Gloom

Over the last weekend we spread out some of our limited resources in various campaign contributions, including the presidential campaign. Today, after the first debate, I'm worried that the presidential donation was a waste.

No need to re-hash some of the other reviews, most bad and a few delusional. I thought Obama looked like someone in an interview who really doesn't want the job.

I do have  to add my vote to those who thought Romney was now shaking the Etch-A-Sketch and trying to move back to the centre. The trouble is, he may now be unable to do that. He has deeply indebted himself to the reactionaries. Worse, he has taken on Ryan, and I believe Ryan's chief function is to be Romney's keeper, forcing him to remain on the path to ideological purity.

This is grim news when you're 65, underemployed and never likely to be anything else. This is chiefly thanks to a Supreme Court that has enabled hiring bigotry. Full retirement already looks like a delusion. I don't hear Romney or Ryan when they try to buy people my age with promises that they will "save" both Social Security and Medicare. They represent the reactionaries of their party, who have hated Social Security for 75 years, and hated Medicare for 47 years. Elimination of both is their agenda, make no mistake. Consequences? Damn consequences. They also represent the capitalists who have destroyed private pensions in the US without a single thought for the consequences.

If Obama doesn't give a crap about keeping his job, how about it? Let's go have that die-in on the Capital steps.

Oft evil will shall evil mar

Speaking as a recovered marketing type, there's only one thing I don't understand about the latest Belvedere Vodka outrage. Which is, why is it unexpected?

Advertising is an industry heavily populated by frat boys: adolescents past their prime. One is expected to get into the business right out of college. By the time one has reached an age at which common sense should predominate over hormones, one is either president of an agency or forced out of the business. This is age bigotry at its most refined.

Another thing that's just like frat boys: apparently, Nobody created the ad.
You know, one of the evil spirits from The Family Circus: Ida Know, Notme, and Nobody. It's understandable when little kids won't take responsibility for their actions, but not so much for theoretical adults in their 20s and early 30s.

If this were a single aberration, perhaps we could buy it, but Belvedere advertising has been in a death spiral for months, nearly a year. One hopes that with sick rape humour they've hit bottom, but of course there's still rape and murder to explore.

It strikes me there's a conflict here. On the one hand there's a mammalian response, the idea that anything that gets attention must be good. This runs the gamut of species: cat behaviourists explain why your kitties keep scratching the sofa by saying that if you yell at them, you're rewarding them. On the human end, there's the publicists' trope that "there's no such thing as bad publicity."

There is, however, such a thing as bad advertising. As I recall it was Jerry Della Femina who said that the sole purpose of advertising was to get consumers to try a product once. Advertising that gets caught up in its own jejeune cleverness and forgets to sell is by definition bad advertising. Every goddam thing done for Belvedere Vodka in the past year has been bad advertising. This is what you get when you let the children run the nursery.

I'm not much of a hard liquor drinker, I admit, but at this moment, I would sooner drink cat piss than Belvedere Vodka. If a product is trying so desperately to get my attention, I'd conclude there isn't much difference.

A comment from the age barrier

Some of the online idiots whose uninformed opinion passes for truth would have one believe that I, at 65, am eligible for Social Security.

Not.

People my age, first wave of the so-called Boomers, had our full retirement age advanced to 66 a generation ago. The second round of my generation had their full retirement age hiked to 67 at the same time. Thus, in a stable political climate, and an employment climate that didn't consider people old and worthless at 45, I would have no problem with further incremental advances in the retirement age. I've never had a problem with moving up, or eliminating, the income ceiling. The latter especially could eliminate the projected Social Security deficit all by itself.

Although I do belong to AARP, I take some exception to its periodic descent into scare tactics about these and other reasonable reforms. However, I understand why they do it because they share my chief reservation.

I do not trust the shredded remains of our legislative branch. Along with millions of others, I have to assume that the majority will lie; that they will make a determined effort to eliminate the entire system, which the wingnuts have hated since it was enacted. In their ideological zeal, they are quite capable of eliminating Social Security entirely without a moment's thought to what will happen to the people who depend mostly or entirely on Social Security. They certainly won't give a damn about breaking the commitment the system represents to those people. After all, the wingnuts in particular are owned by the same corporations who promised their workers pension plans, then sold them out.

Further, any idea of continuing to increase retirement age in a reasonable way rests on the assumption that years left to live at 65 is going to go on increasing. But beware the sine wave fallacy: put simply, this is the belief that a given variable will always move in the same direction. Today's increases in years left to live are on a collision course with the corporate age bigotry which has lately been enabled by the Supreme Court. A society which considers workers useless after age 45 is wedded to a principle which is likely to cause mean age at death to plummet. Pop goes the sine wave!

Perhaps that's what the wingnuts in Congress want, as long as it doesn't include them.

