Lenin once said that capitalism would ultimately undo itself, because the entrepreneurs would gladly sell the rope with which they would later be hanged; they’d be too busy counting the profits to see the noose tightening around their necks.  Well, somebody is choking right now, but it’s not the “capitalists”.

Instead, like a torture victim, the little guy is being pressed to see just how much he can tolerate, how close they can bring him to the brink of asphyxia… Aside from the obvious swindle, the banks are using trillions of blackmailed dollars, stolen from the people, to strengthen the stranglehold.

Several companies (e.g., Goldman Sachs and American Express) became “bank holding companies” only after the sh*t hit the proverbial fan, for the sole purpose of capitalizing on TARP funds, which they’re now using successfully to buy up the “not too big to fail” banks (the ones that actually failed, or were on the verge of failure) in order to become “too big to fail,” ensuring a limitless source of future bailout funds. And they are now using those stolen funds to earn risk-free profit.

Quoth Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, “The oligopoly has tightened.” The Washington Post emphasizes:

Regulators pushed failing mortgage lenders and Wall Street firms into the arms of even bigger banks and handed out billions of dollars to ensure that the deals would go through

In several metropolitan regions, [J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo] were permitted to take market share beyond what the Department of Justice’s antitrust guidelines typically allow,

Right now the biggest banks in the world are sitting on the biggest stockpiles of “excess” money ever, and the government is paying interest on these reserves.  And why would bankers lend the money to people who might need it, or might be able to put it to good use, (especially in such turbulent times!) when they can instead earn risk-free profit?  Banks do not need to compete for business when the government guarantees their profits and subsidizes their losses.

That risk-free profit is someone else’s loss.  And that “someone else” is you.

This is not an accident, not misfortune, not due to “animal spirits” or any other academic gobbledygook. Economic depressions are built into the system, by design:

[T]he booms and busts of State-capitalism are coordinated. …[T]hey are coordinated in the sense that, failure to coordinate them results in the complete dissolution of State capitalism’s power structure. Business Cycles then, are not so much engineered by policy makers, as they are tolerated as a necessary evil.

— Engineering a Depression: Monetary Policy 101

Because the zombieconomy feeds on the flesh of the living, at some point the torturer has to relax his grip, has to let go.

So they give us—the victims—a brief reprieve, allowing us to catch our collective breaths just long enough to beg for mercy. At which point they will offer to advance us our own labor and our own credit and our own belongings that were stripped from us in our previous attempts to satisfy their new demands (plus interest). Failing to learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of our forefathers, many will likely accept the terms of whatever new bondage they can devise.  History is doomed to repeat.

How much more suffering at their hands will it take to learn the lesson? We do not need them. But like any parasite, they need us.

I used to doubt whether the “capitalists” were stupid enough to sell the rope, but I confess now that I grow less doubtful each day.  Whether the rest of us are wise enough to tie the hangman’s knot, is another story.

We can control our fates if only we stand and take back what’s ours.