What is the Green New Deal and how can we afford it? To protect the future of life on earth, we need to do more than just reimagine the economy—we have to change everything. One of the seminal thinkers of the program that helped ignite the US Green New Deal campaign, Ann Pettifor explains how we can afford what we can do, and what we need to do, before it is too late. The Case for the Green New Deal argues that economic change is wholly possible, based on the understanding that finance, the economy and the ecosystem are all tightly bound together. The GND demands total decarbonization and a commitment to an economy based on fairness and social justice. It proposes a radical new understanding of the international monetary system. Pettifor offers a roadmap for financial reform both nationally and globally, taking the economy back from the 1%. This is a radical, urgent manifesto that we must act on now.

From first to last the New Deal was a work in progress, a patchwork of often contradictory ideas.

A look at how the New Deal fundamentally changed American life, and why it remains relevant today" The New Deal was America's response to the gravest economic and social crisis of the twentieth century. It now serves as a source of inspiration for how we should respond to the gravest crisis of the twenty-first. There's no more fluent and informative a guide to that history than Eric Rauchway, and no one better to describe the capacity of government to transform America for the better."--Barry Eichengreen, University of California, Berkeley The greatest peaceable expression of common purpose in U.S. history, the New Deal altered Americans' relationship with politics, economics, and one another in ways that continue to resonate today. No matter where you look in America, there is likely a building or bridge built through New Deal initiatives. If you have taken out a small business loan from the federal government or drawn unemployment, you can thank the New Deal. While certainly flawed in many aspects--the New Deal was implemented by a Democratic Party still beholden to the segregationist South for its majorities in Congress and the Electoral College--the New Deal was instated at a time of mass unemployment and the rise of fascistic government models and functioned as a bulwark of American democracy in hard times. This book looks at how this legacy, both for good and ill, informs the current debates around governmental responses to crises.

Putting Government In Its Place: The Case for a New Deal 3.0 tells the story of the House that FDR Built. Responding to the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal team--most prominently, Frances Perkins and Harry Hopkins--created four new clusters of domestic policy. Those policy clusters--(1) broad-based economic security guarantees, (2) means-tested welfare programs, (3) across-the-board market regulation, and (4) massive market manipulation-- emerged quickly during the original New Deal of 1933-1938 (Version 1.0). For the next 80 years, both Democrats and Republicans added dozens of new programs within the same four policy clusters, shaping today's New Deal writ large (Version 2.0). The model worked fairly well during the post-WWII era when the U.S. dominated the world economy and technology remained generally benign. But since the mid-1970s, the New Deal settlement has sputtered in the face of rising international competition and highly disruptive technology. For decades, we've been stuck on a plateau of little-to-no progress--at times, deterioration--in economic security and market effectiveness. Putting Government In Its Place: The Case for a New Deal 3.0 explains the major gaps, flaws, and mistakes of the New Deal settlement. Equally important, the book spells out, in outline and detail, the fundamental and sweeping changes needed to revive the New Deal. The proposed New Deal 3.0 would guarantee far greater economic security for all Americans, make our market economy dramatically more productive, and enlarge the nation's wealth. The result: America's next birth of freedom.

In a riveting account based on new documents and interviews with more than 400 sources on both sides of the aisle, award-winning reporter Michael Grunwald reveals the vivid story behind President Obama’s $800 billion stimulus bill, one of the most important and least understood pieces of legislation in the history of the country. Grunwald’s meticulous reporting shows how the stimulus, though reviled on the right and the left, helped prevent a depression while jump-starting the president’s agenda for lasting change. As ambitious and far-reaching as FDR’s New Deal, the Recovery Act is a down payment on the nation’s economic and environmental future, the purest distillation of change in the Obama era. The stimulus has launched a transition to a clean-energy economy, doubled our renewable power, and financed unprecedented investments in energy efficiency, a smarter grid, electric cars, advanced biofuels, and green manufacturing. It is computerizing America’s pen-and-paper medical system. Its Race to the Top is the boldest education reform in U.S. history. It has put in place the biggest middle-class tax cuts in a generation, the largest research investments ever, and the most extensive infrastructure investments since Eisenhower’s interstate highway system. It includes the largest expansion of antipoverty programs since the Great Society, lifting millions of Americans above the poverty line, reducing homelessness, and modernizing unemployment insurance. Like the first New Deal, Obama’s stimulus has created legacies that last: the world’s largest wind and solar projects, a new battery industry, a fledgling high-speed rail network, and the world’s highest-speed Internet network. Michael Grunwald goes behind the scenes—sitting in on cabinet meetings, as well as recounting the secret strategy sessions where Republicans devised their resistance to Obama—to show how the stimulus was born, how it fueled a resurgence on the right, and how it is changing America. The New New Deal shatters the conventional Washington narrative and it will redefine the way Obama’s first term is perceived.

ultimately elevating public opinion of his administration but falling flat in achieving the economic revitalization that America so desperately needed from the Great Depression. Folsom takes a critical, revisionist look at Roosevelt's presidency, his economic policies, and his personal life. Elected in 1932 on a buoyant tide of promises to balance the increasingly uncontrollable national budget and reduce the catastrophic unemployment rate, the charismatic thirty-second president not only neglected to pursue those goals, he made dramatic changes to federal programming that directly contradicted his campaign promises. Price fixing, court packing, regressive taxes, and patronism were all hidden inside the alphabet soup of his popular New Deal, putting a financial strain on the already suffering lower classes and discouraging the upper classes from taking business risks that potentially could have jostled national cash flow from dormancy.