You can scroll down 3 grafs to get to the tools if you don’t care to read the words. I don’t want to lose the purpose within my words, like trees in a forest.
I consider myself a superlative networker. I can find people/things/articles/whatever and bring to them others who can use them. Scottie needed some help a few months back and gave me some space on his platform, and mostly, instead of writing my opinions about things which so many of us share already and read in lots of places, I’ve tried to go in the direction of supporting mental health, and things we can do to keep (or, these days, try to keep) our democracy (healthy) and fix things for people’s greater good. So, it’s true, other than a few comments and some original post titles, I don’t write much here; I network information. This post is from me, though.
We all know that I’m big on civic duties, having been practically brought up to do them, and believing in the rule of law and being loyal opposition when opposition supports the most people. So, when I do write things, typically it is with hopes of motivating or reminding others that we still have these duties and the rights to perform them; that letting these duties slide has helped bring us where we are; and, especially now, if we don’t use our rights and perform our duties, we lose the rights and can no longer perform the duties.
Which brings me to some tools. I’ve read EPI for years and years, and use their tools to help me lobby my legislators about issues that matter to most people. EPI has created a new set of tools, so I’m sharing them here in this post. I hope you managed to read through the previous grafs to get here, because this is important, and will be helpful to all of us as we do our work preserving democracy.
EPI Action is the home page. From here, you can scroll and click around to see what you want to see, and gain the tools to make your work easier. Yes, “EPI” stands for Economic Policy Institute (I think; they’ve been EPI now for so long, I may have messed that up.) And, yes, maybe someone thinks, “Hey, I only want to work on this, that, or the other, but not on economics.” Well, you can do that from here. EPI has information and tools to work with:
Watching the Republican Administration Mess Everything Up , and
Learning About Wages, Jobs, and Inequality listing numerous items of data to peruse, including “Union membership rates and the union wage premium, Annual wages for select groups, including the top 1% and bottom 90% of wage earners, Racial and gender wage gaps, Unemployment rates, including by state, Poverty rates, Inflation rates”.
EPI has fact sheets you can use when you go to legislator town halls/forums, if that’s your thing, or to give away at a booth or a table if that’s your thing, or just to consult while you’re writing up a letter or email, or a script for calling, your legislators. Whatever your thing. If your thing is filing to run for office, EPI is a great information resource for use while campaigning and forming policy.
After all, somebody’s got to do it! For too long, not enough of us did, and now we all need to. More tools is a good thing, and Tuesday’s coming! (Monday is President’s Day; a holiday in most offices.) This is government of, for, and by the people. And never forget: https://www.house.gov/representatives , https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm , and even https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/get-involved/write-or-call/?utm_source=link
Scottie's Playtime 