Why the 1% Wants Seniors and Older Workers Dead

HATRED OF ELDERLY people, especially those of us who are also poor, has long been amongst the defining sociological characteristics of Occidental culture and of the United States in particular: Google negative attitudes toward the elderly, you get 577,000 hits of instant confirmation. And if that's not enough, there's the tacitly genocidal campaign to slash and eventually terminate Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food-assistance programs, which would condemn millions of elderly and disabled persons to death by starvation and sickness – getting rid of us and our subversive memories of better times all without the international embarrassment of geriatric death camps.

 

No surprise to those of us who recognize capitalism for the moral imbecility it is – its elevation of infinite greed to maximum virtue is the absolute rejection of humanitarianism – the same murderous trend is now showing up in the USian workplace. Its ugly, ageist truth is exposed by AlterNet's Lynn Parramore in a Truthout-reprinted piece entitled “Fifty Is the New 65: Older Americans Are Getting Booted from Their Jobs – and Denied New Opportunities.”

I recommend we all read it from beginning to end. Its revelations are so important my comment-thread response morphed into this week's blog essay. But Parramore's work nevertheless has one huge flaw: despite being a superb and necessarily diligent investigative reporter, she omits from her otherwise-informative catalogue of capitalism's atrocities against older workers the pivotal fact our memories of infinitely better times make us definitively subversive. The mere fact we recall those halcyon days before the Christian Prosperity Gospel granted all bosses the divine right of medieval tyrants is enough to make us persona non grata – even if, terrified of losing our jobs, we are trying desperately hard not to rock the our place-of-employment boat.

It's perplexing a reporter of Parramore's skills has missed this crucial point. Perhaps she is simply too young to understand how radically different the USian Empire of today is from the United States of the years before the Decade of Assassinations. Thus she would not understand the absolute truth of a statement often whispered by those of us who have lived through the awful transformation from our former American Dream constitutional democracy to the relentlessly oppessive total-surveillance plutocracy that rules us today. “This is no longer the country I was born in,” we say. “It's as if the fascists won World War II.” 

Indeed the difference between that globally admired, seemingly blessed nation we knew as children and young adults and the internationally accursed nation wherein we dwell today is as nearly as great as the difference between Nazi Germany and the postwar German Federal Republic. Here it often feels as if time is marching backward – that the United States is not only becoming the de facto Fourth Reich, but is doing so deliberately, methodically, in malevolent fulfillment of the long-range intentions first revealed by the Bankers Plot of 1934. 

According to some of the old Communists I met years ago – all of them now dead – it was far worse than just a bunch of greedy One Percenters trying to boost their profits by imposing fascism. These old Reds said the plotters had secretly met with Hitler and Mussolini and intended to make the United States the bank, granary and manufacturing center of what was to be the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo-Washington D.C. Axis. Thus did the fathers and grandfathers of today's One Percent reveal what Karl Marx had understood long before the terms “fascism” and “Nazism” entered our vocabulary of horrors – that given the opportunity, capitalism will inevitably morph into pure Evil. 

The disposal of surplus workers and of workplace elders in particular is thus merely another of the cruel measures capitalism employs to ensure the subjugation of its workforce. In the case of all surplus workers, we are deemed no longer exploitable for maximum profit and therefore no longer worth the costs of the social safety net that formerly helped us stay alive between jobs. 

In the case of elderly workers, our individual and collective memories of a time when obscenely greedy capitalists were compelled to reward white males for hard work and diligence -- and were forced to at least render lip service to such rewards for women and minorities -- are viewed as dangerous incitements to rebellion. Thus considered the living equivalents of radical literature if not potential Outside Agitators, we are being disappeared down the Orwell-hole along with every other USian vestige of humanitarianism.

It cannot be repeated often enough the same murderous purpose motivates the "austerity" campaigns against Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment compensation and any other safety-net program. Though no politician or Ruling Class pundit dare say it, the true objective of all these campaigns is genocide: the elimination of surplus workers and especially anyone who might remember what life was like before the aristocrats robbed us of the good times forever. 

We elderly are especially fragile; slash our Social Security stipends and deny us medical care and we're dead -- exactly as the One Percent intends. The associated fear alone – the daily stress of never knowing what the Ruling Class will do to us next – is often itself deadly. None of this is accidental. The sooner there are no longer any of us who remember the humanitarianism that was forced on the United States and on capitalism in general by the Soviet Union's formidable endorsement of global Marxism, the sooner the One Percent can get on with its intention of turning all workers into throw-away slaves and reducing Planet Earth to an electronically policed concentration camp.

Such is capitalism: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue -- the methodical rejection of all humanitarian principles, therefore the closest approximation of Absolute Evil our species has yet spawned. Next comes unabashed capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us -- what earlier generations knew as fascism or Nazism.

Though the Soviet Union was never the workers' paradise it claimed to be, its agitation for economic democracy at least forced capitalism to assume a humanitarian disguise. But now, with the U.S.S.R. dead and the People's Republic of China eternally co-opted by Wall Street, there is little or no hope of escaping or even ameliorating the Ayn Rand savagery by which the One Percenters are determined to guarantee their own luxurious survival.

Notwithstanding the superior investigative reporting skill Parramore demonstrated in “Fifty Is the New 65,” she is obviously afraid to confront the hideous malignancy capitalism now reveals itself to be. Nor can we really blame her; she would be instantly blacklisted were she to do otherwise. At least she implies -- but dares not say outright -- that capitalism's war against those of us who are older is bolstered by subtle  brainwashing that encourages younger generations to think of us as parasites and obstructionists. But she fails to note how similar techniques were used by Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels to engender the murderous hatefulness of an entire nation against the Nazis' racial, ethnic and demographic targets.  

Parramore thus avoids the undeniable truth of capitalism's deadly nature. She remains silent about what should be the main and most terrifying point of her disclosures: that by similar atrocities against specific groups did the Nazis prepare the German public for the Holocaust. No matter there are no geriatric death camps in the United States -- at least not yet. Whether we are herded into gas chambers or thrown out to starve, we are equally dead. Meanwhile, as prophets and rebels as far removed from one another as Lao Tzu and Boudicca and Jesus and Marx have said of oppressors, by their deeds do we know them -- and through our responses to that knowledge do we come to know ourselves. 

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More Relevant Remarks on the Comment Threads of Other Websites

“Cheerios Drops Genetically Modified Ingredients”  Reader Supported News posts a USA Todayreport, and I respond with a wise-ass remark: “Yeah, good for General Mills. But remember that covering up product danger by lying about is standard capitalist practice.”

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“Capitalism, Ecology and the Official Invisibility of Women”  I posted a link to this Chris Williams piece last week, but the associated comment thread, already lengthy, has since turned into a thought-provoking dialogue between me and two other posters, one a fellow socialist, the other a person difficult to afix to any pin, whether of the T.S. Eliot sort or otherwise. 

LB/5 January 2014 

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