Things look increasingly divided now in the US as the Occupy Wall Street movement rises to counter the defenders of the establishment. But we should remember that during the depression years in the US a group of right-wing businessmen began organizing a coup against President Franklin D Roosevelt's reform agenda.

The US plot was exposed in 1933 by retired Marine General Smedley Butler after the conspirators approached him, not knowing his personally radical political views.  Although there was considerable right-wing opposition to President Roosevelt's New Deal, that policy held fast and was replicated in other countries around the world.

There should be no surprise that the same tensions are breaking out today at the beginning of the second great depression in 100 years. The Republican Party has been moved to the right by the Tea Party movement. The Democratic Party has lost focus and has become entwined with the Wall Street institutions it has been compelled to bail out.

So ferocious is the partisan rivalry in the Congress that no practical policy solution can be implemented. During the Depression, Roosevelt put forward a policy to take America out of depression that aimed to achieve three things: to secure the financial sector, to rebuild the real economy and jobs and finally to invite the widest popular participation of the American people. In the latter, he was aided by the rapidly growing trade union movement.

The arrival of neo-liberal economics around 30 years ago began to change all that. All of those structures built by the New Deal were dismantled one after the other. The economy was deregulated from the financial industry, through the provision of basic services like electricity, gas and water. The market was crowned king.

With everything measured by the market, social support systems dismantled and labor rights reduced, the American workforce was increasingly de-unionized.

Industrial workers found themselves made jobless and then rehired on half the wage, doing the same work. The new technologies spread like wildfire, restructuring whole work forces, deskilling others and providing some new skilled employment but not for those who had lost their jobs.

China's rise became so noticeable that those politicians and union leaders who could find no leverage within their own political system decided it was China's fault. This is where the Democratic Party has come to rest. Other voices, calling for a Green New Deal, have been drowned out.

The Republicans, representing those companies and sectors which have done very well out of the economic growth based on the infotech revolution and trade with China, disagree, but blame the Democrats and the federal government. For them the market must remain king.

In the EU the story is rather different. As a bloc it has not been plunged into foreign wars which drained its resources, like the US, and instead for 60 years grew and expanded both in its economic power and its geographical presence. From the original six member states it has grown to 27. This growth rate was sustainable as long as no shocks came to disturb the rising trajectory of its economy. So confident were the EU decision-makers that they did not even bother to shock-proof the euro.

The crisis now faced by the European peoples is, like that in the US, both economic and institutional. The EU is not paralysed by partisan politics as much as by insufficient political development. The development of the economy has outrun politics and it is now plunged into crisis in the middle of the worst economic slump in two generations.

For the EU to act decisively and quickly is not easy, given its legal, institutional basis, but the European peoples are creative and can find a solution. It is essential that they do so, as it does seem at the moment that the US is becoming more locked into a political quagmire.

The author is a coal mine safety adviser and former member of the European Economic and Social Comm