Big money, not immigrants are the problem

It’s not economic refugees and workers from south of our border that are responsible for the great discontent sweeping our land. It is instead the corporations and moneyed interests that are represented by the billionaire class now at the head of our government.

This not exactly a partisan issue either, but a class issue. Long successful in the art of demagogy, the billionaire class keeps us looking down our noses at each other instead of looking up the economic pyramid to those who are the real problem. Wall Street, the corporate owned congress, big banks and their “financialization” of our economy; defraud and syphon off the people’s wealth into tax avoiding off-shore accounts. This wealth is money made by the sweat and skill of American workers whose wages are depressed through manipulated labor markets and ideological hogwash. Avoidance of taxes (not to mention the trillions of off-shore dollars removed from circulation) essentially starve what would otherwise be a robust and politically democratic economy that serves its workers and citizens.

Those applauding Trump’s mass deportation of “economic refugees” will in time see their only satisfaction stemming from innate racism because it will not fix the economy or job problem. The nightmarish scene of jackbooted armed men hauling off women and children in the night will however keep us distracted from the overt theft of the treasury by the oligarchy now formally installed in the White House.

This story was originally published March 10, 2017 at 5:24 PM with the headline "Big money, not immigrants are the problem."