This very thing could be said of the "Elite" Class in the USA during the 1850s and 1860s.
They had a system for moving money from the slave plantations into their own pockets.
What sent them to war was the cut off of that money, not any concern for the slaves.
We are still dealing with the corrupt Northeastern portion of the country using the Federal government to line their own pockets. It is the greatest threat we currently face, and it is exactly why they control the media.
Public spitting, defecation, urination, masturbation — shamelessness was part of Diogenes the Cynic’s philosophical strategy
Your view might describe America from the 1880s to the 1930s or 1970s or even the 1990s, but it had little to do with antebellum America and has even less to do with the United States today. The defeat of the South in the Civil War and the problems of the newly settled states made the Northeast dominant in the American economy from the end of that war until more recent times.
That wasn't the case before the Civil War. The North was gradually industrializing, but it wasn't robbing the cotton rich South of anything. If you aren't developing industry and financial institutions, or if other regions are doing it better than you are, you will have to pay somebody for the products you don't produce at home. The antebellum South had great power in American politics, and wasn't dominated by anyone else.
The development of the South and West in the last 50 years has made the Northeast less powerful in the economy. You don't have to be in NYC and pay high taxes to trade in the markets. You don't have to have factories in the Northern states or have a corporate headquarters in New York or Chicago or Detroit or Cleveland anymore. Northern Rustbelt cities have declined and the Sunbelt has risen. The same elite urban or suburban culture prevails in Atlanta or Charlotte and in NYC or LA. Our current divisions are ideological not regional.