We must place what is happening today in proper perspective. That Great Depression lasted from October 1929 to 1942. And it was not Roosevelt's quasi-socialist/fascist "New Deal" that ended the Depression. Rather it was the massive wartime production required by World War II that finally ended the downturn - but at the heavy price of 72 million lives, including over 400,000 Americans.

In the Great Depression, there were massive layoffs, with U.S. unemployment rates of over 25% by 1933 (April 2010 it is about 9.5%).

Banks that financed huge stock investment binges began to fail as debtors defaulted. Millions of dollars worth of stocks had been bought on "margin," meaning they only paid a fraction of the purchase price.

When the banks suddenly demanded payment on this margin debt, depositors tried to withdraw their money en masse, triggering multiple bank runs. In those days before the FDIC, with only meager government guarantees and few Federal Reserve banking regulations, bank failures caused the loss of billions of dollars in assets.

As unpaid debts mounted, farm and other commodity prices and incomes fell by 20% to 50% - deflation with a vengeance.

After the 1929 stock market crash, during the first 10 months of 1930, nearly 800 U.S. banks failed. (In all, over 9,000 banks failed during the 1930s.) By 1933, individual bank depositors had lost about US$140 billion, (which adjusted for inflation would be well over US$1.5 trillion in 2008 dollars).

With a creeping fear gripping America, capital investment and construction slowed, then almost completely ceased. In a crisis of bad loans and worsening future prospects, surviving banks became even tighter in lending. Banks built up their capital reserves and made few loans, which further intensified deflationary pressures.

A vicious cycle developed and the downward spiral accelerated. This kind of self-aggravating process ballooned a 1930's recession into the Great Depression.

Must we repeat this national economic suicide from 2008?

Are we, as an American people, so abysmally ignorant that we learn nothing from history?

If you want to better understand what is happening now, go to www.google.com and enter Panic of 1837, Panic of 1873, the Depression of 1893, the Panic of 1907, and the Great Depression et al. What is happening today is neither new nor unique.

In 2008, the ambitious Senator Barack Obama ridiculed Senator John McCain for stating the truth - that the economic fundamentals of America are indeed sound.

Our vast natural resources, abundant commodities, our human productivity, our world trade, our accumulated capital, still lead the entire world economy in this age of financial globalism.

Yet because of mortgage bankers' rapacious greed and a near total lack of risk judgment, Wall Street traders, financial "experts" (and their power-hungry political allies), we're now facing financial panic and paralysis.

Americans and the world at large collectively need to stop for a few moments of serious reflection.

That could lead to the inevitable realization that history teaches us:

a) That for the most part we are causing this panic ourselves

b) That we can and will survive what some day will be looked back upon as another in history's many economic backslides - certainly serious, but certainly not fatal.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's words at his inauguration on March 4, 1933, still ring true:
"This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

These choices were primarily a response to the circumstances of the time, mainly cheap land in a large continent and a lot of cheap energy. These choices were also a reaction against the great industrial cities of the 19th century. These enormous industrial worker slums had never been seen before...and it really scared people and it was full of all kinds of problems. You get the noise and the filth of the industry and the pollution and the health problems. You start to get these enormous sanitary problems and epidemics from bad water and bad living conditions with no light and no fresh air and terrible social behavior.

And then something comes along. In the 1890s...we decided that we were becoming a great nation, a great industrial power with great cities, but we had cities that were unworthy of our greatness. So a consensus formede that we had to do something about it. The architects, the municipal officials, the money people, the plutocrats all decided it was a very important project and the first great expression of it...was a period of robust and emphatic Greco Roman revival architecture because the idea there was.

There were a couple of ideas there: First, our society was coming out of the tradition of democracy from Greece and the tradition of being a republic from Rome and the other idea was classical architecture was one of the best ordering system for designing buildings...And so you saw this wonderful expression of exuberant new city planning. The great Civic center of San Francisco, the great Civic Center of Cleaveland, the Civic Center of NY public library, the list of great buildings and great civic center is very long, all produced in this period...Another one of the responses to the horrible industrial city was this idea that we have a heritage of settling the beautiful natural landscape...

And so for the people that are really well off, a new option comes on the menu and that is, you can live in the country villa and go into the city during the day to be a city person in business and then go back to the wonderful country villa at night. And remember at this time, when the first railroad suburb was forming, there was no Wal-mart, there were no highways. These people were really living in a country villa. Imagine how wonderfully appealing it was and imagine how everyone else in society began to aspire to this idea as a great goal in life. And it starts to be delivered as a commercial enterprise.

One of the first prototypes is Riverside, near Chicago - the great suburban project by Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of central park. They come to Chicago just before the Chicago fire breaks out and they plan this town...It must have been a wonderful thing, it was a 9 mile trip to Chicago.

