David Cobb is a spokesperson for Move to Amend and was the 2004 Green Party presidential candidate. The People’s Tribune interviewed him in mid-November.
People’s Tribune: Can you give our audience an overview of Move to Amend?
David Cobb: Move to amend (MTA) is a multi-racial coalition of groups and individuals coming together to demand a constitutional amendment to abolish two illegitimate court-created legal doctrines that serve as the lynchpin for how the ruling elite have stolen our sacred right to self-government in this country. The first doctrine is called corporate personhood, a shorthand to describe corporate constitutional rights by which corporate lawyers can go into court and overturn democratically enacted laws that attempt to control the corporations.
The second doctrine is that money equals speech [which allows] the wealthy to basically buy and sell our elections to the point that we have auctions, not elections.
We intend to amend the United States Constitution to abolish both of these two illegitimate court-created legal doctrines, which would allow economic democracy to be practiced in the United States of America. We believe that ordinary people must take up this struggle and articulate their vision of the society we would have if we eliminated the mechanisms by which the small ruling elite are controlling the political, economic and legal institutions.
PT: How does Move to Amend go about its work?
DC: The thread is a commitment to deep political education, whereby ordinary people can come to better understand why it is so that we’re not living in the world that almost all of us want. Our commitment is to provide people an analytical framework to understand how the small ruling elite has hijacked our government.
Our mechanism is to create local affiliates across the country that will work on resolutions first at the local, then moving up to the county, state, and federal level. We’ll be engaging in political work that will ultimately require that people run for political office on this analytical framework, willing to challenge directly the ruling elite that has taken control of both political parties, to the point that ultimately we will have literally a new and different Congress, state legislatures, county executives and city councils all across this country.
PT: How is it going?
DC: We are experiencing what late-stage corporate capitalism looks like, both ecologically and economically. There is no going back. The system is turning on itself. But this crisis also presents an opportunity, and I think the fact that MTA is well positioned, just in terms of historic timing, explains why we are growing faster than anything I’ve ever been part of.
We didn’t even exist as a coalition before 2010, and today we just rolled over 244,000 supporters at movetoamend.org, and that number continues to tick up. Today we have over 150 local affiliates. We have over 1000 endorsing organizations, about 20 of them putting real effort and energy behind the coalition. We’ve passed resolutions and advisory opinions at the local, county and state level already. Over seven million voters in November had an opportunity to weigh in on MTA and we won every single vote, almost every one by supermajorities – 60, 70 and in some cases 85 percent.
PT: Where do you think it goes next?
DC: It’s becoming more obvious that there are systemic problems with the economic, legal, and political systems. These systems are repressive and exploitive and must be replaced. I‘m hopeful that we’ll win not just a constitutional amendment, but that we’ll have the cultural and political revolution we so desperately need and so richly deserve.
Bob Lee is a professional journalist, writer and editor, and is co-editor of the People’s Tribune, serving as Managing Editor. He first started writing for and distributing the People’s Tribune in 1980, and joined the editorial board in 1987.
