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:
“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, its probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)
“A political place with no power, only influence, is not to my taste.”
—Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842–1911)
“The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labor to leisure.... Leisure contains the future, it is the new horizon.... The prospect then is one of unremitting labor to bequeath to future generations a chance of founding a society of leisure that will overcome the demands and compulsions of productive labor so that time may be devoted to creative activities or simply to pleasure and happiness.”
—Henri Lefebvre (b. 1901)