What we are witnessing right now is the end of an era: the death of turbo capitalism, writes RENATE OGILVIE.

No matter if Bush can force his recalcitrant Republicans to reconsider their embarrassing No vote to the bail-out, no matter what a Plan B might be if they remain in their stubborn opposition - these are the convulsions of a dying animal.

Until the collapse of Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, AIG and Lehman's there had been hope. Now the myth of Wall Street is destroyed, the long-term effect quite unpredictable. Even now, in an irrational lemming-like impetus, the world financial markets still look to  the U.S. for guidance, like children whose parent has been found, drunk and covered in vomit in the gutter in front of a casino.

The so-called emerging markets, the darlings of financial pundits, China in particular, are hardest hit. The Hang Seng down by an astonishing 800 points. Russia simply closing the stock exchange, a simple, brutal and effective measure as their intervention in Georgia.

So, how did all this happen?

When the planned economies of Eastern Europe collapsed and the Cold War was decisively won by the West and anglo-Saxon capitalism, freedom was associated with an all powerful free-market that would bring affluence to all and regulate itself.

By contrast, the state and its regulatory intervention was associated with grey and stifling bureaucracy, tottering planned economies, political suppression and stagnation. Socialist Realism and its ludicrous banners of happy workers and farmers sagged into oblivion, and turbo capitalism exploded world-wide. Capitalist Realism ruled.

In the East, Russian carpetbaggers looted the ailing heavy industry of post-Stalinist experiments and turned themselves into billionaires, the so-called oligarchs, only partially disciplined by Putin's heavy handed persecution.

China decided that they had enough of Mao-style economic destruction and it was time to be rich and glorious. Now the most repressive system the world has ever seen has emerged in China: untrammelled capitalism combined with absolute communist control.

In the meantime, India woke up after centuries of slumber and colonial nightmare.

In the West, the post-socialist triumph became unhinged. Unregulated investment banks like Lehman involved themselves in ever more risky speculation. The financial instruments which appeared sophisticated and profitable, were nothing else but ways of building debt upon debt with ever more impenetrable nets of international interdependence. Huge bonuses for short-term gain were meekly accepted by a public agog at the spectacle of unhinged greed.

Karl Marx didn't know about investment banks, but he did know a thing or two about capitalism. In a famous quote he described the underlying psychology: "Like nature's horror vacui, Capital has a horror of small or a total absence of profit. Profit shakes capitalism awake - 10 per cent for sure; at 20 per cent it becomes animated; at 50 percent positively lively; at 100 per cent it stamps all human laws under its foot; and at 300 per cent there is no crime that it doesn't risk, even at the danger of ending at the gallows."

Gallows are not threatening Wall Street, but the Emperor stands nude, his body revealed as revolting and corpse like. A white-faced finance minister Paulson, himself a former Wall-Street-banker, stammers his way through press conferences. Bush is for once devoid of folksy humour and pleading for his rescue package. US$5000 for each and every U.S. citizen, to bail out the free market. Risk is good when profits roll. When it all collapses in a heap, the tax payer is expected to pick up the bill.

It is a final irony that the most conservative Republicans have voted down what they call an ‘un-American socialist measure'. What socialism never managed is now becoming a new and astonishing capitalist phenomenon: nationalisation by default.

History is not dead, it is alive and has a sense of humour.

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