…so I’m not an economist, but I suspect I’m experiencing many of the same issues as those in Britain are experiencing when they voted out of the EU. I live in Los Angeles. One of the few things I love about LA is how cosmopolitan it is. And that, being among the few things I love about it, compensates for the many things I don’t like about it (don’t get me started). My brethren from here and all over the world is what has enriched this place to me. When I see the “Brexit” folk being demonized and labeled as “xenophobe”, and, because I’m empathetic to the Brexit cause, it seems to me the media is failing to parse out and understand and therefore portray, with any diplomacy, what the real issues may be.
I don’t doubt that immigration lends itself to the issue in Britain, but I definitely see the global political-economic engineers (a.k.a. profiteers) as the demon. Again, although I’m not an economist, I suspect that the elite in our global economy have bundled our efforts, our work, our savings, our student loans, our mortgages (once again), and our retirement accounts; our general livelihood, the same way as it bundled and leveraged our mortgages up to the 2008 collapse (that was just field practice) – funneling the gain for themselves and democratizing the risk to the rest of us – and effectively subscribing the middle class to its own deflation. Thus, the profit margin of my life savings (which benefits me less than 1%) gets exploited and bundled into larger profit-bearing enterprises for the global elite: exploiting the underpaid worker in China (or anyplace else), exploiting the environment, or waging war. No doubt the Brexit vote is protectionist, but I trust Britain’s vote indicates, even more so, that it DOES care about democracy and it doesn’t care to revisit it’s own feudal history. Carry on!
…says me.
Talaria Walk 