When Government Helped: Learning from the Successes and Failures of the New Deal

The global financial crisis of 2007-2008 was the most severe since The Great Depression. This book is a methodical evaluation of the parallels between the Great Depression and the 2007-2008 global economic meltdown. Although many books have been written on this topic, the unique aspect of this book is the analysis of the positive and negative lessons for contemporary policy-making of the New Deal response to the crisis, through viewing both the New Deal and recent economic crisis as a combination with the current environmental crises. It also will assess the politics of the market and the regulatory failures by helping readers better understand the structure of these crises and the constitutional reforms proposed to mollify them. This book offers new perspectives on comparisons of the intersection of economic and environmental crises of these two periods. Integrating a unique blend of disciplines, it plans to demonstrate some possible ways of escaping our malaise, approaches that were begun but never fulfilled in the 1930s, that were raised as possibilities by popular movements but never allowed onto the political agenda, or approaches that were simply unforeseen in an earlier era. Thus, the book presents a set of guideposts, some beneficial, some cautionary, for the future. Contributors to this volume - Timothy A. Canova is a Professor of Law and Public Finance at the Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad Law Center in Florida. His work, which crosses the disciplines of law, public finance, and economic history, has been published in numerous articles and book chapters, including academic journals from Harvard, Georgetown, Minnesota and University of California. Canova has held high academic and administrative posts at the University of New Mexico and Chapman University. In 2011, he was appointed by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders to serve on a blue-ribbon advisory panel on reforming the Federal Reserve. Prior to teaching, he served as a legislative assistant to the late U.S. Senator Paul E. Tsongas and practiced law in New York City with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and Mudge Rose Guthrie Alexander & Ferdon. Sheila D. Collins is Professor Emerita of Political Science and former Director of the Graduate Program in Public Policy and International Affairs, William Paterson University. She has written and taught in the areas of American politics, environmental politics and policy, poverty and inequality, globalization, social movements and religion. Collins is the author or co-author of six books and numerous articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries. Among her books are Washington's New Poor Law (2001), co-authored with Gertrude Schnaffner Goldberg, and Let Them Eat Ketchup: The Politics of Poverty and Inequality (1996). Collins is a member of the Global Ecological Integrity Group, a member of the International Advisory Board of the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Studies and co-chairs the Columbia Seminar on Full Employment, Social Welfare and Equity and the Seminar on Globalization, Labor and Popular Struggles. She also serves on the board of the National Jobs for All Coalition. Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg is Professor Emerita of Social Policy and former director of the Ph.D. Program in Social Work, Adelphi University. Her areas of study are full employment, public assistance, the feminization of poverty and comparative social welfare systems. She has written numerous articles in refereed journals, chapters in edited books and co-authored or edited six books. With Sheila D. Collins Goldberg co-authored Washington's New Poor Law: Welfare "Reform " and the Roads Not Taken, 1935 to the Present (2001). Goldberg was the editor and author of several chapters in Poor Women in Rich Countries (2010), the first work to study the feminization of poverty over the life course. Goldberg is Co-Chair of the Columbia Seminar on Full Employment, Social Welfare and Equity and co-founder and chair of the National Jobs for All Coalition. Philip Harvey is Professor of Law and Economics at Rutgers School of Law and Counsel to the Board of the National Jobs for All Coalition. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the New School for Social Research and his J.D. from Yale Law School. A labor lawyer and human rights economist, he practiced law in New York City before joining the Rutgers faculty. He is the author of Securing the Right to Employment (1989), co-author of America's Misunderstood Welfare State (1990), and has published over three dozen scholarly articles and book chapters on the subject of economic and social human rights, with a particular focus on policy options for securing the right to work. Copies of his work can be accessed at www.philipharvey.info. Volker Janssen is Associate Professor of History at California State University. He specializes on California and United States economic history but has made it a mission to teach economic history to teachers through the National Humanities Center and the Teaching American History Grant. He is the editor of Where Minds and Matters Meet: Technology in California and the West, and in his own research specializes on the political economy of California's postwar prison system. His monograph on this subject is due to be published with Oxford University Press, and his essay on prison labor camps in postwar California won the Binkley-Stephenson Award of the Organization of American Historians for best article in the Journal of American History in 2009. Richard McIntyre is Professor of Economics and Director of the Honors Program at the University of Rhode Island, a faculty member at the Schmidt Labor Research Center, and a fellow of the John Hazen White Center for Ethics and Public Service. In addition to many scholarly articles he is the author of Are Worker Rights Human Rights? (2008) and edits the New Political Economy book series for Routledge. Naomi Rosenblum is an independent scholar who has specialized in the history of photography. Her major work, A World History of Photography (1984) is in its fourth edition and has been translated into French, Polish, Japanese and Chinese. She is also the author of A History of Women Photographers (1994). She has arranged exhibits of the work of Walter Rosenblum, Paul Strand, and Lewis Hine for exhibitions in Italy and written forewords for several books on photography. Bill Winders is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the School of History, Technology, and Society at Georgia Tech. He studies and writes about national policies, social movements, and the world economy. His book, The Politics of Food Supply: US Agricultural Policy in the World Economy (Yale, 2009) won the 2011 Book Award from the Political Economy of the World-System section of the American Sociological Association. In addition, he received the Bernstein & Byres Prize for his 2009 article in the Journal of Agrarian Change comparing the U.S. and British food regimes. His current research examines food crises in the world economy, such as the 2007-2008 food crisis that saw food prices and world hunger rise dramatically.