The next incarnation comes along after about 1893 when you get the electric street car and you start to get the great street car suburb of America and they're very well known. The Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Myer Park, Charlotte, North Caroline, Hyde Park in Cincinnati. The list of these wonderful places is very long. They were some of the best neighborhoods built in America because they were grand and magnificent and they were green and wonderful. They were very close in and they used public transportation very well. In fact, some of you may realize they were places that have retained the most value in the last 100 years.

Something else comes along now. Henry Ford invents the Model A in 1907, but its got a little problem with it. It's handmade. You can only turn out so many of it. And it's relatively expensive at this point, more than $1000. But in 1913 he devices the Ford assembly line and then you can pump these things out in massive numbers and the price starts to come down, down, down - from $500 to $300. By the end of the First World War, the Model T cost about $280 and just about everyone that wants one can get one.

Something is happening in the mean time. This wonderful program of the "City Beautiful" that started in the 1890 has been going in full force throughout the 1910s. And all these great civic centers have been built, and the libraries and the city halls and the court houses. But the First World War is a real turning point because when that is over, we abandon the "City Beautiful moment" just like that. And we start to retrofit the American Industrial city for the car and in the process of doing that we make it worst than ever. Not only does it have all the industrial crap all through it and the huge slums are bigger than they were in 1890 cause we've let millions more worker into the country, now we're putting this overlay of noisy cars.

Now admittedly, there were a lot of horses there before, but there are still enormous problems and the expense of the signaling and paving the streets because the cobblestone aren't very friendly. So immense amounts of money go into the retrofit of the American city. And now another thing starts to happen, you start to see the massive development of the rural agricultural hinterland and the first real dedicated automobile suburb like Radburn in New Jersey starts to get built. These are the prototype to what is to follow.

However, only a certain amount of this stuff gets done before the economy implodes and after 1929 the industry that is hurt the most is the construction industry and very few of the motors suburb get built during the Great Depression. And it's a 10-year hiatus in which the city gets older and then you get another catastrophe, World War II. So the hiatus is prolonged for another five years.

Then the war is over and wonderful, interesting, strange new things happen in America...We take this great knowledge of war time production and expertise of producing massive amount of stuff to win the war - and all the confidence that went with it - and we turn that into the project of creating housing and housing subdivisions and that becomes the great competition now for city life.

And all of the advertising and public relations muscle of our culture is put to the task of proclaiming the wonderfulness of the American suburb. By the mid 50's you can take your choice, you can live in a lifeless, slummy apartment with a view of the air shaft, like Ralph Kramden, or you can move to the suburbs and live with Beaver Cleaver. And the choice becomes obvious. The interstate highway comes along in 1955, a lot of people said we built it because we had this idea that we had to evacuate the city from the nuclear holocaust and all that stuff. Forget it, that's not why we did it. We did it because we needed an economy of suburban land development and it was a wonderful opportunity to do it.

We were at our most confident in that period, we just won this tremendous war against manifest evil so we used our resources to build this great suburban project starting with the highways and, by and by, over the decade all the subdivisions were built and all the other stuff followed. For a while people would live in the suburb and go in the city during the daytime and do their job and maybe their wife would come into the city and do their shopping. I'm not making this up, my mom did this for a little awhile. But after a while they purged the cities of the shopping stuff and that went to the suburbs and some of the office stuff went to the suburbs until the suburbs began to elaborate as a self-organizing system into a kind of hypertrophic growth of their own. Kind of like a giant network of tumors around America.

And something else happened at the same time, the American mind starts to get cartoonified. We start to loose a lot of our sensibilities and our aesthetic and also our reasoning abilities and we become a cartoon nation with a collective cartoon imagination. One of the unintended consequences of this whole package is that for all of our blabber about the American Dream and suburbia, it ends up to be an unrewarding place to live in a lot of ways....

As suburbia morphed and mutated, it was not country living for everybody, but a cartoon of country living in a cartoon of a country house in a cartoon of a country and that's one of the great unexpressed agonies of the failure of suburbia and one of the reason why its ridiculed by some of the people that live there, because at some level, subconsciously we understand this.

You know, the common complaint is that the trouble with the suburbs is that they are all the same. When you ask a room full of people in a design studio what's wrong with the suburbs, they'll say, "Oh, they're all the same." But you know, there are a lot of places around the world that are all the same. The hill towns of Tuscany are hard to tell apart from 500 yards away. Have you been there? You know...you don't come back from Tuscany with a headache saying, "Oh, they were all the same, made me feel bad." The boulevards of Paris are hard to tell apart at first. But, you know...it doesn't ruin your vacation to go there.

The problem with the American suburban habitat is not that its all the same, its that it's the same miserable quality.