Barack Obama is only one month into his presidency and he’s facing some serious challenges, primarily the economy. What began as a distant rumble early last year has hit like a tsunami. Banks are failing, millions of people have been laid off, GM and Chrysler are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, tens of millions of homeowners face foreclosure, and it looks like it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

It’s the kind of economy that most of us have never faced before. We’ve had recessions before, but this is getting awfully close to a depression. According to a February 9 article in The Wall Street Journal, the world’s advanced economies--the United States, Western Europe, and Japan--are already in a depression, says International Monetary Fund Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Although most of us have never lived through this before, we’ve all heard the stories of the Great Depression from our parents or grandparents. My mother tells stories of wearing flour-sack dresses that her mother sewed, tending a huge garden, canning vegetables, and watching as her mother made extra plates of beans and cornbread to feed the poor folk who showed up on the back porch.

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