Bankistan Vanquishes America

Barry Ritholtz watches as Bankistan Vanquishes America and issues a call to arms to liberate America. Wolverines!.

Ritholtz still has not caught with Lenin's idea that Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism. Of particular interest, chapter 3 "Finance Capital and Financial Oligarchy" has the quotes:

It is characteristic of capitalism in general that the ownership of capital is separated from the application of capital to production, that money capital is separated from industrial or productive capital, and that the rentier, who lives entirely on income obtained from money capital, is separated from the entrepreneur and from all who are directly concerned in the management of capital. Imperialism, or the domination of finance capital, is that highest stage of capitalism in which this separation reaches vast proportions.

(Kindle Location 929-932)

And, the big four (4) countries were, prior to the First World War, Great Britain, United States, France, and Germany.

Together, these four countries own 479,000,000,000 francs, that is, nearly 80 per cent of the world’s finance capital. Thus, in one way or another, nearly the whole world is more or less the debtor to and tributary of these four international banker countries, the four ‘pillars’ of world finance capital.

(Kindle Location 954-956)

One hundred years later, the only thing that has changed is the ordering at the top. Lenin wrote:

Thus, the beginning of the twentieth century marks the turning point from the old capitalism to the new, from the domination of capital in general to the domination of finance capital.

(Kindle Location 707-709)

Does Ritholtz really think that financial capitalism is a recent innovation? If he does, then the ideological state apparatus has been extraordinarially effective. Lenin writes that:

The task of a bourgeois professor is not to lay bare the entire mechanism, or to expose all the machinations of the bank monopolists, but rather to present them in a favourable light.

(p.52)