If you are one of millions of Americans who watch the news, and are angry about current political events, please permit me to explain how our TV news media works. The media is not paid by you, the American citizen, for the morning news. All of those reporters, journalists, and talking head commentators are paid with corporate advertising dollars; the pharmaceuticals, car companies, beverage makers, tech giants, etc. And all of them are multinational corporations, which means their loyalty is to their investors, and not to the United States of America.

Like that media, our two-party political system does not run on financial contributions from average working and middle-class Americans like you and me. The two-party system is financed by multinational corporate donors, often contributing through political action committees, or non-profits, to hide the amounts of money they are giving to one party or another (or to both parties), to ensure the economic and political agenda for America is their agenda, and not yours. If you doubt this, ask yourself whether you could run for office as an outsider, like Trump did, and win.

The current political fight in America is not actually between liberal and conservative Americans. It is between average Americans and wealthy oligarchs who have used the media to divide and distract the public over issues that do not put a penny in our pocket, while these rich billionaires continue to export our jobs, invest in slave labor overseas, and push college debt and degrees that are not worth the paper they are printed on.

That is why the media covers stories that make you angry or afraid, rather than reporting the truth of which big money interests are behind the politics.

The problem is not with liberal Democrats or conservative Republicans. In reality, it’s both parties. That’s why the southern border went unchecked for decades, since millions of exploited workers were crossing it. Both parties did nothing because multinational corporations and banks financing each party were profiting from illegal labor for hourly slave wages with no benefits. The American public was just deceived into continuing to believe in an idealistic theory of capitalism, and vote for people who told us one thing to our face, but behind closed doors did the other thing.

As with communism in the Soviet Union during the late 1980s, capitalism in America is facing a crisis, as our lives grow more financially and politically oppressive with each passing year. If you wonder why this is, election after election, I have a hint for you; look at the Clinton, Bush, and Biden clans. It is because the only people pushed in front of the voting public have been, like politicians in communist Russia, party apparatchiks who reliably did what their party told them to do. And our political parties only do what banks and corporations pay them to do.

That’s reality.

The political and economic symptoms of Soviet Russia are virtually identical to our own today: career politicians promising to address wage stagnation, inflation, medical costs, or poverty and crime — during an election anyway. But afterward, all of their good ideas seemed to go nowhere. Our economy got tighter, wages remained stagnant, inflation went up, and people now fear poverty like a credit card booby trap in a job market jungle, while millions of college grads still cannot get a good job, afford a home, or start a family — just like students in Soviet Russia during the 1980s.

No matter who you vote for, in the end, the two-party system is precisely what its name implies; the rich get to party, win or lose, because Congress is bought and paid for by them — not by you. Just like our national media. Perhaps that is why they always find topics that make us so darn angry about race and gender, while our lives, regardless of race or gender, get worse. Perhaps that is also why more and more Americans have taken to speaking out in public, even at work and faith-based events, about the real possibility of a violent revolution or bloody civil war.

Of course, those multinational corporations and their billionaire investment partners fear this, too. Or have you never wondered why their End User License Agreements on your cell phone allow them to analyze every word you say, every web site you visit, every move you make, and store it away? Even the government cannot legally do that without court approval. Curiously, somewhere along the way, your politicians passed laws that permitted private multinational corporations to do what the U.S. Constitution said even the government could not legally do to a U.S. citizen. For real.

And if they can do what even the government cannot, who holds the power, and is really in charge? Wake up America. It’s not your government. It’s not your media. And it’s no longer your country. For all of his faults, Donald Trump is the man in the arena, just like in the speech given by Theodore Roosevelt over a century ago. Trump is fighting to save what is left of our sovereignty, as voters, from a pack of corporate thieves and political liars, who think we should be more concerned about race, gender, and sexuality, than about having a good job and achieving the American Dream.

Joseph M. Mazgaj of Wheeling is a professional educator, a former West Virginia Homeland Security operations officer (2002-07) and the son of a Holocaust survivor.