Quotes About Policy

Good times make bad policy. —Mohammad Sadli, economic adviser to Indonesia's General Suharto2

As the political scientist Michael Wolfe puts it, "Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are unlikely to do it very well." He adds, "As a way of governing, conservatism is another name for disaster."30

Indeed the three policy pillars of the neoliberal age—privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending—are each incompatible with many of the actions we must take to bring our emissions to safe levels.

Much of U.S. foreign policy...is an exercise in projection, in which a tiny self-interested elite conflates its needs and desires with those of the entire world.

Association of Petroleum Producers—spoke with federal government officials 536 times between 2008 and 2012, while TransCanada, the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline, had 279 communications. The Climate Action Network, on the other hand, the country's broadest coalition devoted to emission reductions, only logged six communications in the same period. In the U.K., the energy industry met with the Department of Energy

the only way" negotiators "can achieve a 2-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy."48

Energy supply and environmental issues should not be left in the hands of private for-profit interests."14

public infrastructure, economic planning, corporate regulation, international trade, consumption, and taxation

You cannot advocate massive economic change in a country without that change having big political consequences.

Under the neoliberal worldview, governments exist in order to create the optimal conditions for private interests to maximize their profits and wealth, based on the theory that the profits and economic growth that follow will benefit everyone in the trickle-down from the top - eventually.

the task is to articulate not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis—embedded in interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance, and cooperation rather than hierarchy.

You have been negotiating all my life." So said Canadian college student Anjali Appadurai, as she stared down the assembled government negotiators at the 2011 United Nations climate conference in Durban, South Africa. She was not exaggerating. The world's governments have been talking about preventing climate change for more than two decades; they began negotiating the year that Anjali, then twenty-one years old, was born.

The Nature Conservancy, for its part, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from JP Morgan to come up with voluntary rules for fracking.

Most of us chose to oppose the war as an act of folly by a president who mistook himself for a king, and his British sidekick who wanted to be on the winning side of history. There was little interest in the idea that war was a rational policy choice, that the architects of the invasion had unleashed ferocious violence because they could not crack open the closed economies of the Middle East by peaceful means, that the level of terror was proportional to what was at stake.

Hands are wrung about the "migrant crisis"—but not nearly so much about the crises driving the migrations. Since 2014, an estimated thirteen thousand people have drowned in the Mediterranean trying to reach European shores.

Less than 1 percent of American have served in 12 years of war, and serious public conversation about military policy is sorely lacking.

Congress is a place that lacks any debate of ideas.

We need to conceptualize; we need to articulate conservative domestic policy with a laser focus on opportunity, on easing the means of ascent up the economic ladder.

Karnataka was known for its good governance. After the BJP came to power, they laid the foundation for bad administration.

School after Labor Day is now the law of the land in Maryland.

If you're a Conservative, why aren't you behind conserving the land?

Look, I'm a member of the House of Lords and I'm the first to admit that I don't understand how one gets new laws through.

If becoming a member of Congress is like going to college, then crafting legislation is our homework.

Hey, well, I've been a pretty conservative member of congress.