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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Concern and Community in a Time of Growing Despair

IF YOU'RE OLD or disabled and no longer exploitable for profit and you are trying to survive in the industrial world's most deliberately cruel nation,  you are daily forced to endure the kind of constant anxiety that may eventually kill you or drive you to suicide. The government is now every bit as much your enemy as the fat-cat bosses were before you were tossed off the job, and that's because those same greedy bastards who were always trying to make you work more hours for less pay have bought off all the politicians and most of the upper-level bureaucrats as well. As a result the constitution you once trusted (and if you are male probably swore to defend with your life) has been nullified and subverted to the point it has become nothing more than the proverbial toilet paper upon which the One Percent routinely wipes its metaphorical ass. And it no longer matters whether their wholly-owned politicians are openly sadistic Republicans like Alan Simpson, who sneeringly described Social Security-dependent elders as “greedy geezers,” or serpent-tongued Democrats like this president who so often shape-shifts from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer and then back again whenever his (always) Machiavellian agenda demands some new deception.
 

As I have said before and will continue saying until I die, it is obvious the Betrayer's intent and for that matter the intent of all today's elected (i.e. bought-and-paid-for) politicians is to reduce younger people to slavery and exterminate those of us who are now dangerous subversives merely because we have lived long enough to remember the better times Ayn Rand capitalism has now stolen from us forever.

 

Meanwhile the Betrayer's purpose has become obvious enough we can now name it with certainty: he intends to go into history as Wall Street's most faithful and reliably obedient servant ever and thereby ensure he and his descendants live the same pampered lives as the wealthiest aristocrats – never mind the color line will never allow the president and his family entry into the vindictively racist, adamantly all-white aristocracy itself. He knows – and you have to give him a kind of sleazoid credit for the morally imbecilic cunning with which he acts upon this knowledge – exactly who rules the global plantation into which our ever-more-enslaved and desperate planet is being transformed, and he will do anything in his imperial power to serve the Ruling Class. He is the perfect butler, the perfect overseer, the perfect factotum. He does not give so much as a Marie Antoinette damn if We the People are at last awakening to the fact he's the most dishonest U.S. president ever. If we dare resist, he will crush us at home as surely as he now crushes his enemies abroad.

 

That context – the ugly truth the genocidal war against Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid is now being led by the man so many of us hoped would protect us – was deliberately submerged by the Josef Goebbels clones who manage Ruling Class Media, and with the One Percent cleverly pointing its Romney-Ryan assault weapon at our heads, our fears thus enabled the Betrayer to lie his way into a second term. (I admit I voted for him twice, first time by choice, because I believed his “change we can believe in” Big Lies – that he supported single-payer/public-option health care, would enact Employee Free Choice and restore our constitutional rights – second time because Romney/Ryan terrified me into not voting my default preference, the Socialist Workers Party.) But whether it was acknowledged or not, the threat was always there Obama would do again what he had done in his first term and prove himself to be, behind his his Afro-Democrat disguise and his mastery of rhetoric, another Richard Milhous Nixon, at last fulfilling the Nixonian dream of being the man who struck the final blow against the constitutional democracy the One Percent has despised since the days of the Banker's Plot, when the Wall Street aristocrats collaborated with Nazi Germany in a (failed) attempt to topple President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But Barack the Betrayer has in fact done much worse: were there a medal entitled “Most Obedient Servant of Wall Street,” Obama would have already won it.

 

Yet amidst all this misery and anxiety and wretchedness and sense of impending doom in a realm so transformed by capitalism into fascism it now bears only the most superficial resemblance to the nation in which I was born, the human spirit yet prevails in myriad ways. It reminds me of Lao Tzu's description of Tao as translated by Richard Wilhelm – “you look for it and you see nothing special; you act according to it and you find no end” – and that is what the above photographs are really about. I am blessed to live in a senior housing project that has evolved into a genuine community, thereby of course disproving all the Ruling Class lies claiming subsidized housing breeds alienation and irresponsibility, and when I limped outside today to hobble to a bus stop on a first-of-the-month errand, about 15 of my neighbors were gathered in the paved courtyard. They were seated on outdoor chairs and at outdoor tables, a jolly circle in the afternoon sun, and I was greeted by their smiles and friendly salutations and reminded again of how last summer maybe a dozen of us – even some who are severely disabled – had volunteered to paint the rusting steel bars of the courtyard fence. I spent hours grinding off the rust spots with an electric sander, then near the end of the workday grabbed a Pentax MX and a pair of SMCP-M lenses (a 28mm and a 100mm, each an f/2.8) and photographed a few of the painters as they finished the job. If our species is to survive what is to come – what indeed is already upon us – it will only be by such small local but definitively human efforts. The film is Fujicolor 400. All photographs by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

 

LB/2 May 2013

 

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