government

This page contains a list of resources that should help you to start finding the information you need to advance your cause. Hopefully, you will find that this page strikes a delicate balance between too much and too little information. If you cannot find what you are looking for, you can email Amelie at davis.amelie@gmail.com for more help with your search.

Meeting with an official or her staff can be an enriching and fruitful experience. It can also be intimidating, so we offer the following guidelines to help you to achieve the most in your meeting. Most importantly, you should be concise but knowledgeable on your issue, and you should be respectful and courteous to the politician or staff member you meet with.

Although they don't always realize it, deep down your elected officials really appreciate your input. Even the ones who refuse to admit this cannot deny that they occasionally need your input to help them make a smart decision. Admittedly, they're usually more interested in appeasing the powerful corporate lobbies in their district than they are in you or me, but persistence and dedication can still yield results. As much as the lobbyists would like to cut us out of the process, the people do still hold some power in the electoral process. Perhaps your most valuable tool is your access to their constituents. By actively engaging with other voters in your district you are acting as a direct link between your legislator and the people she needs to appease to retain her power. This is where those alliances you made earlier on yield their dividends. The following guidelines should help you to maximize this leverage.

Before you start lobbying the government, you should probably know a little bit about how it works. This knowledge will help you understand how your issue has evolved, and it will help you identify which government officials you should focus your efforts on. Unfortunately, neither of us possesses enough knowledge of political science to describe in detail the government of any nation other than the United States. To the extent that the structure of the U.S. government draws on older systems (e.g. the Roman republic or many of the articles of the Magna Carta), it can offer insight into other forms of government. Most of the information here, however, is only useful to citizens of the United States.

Most of the social issues we face seem overwhelming when considered all at once. One of the most frequently asked questions when people learn of an injustice or a failed policy is some variation of "What can I, as just one person, do about it?". As the respected human rights and social justice advocate Noam Chomsky has indicated, the answer to this question is not so much unknown as it is unpopular. You can do a great deal about an issue, but you need to start at the beginning and work forward slowly. Your actions on an issue should be driven by a thoughtful and careful examination of the available information, which in turn may have been initiated by an emotional reaction to an upsetting policy. While a strong emotion provides you with a good incentive to start working on an issue, you must be diligent about fueling your passion with knowledge as you proceed. As you learn more about an issue that is important to you, your reason and emotion should begin to work in concert, and this authentic blending of passion and reason is much more likely to convince others to consider your position than either would alone. Admittedly, balancing these two forces can be much more difficult than expected in many cases. Outrage and anger may very well be the natural reaction to what you learn, but you must not allow your anger to short-circuit your compassion. By forcing yourself to sit down and calmly study the issue, you will learn to channel your anger into productive (and rather creative) endeavors and will therefore accomplish much more than you would with a more impulsive approach.

Public concerns continue to vie with private interests for control of policy and legislation in the United States. While general global trends toward democracy leave some room for optimism (as do the first few Executive Orders to come from the new administration in the White House), the degree to which lobbying and campaign contributions dictate government policies ensures that public issues such as environmental sustainability and social justice will continue to be trumped by the economic interests of a wealthy minority. The mainstream media, operated by the same corporate interests that dictate policy, rarely encourages public engagement in civic issues, and instead inundates viewers with sensationalized reports of crime and terror that serve only to heighten the general paranoia and distrust of one-another. Meanwhile, the media fail to take note of the critical decisions our elected leaders are quietly making based on corporate interests without any input, oversight or feedback from the people that these elected officials are purportedly serving. If public interests are to compete with commercial interests in the political arena, then the people must learn to use the resources available to allow them to engage in the political process and to organize mass struggle. The objective of this online tutorial is to provide individuals with the basic information needed to lobby in the political arena.