The fight between Congress and George W. Bush over the 700 billion dollar Wall Street bailout package has stalled for several reasons. One is the question of oversight. Democrats suggest that a legislative or judicial body should oversee the process of ladling out our wealth in the corporate soup kitchen, while Bush loathes the idea of such interference, though the U.S. Constitution says this is exactly how government is supposed to work. The spectacle of this battle should awaken Americans at long last from the greatest mass hallucination in human history—namely that capitalism and democracy go hand in hand.

Every culture has its fairy tales—America’s beloved myth of free-market capitalism as a democratic force is so deeply seeded that people across a broad political spectrum believe it, or at least behave as if they do. Republicans have spent thirty years screaming that capitalism equals democracy. But even a cursory glance at history shows that capitalism and democracy are fire and tinder. They don’t co-exist—one consumes the other.

Chile 1973: CIA-backed rebels deposed democratically elected Salvador Allende and his bloodied corpse was dragged from the presidential palace. In his place the U.S. installed Augusto Pinochet, who killed 30,000 while imposing free-market capitalism on the populace.

Bolivia 2008: Evo Morales won a national election, and later won a referendum demonstrating broad public support for his policies. Yet the U.S. began funding right wing prefects and their death squads in an effort to topple Morales and derail the economic populism galvanizing the country.

Iraq 2003: a country was destroyed at a cost of more than 600,000 lives and counting. Out of the rubble Iraqis arose and began organizing. Saddam was gone, and self-determination would be their reward. But Bush and his neo-cons were horrified to see the Iraqis bouncing back so quickly. Bush issued a decree that the new Iraqi leader would not be elected, but appointed by the United States. And with that decree, any pretense of bringing democracy to Iraq vanished. Iraq was about capital—first and always.

Iran 1953: Mossadeq is deposed and the horrific Shah makes the scene. Guatemala 1954: Arbenz is replaced by a homicidal U.S. puppet. Cuba, 1952: Prio goes poof and Batista is installed to turn the island into a cesspool of American vice. The examples litter history like crucifixes atop Golgotha. In El Salvador, Zaire, Grenada, and other nations ad nauseum, democracy was sacrificed to the meat grinder of American capitalism. Yet through all the years and all the coups d’etat, the mass hallucination of America as a wellspring of democracy held firm. Even as capitalism was imposed by force in every corner of the globe, we chose to see Uncle Sam holding flowers when in reality he was aiming a pistol. 

Naomi Klein points out, in her tour de force deconstruction of American capitalism The Shock Doctrine, that though capitalism has many flaws, its fatal problem isn’t the system itself, bad as that may be. The problem is nobody has ever voted for it. In any place where the choice of capitalism has been presented to people they have rejected it. This means the only ways to spread the system are by brute force or deception. That’s the ugly truth behind the myriad myths of capitalism—it can only be spread by violence or trickery.

Even Americans reject capitalism, when they’re given the choice. Republicans want to privatize Social Security, yet an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose their plans. Republicans want to be rid of Medicare, Medicaid, and public schools. Americans think those are bad ideas. Corporate America wants to privatize the nation’s roads, bridges, and national parks. No thanks, say the citizenry. Left to a vote, capitalism on its own merits would be rejected and buried in a crypt forever, consigned to the dust like its chief evangelist, the ghoulish Milton Friedman. It is only by conflating capitalism with democracy that people are fooled into supporting it. 

So now we have the junk bond bailout. Bush wanted 700 billion dollars, and, like a true capitalist, intended to impose this crushing debt on Americans without discussion. Some journalists and bloggers are asking whether the bailout is socialist. They’re missing the point. Socialism funnels money downward, to the masses. A capitalist kleptocracy, which is what the U.S. is, funnels money upward by whatever available means, whether illegal, violent, or superficially socialist. More to the point, free-market capitalism uses whatever mechanisms are available to it. In a socialist democracy like Sweden, those mechanisms are few. In an oligarchy like Russia, they are many. And in the United States, capitalism is an unfettered beast that infects everything from medicine to banking to the prison system.

Does the fight over the big bailout mean American democracy is finally waking up? I wouldn’t count on it. Whatever shape the bailout ultimately takes, as we move into 2009 and beyond we’ll probably hear loud calls for cuts to social programs. Naomi Klein writes: “The debt crisis currently being created by this bailout becomes the excuse to privatize social security, lower corporate taxes and cut spending on the poor. A President McCain would embrace these policies willingly. A President Obama would come under huge pressure from the think tanks and the corporate media to abandon his campaign promises and embrace austerity and “free-market stimulus.” 

We could vote against these coming threats to our social programs, but we will not be allowed to, any more than were the Chileans or the Iraqis. Whichever pro-corporate, pro-war presidential candidate wins the November election, have no illusions—the American course is already locked in. We are capitalist to the bitter end. Though that end still lies far in the future, the jackal of capitalism is hurt. It has fallen into a thorn patch and disemboweled itself. Knowing only that it must behave as it always has, the eating machine has begun devouring its own innards.