Gwynne Dyer, Contributor

This is not the Crash of 1929 revisited, and we are not heading into a second Great Depression. No developed country this time round is going to face the 25 per cent unemployment rate that the United States experienced in the 1930s.

"Capitalists can buy themselves out of any crisis, so long as they make the workers pay," Lenin said, but it's more complicated than that.

They didn't manage to buy themselves out of the Depression, mainly because they didn't know how to use the government (i.e. the taxpayers) to restore credit and confidence. They know now, however, and they can still buy themselves out of this crisis despite the hitch in the US House of Representatives on Monday.

The bailout legislation was negotiated with bi-partisan support and then the people's elected representatives baulked. Two-thirds of the Republicans in the House voted against it, but the Democrats had the majority to pass it with no Republican support whatsoever. It failed because 94 out of 235 Democrats voted against it too.

Some Republicans argued that they could not support "socialistic" measures like nationalising banks and capping executive salaries, but in most cases that was not their real problem, and it can hardly have been the Democrats' problem. What really drove the House's rejection of the bill was the fact that every member faces re-election in five weeks' time, and the workers (sorry, I mean the voters) don't want to wind up paying for the mistakes of Wall Street's capitalists.

Bad timing

They will be forced to pay in the end, because there's nobody else who can, but the timing is bad right now. All 435 Representatives have their jobs on the line in the elections on November 4, and those in marginal constituencies know that they will be severely punished at the polls if they use the taxpayers' money to bail out Wall Street now. A deluge of emails, letters and calls from outraged voters has made that very clear to them. After the election will be a different matter, and a bill quite similar to the one that failed this week will probably pass the House then without too much difficulty. There really is a financial crisis and, as soon as their own jobs are safe, the politicians will deal with it.The response of American politicians at all levels has been pathetic.

Unpunished

It will be unpunished mass folly, of course: these people are not going to lose their homes and end up poor. Most won't even lose their jobs. It takes another old Commie (a pre-Commie, actually) to sum it up.

In 1852 Karl Marx wrote: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce."

Not the Great Depression, but the Reign of Folly.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.