Early Life, Career and Political Activities
Cobb was born in San Leon, Texas. After working as a crewman on a Gulf Coast shrimp boat, a construction worker and a waiter, Cobb graduated from the University of Houston Law School in 1993 and for several years maintained a successful private practice as an attorney in Houston, Texas. During the 1980s, Cobb had campaigned for the Democratic presidential candidacies of Jesse Jackson and Jerry Brown. As a result of his experiences, however, Cobb became disenchanted with the Democratic Party and declined to campaign for them any further. Instead, he turned his activism to the issues of democracy and corporations, appearing at lectures, seminars, and workshops throughout the U.S. with various citizens' groups to promote his view that corporations have become unelected governing institutions and that a nonviolent democratic revolution is needed in response.
In 2000, Green Presidential candidate Ralph Nader asked Cobb to organize his campaign in Texas, and Cobb closed his law practice to do so. He coordinated a successful ballot access drive in the state. Concurrently, Cobb became the General Counsel of the Green Party of the United States.
In 2002, Cobb ran for Attorney General of Texas on the Green ticket and used his candidacy to "barnstorm" parts of Texas with little Green representation. He was unsuccessful in the election, winning just 0.92% of the vote, and the Green Party of Texas lost its ballot access, which it did not regain until 2010. The next year, Cobb was tabbed as a possible presidential candidate by a Green committee, and he accepted the challenge, resigning as General Counsel (he has since lost his State Bar status and is no longer permitted to practice law in any state).
Read more about this topic: David Cobb
Famous quotes containing the words early, career, political and/or activities:
“To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candour never waited to be asked for its opinion.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“I’ve been in the twilight of my career longer than most people have had their career.”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)
“He is unable to take a fact out of its merely political relations, and behold it as it lies absolutely to be disposed of by the intellect,—what, for instance, it behooves a man to do here in America to-day with regard to slavery.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Juggling produces both practical and psychological benefits.... A woman’s involvement in one role can enhance her functioning in another. Being a wife can make it easier to work outside the home. Being a mother can facilitate the activities and foster the skills of the efficient wife or of the effective worker. And employment outside the home can contribute in substantial, practical ways to how one works within the home, as a spouse and as a parent.”
—Faye J. Crosby (20th century)