While some “Occupy” movements have faded, the Occupy Southwest Michigan group is still going strong, organizer Matthew Rosenhagen of Niles said.
The group will host a community forum from 6 to 8 p.m. Friday at Bethlehem Baptist Church, featuring speaker David Cobb, an American activist and the 2004 presidential candidate of the Green Party.
The forum, “Creating Democracy and Challenging Corporate Rule,” will focus on the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United vs. FEC, which allowed for unlimited corporate spending on elections.
“No matter your political persuasion, it goes against what this country was founded on,” Rosenhagen said of the ruling. “You can see it already in the Republican campaign. People have to drop out after one state because they didn’t raise enough money to keep up.”
Cobb, an attorney and a spokesperson for the Move to Amend coalition, will help area residents understand the history behind the decision and how they can work to abolish “corporate personhood” — the constitutional protections currently extended to corporations.
The Move to Amend coalition is a nonpartisan organization that promotes a constitutional amendment that would end corporate personhood.
“The Supreme court ruled that a corporation was a legal person with 14th Amendment protections before they granted full personhood to African-Americans, immigrants, natives or women,” Cobb said earlier this week. “We recognize that amending the Constitution to restore the power of the people over corporations will not be easy … but is imperative to the progress of our nation.”