I still remember that dog penis one <| sep |> I could hear your sigh of releif from here . <| sep |> The US had what was literally called The Progressive Era that fixed a lot of this shit and set us up to survive the Great Depression , win WWII and prosper enormously from 1945 through 1980 when lots of money was being created , but we shifted to where almost none of it went to the bottom 90 % of income earners . But clearly lots of people forgot how well Progressive policies work not only for poor and working class people , but the entire nation and indirectly the whole world . The one thing that gives me hope in this era where the W Bush administration recreated lots of that dark time check out the Teapot Dome Scandal and see how similar it was to lots of Bush stuff , and where we ' ve elected an orange con man idiot as president with a fundamentalist talk radio putz as VP , it ' s that America has fought back from lots of shit , including shit very much like what we ' re creating for ourselves today . We ' ve done it before , and we can dig and fight back again .