Social Security and the age thing

In theory, I think raising the Social Security retirement age is one good and logical step toward getting our house in order. After all, anyone my age already reaches full retirement age at 66, not 65. (It is a constant surprise how many younger people don't know that.) In practice, I have reservations, to wit:

1) Can we trust the lap-dogs of the people who have spent the last 30 years cheating--yes, cheating--their workers out of the pensions that they relied on for their retirement? Any tinkering with Social Security has to come with defences against this sort of thing. Putting Congress on Social Security is a good place to start, but it may need more. I've worked for the very rich. I know how they think, and in general they have no problem with older Americans dying by the roadside, as long as someone sweeps up the corpses so they don't frighten the horses. Cut the deck before starting this reform.

2) Living until 90 is a statistical construct, subject to many variables. Depriving the older poor of retirement income and health care is one of those variables. The more the reactionaries get their way, the more likely it is that "years left to live" (a more accurate statistical term than life expectancy) will decline, not increase. Don't make changes based solely upon this one, vulnerable measurement.

3) During my time of un- and under-employment, it has become clear that in the near future most "careers" will run from age 25 to 45. Age bigotry is entrenched in corporate America. If present mindsets are allowed to persist, the nation will have an entire generation greeting customers at Walmart between 45 and retirement age. This just at the time we have made the retirement age a moving target. This too introduces a factor that is likely to cause life expectancy to decline. What if anything will reform do to adjust corporate attitudes and keep people over 45 working?

4) Finally, remember that all those jolly age projections may work for the elite and professional classes, but they aren't realistic for the working class, now. For anyone in the sort of physical occupation praised in TV truck commercials, 66 is a stretch now. Age 90, for men at least, is absurd. I see this every day I work. Time to get out and see how the other half lives before dicking around with anything in the social safety net.

I'll save Keynesian rants about the benefits of deficits for some other time.

In case of doubt, check this

If any of my peers were wondering whether "age bias" is only an excuse, I suggest a bit of light reading courtesy of myboomer2boomer. A charming thread on Yahoo Answers called "Should we blame the Baby Boomers for everything? " No I won't give you the link: you can Google this yourself if your digestion is up to it. The Asker's opinion is "yes, we should blame the Boomers for everything." Evidently that includes original sin, the fall of Rome, the rise of 19th century imperialism, Karl Marx and smelly cat urine.

The thread proves that no one generation has a monopoly on bigotry, selfishness and whining. Commenters include a couple who are of my generation and attempt to show that they too hate my generation. It's a feat of intellectual gymnastics that is frankly beyond them.

In fairness, the thread demonstrates that even in a confederacy of dunces, there will be one or two people of reason and principle who try to make their point over the noise. Unfortunately, the noise usually wins.

I can afford to smirk for a couple of reasons.

First, the oldest members of the so-called "Generation X" turn 45 this year. This means, by their own standards, they are now too old to make a meaningful contribution to society.

Second, I can seldom overlook the slavering and uncritical praise most of the American public heaps on the servicefolk and veterans of our present imperial conflicts. In common with other, more thoughtful veterans of the late and overlooked unpleasantness in Southeast Asia, I know perfectly well that this slobbering is a compensation for the disagreeable way my generation of veterans were treated once, and are treated still. They might consider including us in their encomiums, but that seldom occurs to anyone.

Both instances lead me to caution younger people to be careful what they say, especially on the Internet. It will stay there forever, and it may come back to grab their throats at an awkward moment.

Cooks who spoil the broth

This topic came up a couple of days ago in a networking group I visit regularly. (OK, I brought it up.) A thread in a certain social networking group highlighted one of the problems that has surfaced when one blends 50-year-old job-hunting practices with a culture of privilege and entitlement.

The first "networking" was more or less learning to use and love the old-boy (or good-ol-boy) network. It seems to have worked very well in those days gone by when most people looking for a job already had one. It has steadily eroded over the past 40 years as the so-called social compact between the employers and employed has eroded. Now, most people looking for a job don't have one. Many haven't had one for some time. Although the era of the social compact and lifetime employment was dying or was dead before many of these people entered the work force, most of them still believe they have a right to—not just a job, but to all the money and perquisites they had enjoyed before the HR person with the empty box arrived at their cubicle.

When earnest employment pundits trot out their Haldane-era advice, especially about networking, that advice gets as garbled as the kids' game of gossip. What comes out is not the idea that you will actually try to meet a friend of a friend, in a place or field of interest, and make them your friend. Oh no: the output is too often that you will get the name of that someone, whether you have mutual connections or not, and demand that they give you an interview (i.e., give you a job). When that someone, very understandably, either ignores you or tells you to sod off, you then throw a tantrum. This has happened more and more often over the last 15 years or so, to the point where the artificial networking structure built on the old-boy example is pretty much dead.

And yet, the job search experts still bang on this drum all day.

