Event Recap
David Cobb: On Building Effective Democracy in the Face of Corporate Hegemony
By Ben Frank, Patriotic Pulse
Friday, 30 June 2006

NORTHAMPTON, MA — Attorney David Cobb, fresh off his recent Measure T victory banning non-local corporate campaign donations in Humboldt County, California, was the featured speaker at a Shays2.org event called "Building Effective Democracy in the Face of Corporate Hegemony" held on Wednesday.

A crowd of about 60 people, many of them local activists, listened appreciatively as Cobb — who was the Green Party presidential candidate in 2004 — told his inspiring story about the motives and winning strategy that gave them 55% of the vote regarding Measure T.

Cobb is one of the founders of Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County (DUHC) a Eureka, California based grassroots organization that educates citizens about the illegitimate seizure of authority for self-government from the people by corporations. The DUHC does this by designing and implementing grassroots strategies which exercise democratic power over corporations and governments.

As our founding fathers framed it, our Constitution is intended to provide a government which protects the rights of individuals. Moving over to a diagram on an easel, Cobb explained how in theory, the Constitution was intended to invest all legitimate power in the people. The people then could delegate some of that power to the government.

Individuals were intended to be free with sovereignty over their lives, whereas the government was intended to be subordinate and accountable to the public. Individuals had rights and the government had collective duties. Cobb emphasized that people do not have a duty to the government, and that government does not have a right over you.

According to Cobb, one of the main realities of our Constitution is that — while its intentions were good — we've never really had true democracy as a result of it. Why? Cobb explained that it is because of who held power at the time that it was created. The demographic of those it benefited is as follows:

The result is that only 5% of the population could participate in and benefit from this system. As written and interpreted then, it was basically a fraud against the majority of Americans. It can be argued that it discriminated against and denied the basic human rights of Native Americans, of women, as well as of people of color.

Cobb indicated that the entire history of the U.S. can be seen as vivid struggles to define individual rights. The reality is that our nation started out as a racist, homophobic society, not the noble history told in schoolbooks and in the song by Francis Scott Key.

The 14th Amendment and corporate rights

Much of the degradation of individual rights came as the unforeseen results of well intentioned amendments to the Constitution. Ratified in 1868, the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was intended to protect the rights of all individuals, specifically male African American Slaves following the end of the Civil War, providing a broad definition of national citizenship. The legal language used in the amendment was co-opted by attorneys in the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case in 1886, which resulted in the "legal fiction" in existence in the U.S. today — known as "corporate personhood". That case and many subsequent cases which followed, essentially granted corporations, under the concept of legal entity, a subset of the same constitutional rights as a human being. Thus, constitutional law was turned from protecting the rights of individuals to protecting the rights of corporations.

As background, Cobb noted that during the first 50-75 years of our country's history, companies who wished to incorporate had to receive congressional approval. Incorporating was a privilege. Corporate charters defined rights very specifically and did not last in perpetuity. The corporation's board of directors were not immune to liability. If laws were broken by the corporation, the government could go after individual shareholders. Public campaign contributions were illegal. In short, corporations had to "serve the public good".

On Cobb's diagram — which, by the way, listed items concerning individual rights in a column on the left and government-related items on the right — in that diagram corporations, while enjoying the privileges of individuals, really belong in the government list because of the current corporate relationship to government. According to Cobb, government has become an instrument of corporations.

Measure T

DUHC came into being as an effort to regain authority over the fundamental decisions that affect people's lives. Cobb says that we live in a society that is in a suicide death march. He mentions two key events that helped drive their actions. Wal-mart spent $235,000 in an effort to change zoning laws so that they could build in an area of one of their seaside bays that was already zoned public. In another case, a local district attorney sued a corporation alleging fraud and in retaliation, the corporation launched a recall campaign, attempting to unseat the district attorney.

Measure T — the letter “T” has no significance, being arbitrarily assigned — is a huge first step in protecting their right to fair elections and local democracy by prohibiting non-local corporate contributions to elections. It restricts the influence of large corporations in government and in particular, on influencing who would get elected into positions of power.

The effort drew considerable opposition from corporations, which the DUHC used as opportunities to embark on a public information campaign of their own. They actively wrote Opinion/Editorial pieces, and did radio and television interviews.

Cobb explained that they were able to successfully capture and harvest the public anger that arose, and that by moving in a "zen-like way — slowly, intentionally and strategically" — they were able to "design a campaign that always looked 3-4 moves ahead" of the opposition.

Their goal was to strategically de-legitimatize the idea that a corporation is a person.

Here are some of the specific tasks Measure T activists accomplished in the process:

Cobb mentioned one crucial issue that arose which had a dramatic conclusion. When they went to the county council with the drafted law, representatives of local unions — already onboard — were hesitant because of some lingering concerns that the law would hurt their businesses. Rather than going forward, the DUHC dropped what they were doing and engaged the union reps in a constructive dialog which led to a reworking of the wording of Measure T that was more agreeable to them. The fact that the Measure T coalition was serious about sticking to a democratic process won them tremendous respect and loyalty. At that point in his talk, Cobb made note that the DUHC is run predominantly by young women and by men who are self-described feminists. It was and is not a hierarchical, top-down campaign: the Measure T coalition is consensus-focused.

Another approach they used was to have local media, local businesses and people from their community, including the leaders of local peace and justice movements, tell their own stories about corporate influence in government. All these people were working together toward a unified goal.

Cobb said that at one point in the midst of the campaign, the local Chamber of Commerce made them offers to work together on implementing spending limits, but Cobb said that they resisted that temptation. It would have diluted the outcome. They had been working on the campaign for a year or more by that point, and they knew they could achieve their complete goals better on their own. Cobb realized they really were going to win, when one day he was in a local laundromat and he overheard patrons discussing whether or not a corporation should be considered a person or not. Their public information strategies were paying off.

Cobb responds to questions

During the question and answer period following his talk, the question was asked whether democracy was really possible in our current 2-party system? Cobb replied that there is no way that a 2-party system can capture the diversity of our pluralistic society. He is personally committed to a multi-party democracy. Cobb favors a change to proportional representation as well as publicly funded elections.

Another question asked was “Why did they propose Measure T at the county level?” Cobb explained that they were presented with the opportunity. Their experience can be used as an example and the DUHC is willing to work with other towns and counties to help them in their efforts to reclaim individual rights. He recommended we look at where the potential for reform may be fertile enough to start at the local level. Towns can implement binding resolutions or bylaws against personhood for corporations at the local level.

At one point, their local Chamber of Commerce claimed that the DUHC was anti-business, when in fact they had worked with many local businesses to develop Measure T. Cobb's group was able to capture from the very beginning the frame that they were "pro-business" and "pro-jobs". A key defining statement for them was, "Measure T will protect the rights of the people of Humboldt County," which is exactly what it is designed to do.

Cobb said that "Measure T provided an opportunity for Democrats and other candidates to come together in a new way. He said that “corporate personhood” perverts the entire framework of the Constitution and that it is the reason why we are in the trouble we're in today. For him, the Constitution provides the moral framework under which he now does his work as an active, engaged citizen.

The crystallization of the understanding of the law and the origin of the "elite’s" influence on our Constitution has been incredibly empowering for him. It helped him as an organizer to see what needs to be done to rectify the situation in America in support of our collective good.