The Hollowed Out Social Bond, 3

So now let’s transpose the example in less conspicuous but not less deadly terms, by replacing a blatant addiction – that to drugs, with another one just as deadly – that to unethical, unproductive jobs, producing less actual long−term survival for all in exchange for a seeming short−term survival for self, but without alternatives at hand.

Label it as you please – feudal, racketeering, totalitarian economy –, it’s always the previously discussed suppressive basic of an oligo−monopoly deliberately creating and exploiting scarcities of survival factors. And from that point of view you can look at and understand any depressed region. It has been said that depression is but the result of accumulated unsolved oppression.

To describe the economy of a depressed region we could say that wealth and jobs are scarce and almost all in the hands of the oligo−monopolists, so all the hopes of people to work and thus eat are in the hands of those oligo−monopolists. The alternatives to the oligo−monopoly may be explicitly fought or just magically never seem to materialize, that’s secondary; and the oligo−monopoly may be the prerogative of any kind of chaste, whether it’s a government or a multinational corporation or a racketeer that’s secondary, too. A government−type case in point is southern Italy, where the figures of employees in the public sector are abnormally elephantine, everyone seemingly dreams of a public employment, and the quota of economy managed by politicians and public officials is accordingly huge with all ensuing consequences; a corporation−type case in point is globalisation, where the whole world is being crushed in endless ways by the power of the multinational corporations; and as to the racketeer−type, both these examples fully qualify for it.