re: #82 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

Chancellor Bismarck gave Germany’s workers the world’s first state pension and health insurance in 1889 in order to stave off the Socialists and co-opt their program. And it was followed by a massive economic boom.

Here in America, the Democrats and the Roosevelt wing of the Republicans co-opted the Socialist Party’s platform in its entirety, and that’s the world we live in now—that the current GOP is trying to destroy:

Government to be financed by a graduated net income tax, direct election of US Senators, Public schools paid for by taxpayers and run by elected school boards, Unemployment and Workman’s Compensation, Public parks and recreation areas, Initiative, Referendum, and Recall….

I don’t want to go back to pre-1912 America, but a lot of people do, unfortunately.

(It would have helped if the 1912 Democratic candidate wasn’t a racist pig.)