Rebuild America

In Obama’s America public works is once again a part of the national dialogue. Today it is offered as a solution to the economic downturn and to the public infrastructure crisis. This timely book examines the reasons for the economic crisis facing Main Street, and connects them to why the nation has structurally deficient bridges, weak levees, poorly maintained dams, and dilapidated schools. The book goes on to analyse the history of US public works, updating lessons from the New Deal, to understand the most effective way to organise a modern US civic works project, based on a civic works pilot project for the Gulf Coast. One chapter features new contributions by Howard Zinn, Angela Glover Blackwell, and other leading scholars and thinkers weighing in on how an US civic works project might solve our economic, infrastructure, and environmental crises.

Author Biography

Scott Myers-Lipton, Associate Professor at San Jose State University, is the author of Social Solutions to Poverty: America’s Struggle to Build a Just Society (Paradigm 2006), as well as numerous scholarly articles on civic engagement, education, and racism.

For the past 20 years, Myers-Lipton has helped students examine solutions to poverty by taking them to live at homeless shelters, the Navajo and Lakota nations, Kingston, Jamaica and the Gulf Coast. He is also the cofounder of the Gulf Coast Civic Works Campaign. He is the recipient of the Mover of Mountains Award from the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Association of Santa Clara County and the Manuel Vega Latino Empowerment Award. He lives with his wife, Diane, and his two children, in the Santa Cruz mountains, where they are the proprietors of the Sequoia Retreat Center, a meeting space dedicated to individual and social transformation.

Catalog Author Bio

Scott Myers-Lipton, Associate Professor at San Jose State University, is the author of Social Solutions to Poverty: America’s Struggle to Build a Just Society (Paradigm 2006), as well as numerous scholarly articles on civic engagement, education, and racism.