Quotes About Public

And lawyers, who take risks and make significant investments in such cases, will no longer make enough money to support the risk. And corporations will be free to ignore the public good. That is what "tort reform" is about.

Why an education bill about school testing? Once the testing frame applies not just to students but also to schools, then schools can, metaphorically, fail—and be punished for failing by having their allowance cut. Less funding in turn makes it harder for the schools to improve, which leads to a cycle of failure and ultimately elimination for many public schools.

Slogans can't overcome hypocognition. Only sustained public discussion has a chance. And that takes knowledge of the problem and a large-scale serious commitment to work for a change.

The main concern of the frame is that money be kept in the common wealth (or the hands of the government) in order to be used for the common good. HOW

From the beginning, the United States has been based on a nurturant principle: • Citizens care about other citizens and work, through their government, to provide public resources for all. Those

Conservatives deny that the private depends on public resources. Citing Ronald Reagan's credo that "The Government is the Problem," conservatives are constantly trying to eliminate public resources and to privatize as much as possible.

Private enterprise and private life depend on nurturant morality, but so does freedom in American life. Freedom is what public resources provide—freedom in a way that we take for granted but that needs to be brought out in the open.

Conservatives, through their think tanks, figured out the importance of framing, and they figured out how to frame every issue. They figured out how to get those frames out there, how to get their people in the media all the time.

Incidentally, conservatives are attempting to destroy this system via "tort reform," the capping of damages at levels so low that the attorneys could no longer afford to function as police and prosecutors and the whole system would break down. Their motivation is to make the market "free" from the loss of profit through lawsuits for harming or defrauding the public. THE

The private depends on the public. Public resources make private life possible.

But for conservatives, the very idea that the private depends on the public is anathema—immoral.

It is a fact that the private depends on the public—perhaps the most central fact of American democracy—and yet strict conservatives either can't see it or see it as a form of immorality so fundamental that it must be defeated at all costs.

The central conservative strategy to minimize, or even eliminate, public resources has been to eliminate the money that funds public resources—taxes!

Since the 1970s, the concept of taxation has shifted from the source of needed, and often revered, public resources to the idea that taxation is a burden—an affliction in need of "tax relief.

Connect the private-depends-on-the-public concept to something that conservatives will understand: freedom.

Public resources allow for freedom in case after case, opening up all kinds of opportunities in life. It is the freedom that public resources afford that make them central to democracy. Saying it right—and saying it over and over—is advice that can be applied to issue after issue.

the lawsuits weren't frivolous," you talk instead about public protection, about open courts, about the right to have juries decide, and about the last line of defense against unscrupulous or negligent corporations

Moreover, charter schools have no accountability to local school districts or the public. A consequence in Texas, for example, is that charter schools tend to debunk evolution and science and teach creationism

We have to stop this violence. We have to make the political nature of the violence clear, that the violence we experience in our own homes is not a personal family matter, it's a public and political problem. It's a way that women are kept in line, kept in our places.

Restricting access to such a basic health care service, which 99% of sexually experienced American women have used and 62% of American women are using right now, is out of touch with public sentiment.

Women are as much politicians as men, and I hope that more and more women will enter public life through politics, as this would not only increase participation of women in public life but also have a salutary effect for the amelioration of women's status in India.

Afghanistan is doomed if women are barred once again from public life.

Just look at who won the third debate between Bush and Gore. I knew Bush won, because people liked him more. People just didn't like Gore. But all the journalists thought Gore won big, he cleaned the guy's clock.

I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture - I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.