My good friend John Nery over at the Philippine Daily Inquirer made an interesting point in his column the other day (in which he also chided me for pointing out that Joma Sison has been fulminating against the US capitalist system and has repeatedly warned that one day soon the US financial system will collapse).

According to John, the true secret of capitalism – a secret that he said Marx and, by implication, communists and leftist activists are completely clueless about – is its capacity for self-improvement and regeneration.

Being a struggling capitalist myself, I would love to see that happen in the wake of the US financial crisis. But that can only happen if Wall Street collapsed. Self-improvement and regeneration can only take place in this instance if there's a total annihilation of the US financial system, which evidently is rotten to the core. Only then can we truly assess whether the capitalism's "true secret" can actually work.

But the Bush administration, as you by now know, stepped in and prevented what would have been the inevitable consequence of capitalist greed – Wall Street's collapse, out of which regeneration and self-improvement could emerge.

And now, there's the $700 billion bailout being proposed by the US Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve, which seeks to avert further damage to Wall Street. If that plan gets the nod of the US Congress, capitalism lives another day. And we will have been deprived of a chance to prove if John's capitalist gospel – sorry, bay, can't help it – has got legs to stand on in this case.

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The secret of capitalism is its capacity to suck people dry. This is the doctrine that allowed the meltdown on Wall Street to happen in the first place. And this is the same doctrine that is behind the bailout plan.

Under the plan, the Bush administration will be given a blank check to buy whatever it wants from all the junk that are clogging Wall Street. Perhaps we cannot quibble, at this point, on the necessity of such a plan. Wall Street has just suffered a stroke and there's a need to rid its arteries of all the bad debts that are choking it.

But the bailout plan, and here is the rub, demands that Americans completely entrust $700 billion of their tax money to US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. – the same guy whose department's inaction and incompetence were responsible for Wall Street's worst crash since the Great Depression in the '20s. (Paulson, by the way, is a product of Wall Street.)

Paulson's plan has nothing by way of ensuring accountability and oversight and putting in place tighter regulations.

In essence, the plan is like this: the same people – the American public – who were screwed by Wall Street are the same ones who are now forking over money to save the neck of the one that screwed them. Neat, huh?

Worse, the American public won't even get anything in return (like stocks in those troubled companies, like the Swedes did in the 1990s). They also won't have a say in how to go about this rescuing or in making sure that Paulson's friends – those overpaid CEOs -- and Treasury officials like him will pay for their crimes and incompetence the next time something like this happens again. (And without legislative and judicial oversight and tighter regulations, this, mark my word, will happen again.)

The true secret of capitalism is screwing people and getting away with it.

Carlos H. Conde is a journalist based in Manila.