Miscellaneous
iLobby Mission We help voters figure out their stories so that they can change laws because your present policy decisions shape your political and economic future. We want to empower you to change laws so that you can improve your community, influence your country and impact the world. This podcast is about how to change a law using iLobby. It is based on the #1 International Best Seller "How to Change a Law." http://amzn.to/1XyrWu6 You can learn how to vote, argue, debate, pledge and share a campaign at the iLobby free video proving ground and gain some political relief. http://bit.ly/28MQ0qW -- Transcript (Partial) -- Lobbying is a dirty word. Ask anyone. Read the paper. Watch TV. Listen to talk radio. For the past few years every time I heard about political influence and lobbying there was a prevailing view that if we just got rid of the Washington lobbyists everything would be fine. But is this possible or even desirable? Is it what we really want? I don't think so. According to the First Amendment of the US Constitution "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." [1] Apparently the founders were troubled by King George III's inability to listen to polite criticism. Basically, the Constitution gives us not only the right to talk to our representative, but encourages us to appeal to them, to persuade them, to convince them to our point of view, i.e. to lobby. The First Amendment guarantees it. We're doing it every day with our spouse anyway, with our roommates, our co-workers, and our boss. So why do we have such a problem with lobbying? For most of us I think we feel that it is unfairly applied -- meaning that it's only the big guys and the special interests that actually make their views known to Congress. This is generally true. But that's not their fault. It's ours. In the last 10 years the lobbying industry has doubled in size and grown into a $3.5B per year business with about 10,000 lobbyists,[2] and that's just at the federal level. We, the silent majority (I include myself in this group) have been conditioned to believe that if we vote for a representative every few years, that will be good enough. We'll get what we want. We now know that's a myth. Occasionally the literary, the erudite and brave ones among us write a letter to our congressman, to the editor of our local newspaper or the New York Times. Some of us sign petitions, make campaign contributions or even go out and protest. But does that get the job done? Sometimes it does. Personally, I'd like to believe that one brilliant, well-written letter to my Congressman with a nice follow-up phone call to their Legislative Director would be enough to get him or her to change their opinion about a pending law. But out of the almost 700,000 constituents[3] in my congressional district there are likely a handful of people who would take the exact opposite position of me. Sometimes they have more money, more time on their hands and they're more eloquent than I am. If they work for a large corporation with a PAC or are a union member they seem to have greater political advantage to getting their views in front of my congressman and often make more of an impression then I can alone as an individual. I should just give up, right? Let someone else decide what's right for me. Perhaps. So is that why "lobby" has become a four-letter word?