Looking on the bright side of a depression

Many of our most important social gains were actually achieved in periods of crisis.

Public education and shortening the 16-hour workday were first won during the tumultuous robber-baron years of the late 19th and early 20th century. Social security, unemployment insurance and other “New Deal” reforms were legislated right in the middle of the Great Depression. And finally, the historic GI bill was passed while the government was arguing, unsuccessfully, for “patriotic” extension of the WWII wage freeze.

From a business point of view, any profits diverted to social spending or to increased wages and benefits is a waste. As a result, all these reforms required enormously-powerful popular movements or serious threats of social upheaval such as the incredible 1946 rolling-strike wave in which 10 million participated.

Fortunately, from the very beginning there were many within the ranks of American labor who openly challenged capitalism’s primacy of private profit over public welfare.

In fact, at the beginning of the 20th century, there were actually some 323 newspapers and periodicals that took up the cause of democratic socialism and kept a steady check on the now thoroughly, historically-discredited JP Morgan, Andrew Carnegie and Rockefeller industrialists.

The Appeal to Reason, one of the most widely read socialist papers, reached a weekly circulation of 600,000 copies in 1912.

On Election Day in that same year, labor’s universally-recognized national icon, Eugene V. Debs, won 897,000 votes for President as candidate of the Socialist Party (SP)--and this was before women had the right to vote. The SP had almost 118,000 dues-paying members.

- http://www.counterpunch.org/finamore09292008.html

On the other hand, we could go the way of others in our hemisphere. We are just a fat banana republic (Banana Republic is a pejorative term for a small country that is politically unstable, dependent on limited agriculture (e.g., bananas), and ruled by a small, self-elected, wealthy and corrupt clique...a banana republic also typically has large wealth inequities, poor infrastructure, poor schools, a "backward" economy, low capital spending, a reliance on foreign capital and money printing, budget deficits, and a weakening currency.-Wikipedia). Good thing we have Blackwater to keep order but "Yes we Have No Bananas".