While campaigning in Iowa, former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney famously claimed that "Corporations are people, my friend."

Romney was responding to an activist with the California-based group Move to Amend who recorded a video of the encounter and uploaded what turned out to be the first of many similar gaffes—like "the 47 percent"—that eventually undid his campaign.

In part by applying similar pressure to politicians from the president to congressmen to the local dogcatcher, David Cobb hopes to one day eradicate the notion that corporations are people and money is speech by amending the U.S. Constitution. It's "a heavy lift," he acknowledges, but through grassroots organizing in places like Athens, it's one he believes is within reach.

David Cobb

Cobb is a lawyer and activist who helped build up the Green Party in Texas, then ran for president as a Green in 2004. His latest project is Move to Amend, a California-based group that is pushing for the constitutional amendment. Their proposed amendment has three parts: It declares that only people, not entities like corporations, have constitutional rights; that governments can regulate campaign spending; and that nothing in the amendment restricts freedom of the press. State and local governments would be free to regulate campaign finance however they saw fit.

Cobb points to two Supreme Court decisions—Buckley v. Valeo in 1976, which equated spending money with free speech, and Citizens United v. FEC, which opened the door to unlimited campaign spending—that he says have broken our political system. "Only 35 years ago, it was a felony in many states to even use corporate money to influence elections, let alone directly contribute to campaigns," he says.

Those rulings allowed corporations and corporate executives to dominate our politics by paying to elect representatives who proceed to undo consumer, environmental, labor and civil rights protections for the benefit of Big Business. "Unelected CEOs are ruling over us," Cobb says. "They're using the political and legal system to do it, and they're using the legal system to justify it."

In 2012, Romney and President Barack Obama's campaigns spent a combined $2 billion. Super PACs and other outside groups legalized by Citizens United spent another $4 billion—and that's just what can be traced. Cobb estimates that political groups that don't have to disclose their donations or spending poured another $3 billion into the race, bringing the total to $9 billion. That's twice what was spent in 2008, which shattered all previous records.

Move to Amend is making slow but steady progress. Since forming two years ago, it has grown to 250,000 members with dozens of affiliates around the country, gotten resolutions passed on 400 city councils and county commissions, and won referendums in 25 communities across the political spectrum. "I'm telling you, this issue cuts across traditional ideology," he says. "It cuts across party lines. It's something that ordinary people know and understand and lament."

Cobb has spent the past few months barnstorming across the Southeast, coming to Athens Dec. 7 for a speech at the University of Georgia in between stops in Augusta and Atlanta. He is trying to organize an affiliate—what Move to Amend calls a chapter—in Athens and hopes to get the Athens-Clarke Commission to pass a resolution supporting the amendment or put it on the ballot, although he's unsure of the procedure to do so locally.

Once the affiliate is up and running, the grassroots organizing continues. Supporters talk to their neighbors, call talk radio shows, write letters to the editor, use social media to spread the word and put pressure on politicians to take a stand, Cobb says. The self-described radical compares the effort to the American Revolution and the civil rights movement. "We have forgotten that movements start when ordinary people start to question the status quo," he says.

Although his roots are in the Green Party, Cobb says his group is reaching out to Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, all of whom are disillusioned by the current state of affairs. "Principled liberals have been lied to and sold out by the leaders of the Democratic Party, just as principled conservatives have been lied to and sold out by the leaders of the Republican party," he says. "All Americans are losing faith in the electoral system, and that's a problem."

Eventually, Cobb thinks he can win enough support to clear the extraordinarily high bar for amending the Constitution: a two-thirds vote in Congress and ratification in three-quarters of the states, either through conventions or votes in the legislatures. "It's arguably the most difficult thing to do in politics," he says. But it's been done before—18 times, most recently in 1992 to prevent congressional pay raises from taking effect until the next Congress is elected. "We're due," Cobb says.