Entitlement shows itself in unusual ways, even amongst the formerly entitled. The 1950s were a wonderful, gilded age in the USA: if you happened to be a white Protestant male. It was solid gold if you were a rich, white, Protestant male.It seems that a great deal of the loud social angst of the present is coming from people who resent the social changes of the last 40 years or so, which amount to a message to please share. They did not want to and they do not want to: a characteristic reaction of the terminally spoilt.

As I've been poking around the topic of age bigotry, I've had the unsettling experience of discovering just how many of these spoilt brats still remain in the corporate world and in the ranks of the unemployed. Many—but not all—of them are over 50. Many are obstinate in their refusal to start their job search with a look in the psychological mirror*. To them, their loss of privilege must always be someone else's fault. People who actually have done nothing more to employers than have the gall to get older may very well be collateral damage in a conflict between the fools who did the sacking and the fools who got sacked. Possibly bigotry enters into the business only because bigotry of any sort is a symptom of stupidity.


----------------------------
*A look in an actual mirror is irrelevant. Any job search pundit who advocates a physical makeover as a solution to unemployment has never taken a look at online background checks, in which age is the first data point. Perhaps dispensing online job search advice is the one field available today in which stupidity is a positive virtue.

Wooed to return?

No older worker can accuse US News & World Report of being pessimistic. A May 10 article trots out an impressive and convincing set of statistics that support the present and future need to involve more older American workers in the workforce.

Trouble is, this will happen over the dead bodies of most middle and senior managers, and nearly all HR people, alive today.

In my experience, most managers between 30 and 50, and a few older than that, are threatened by older workers. A good many also harbour unresolved fears of their own mortality that the mere presence of older workers tends to reinforce. If one is going to make the transition, it becomes a matter of changing the psychology of management.

Nothing could be better for the future than sacking every HR department. Assuming that won't happen, they must be jolted out of attitudes toward older workers that are a half-century out of date.

Here, we have a (possibly overstated) example of the stereotype of the older worker held by most managers, HR people and job search pundits:













And here, by contrast, is an actual woman (Helen Mirren) at age 63, photographed in 2008:

One grants that many of us haven't held up quite as well as Dame Helen, but I suggest that my generation more resemble the latter than the former.

Will the wooed, if they return, be able to change the culture of the wooers? Many people who accept their enforced retirement now do so because they are fed up with long hours for no additional pay and with incompetence at every level of management. This old guy would go so far as to say the long hours are in part a result of incompetence—the combination of bad planning and lack of coordination that makes long hours necessary. They are also in part the result of a culture of phony machismo that makes excessive work hours a hallmark of manliness. Sorry: endurance of that sort only counts in one place, mates, and it is not the office.

WBZ-TV analyst Jon Keller asked, in the aftermath of the Celtics upset of Lebron James, whether that did not suggest the value of age and experience. It might, for those who have a brain...not to mention those long past the ages at which the Celtics are considered "old."

I would say that the inmates are in charge of the asylum in today's work world if I weren't entirely convinced that the results would be better if they were. The situation is much worse. The asylums of work and media are run by those people who have never been blessed with a moment of self-doubt, who are sure of their course and perennially optimistic, even as they plunge over the cliff. Many of those the world calls crazy would have more self-awareness than that.

The best revenge open to older workers is to wait for the wooing...and to reply with the finger. If we follow the US News logic, the future of this economy is in our hands. By the time the wooing begins, those of us still alive will have discovered the best of gifts: the understanding that we do not need most of the things for which we once slaved, and that we do not need to be treated like galley slaves to get what we most need in life.

And if you don't think the media speaks out of both sides of its mouth on such matters, consider this, which appeared whilst I was dawdling over this item.

Someone gets it

I found this link whilst googling the problem of older workers. I suppose it figures that one has to go as far as Australia to find some common sense about the growing problem. Note that this dates from August 2008, before the global recession had deepened. Above all note that here is a job pundit, Malcolm King, who isn't afraid to say what I've been waiting to hear:

Ageist attitudes to employment are not new but I suggest that as the boomer cohort ages, ageist attitudes are becoming more entrenched - and I don’t know why.

Do note the comments. First, most are far more intelligent than one can expect to find on a similar topic posted in the USA. Second, they outline both ends of the problem. Third, they indicate the growth of a global bias that bodes very ill.

If age bigotry is not contained, and soon, workers' careers will run from ages 25 to 40. Typical entry-level employees will be shut out of meaningful work until they acquire, somehow, "experience." At the other end, anyone who has amassed more than 15 years of experience will be shut out of meaningful work.

Workers will either have to figure out what they're going to live on between the date that their profession shuts them out and the date their retirement income begins, or that retirement income will need drastic change. Are age bigots actually prepared to (a wild estimate) double the compensation of skilled workers or professionals to enable them to amass a retirement fund in 15 years? Are they willing to increase government retirement contributions at the same time and accept the beginning of entitlements at 40? Are they OK with the idea that the few who are allowed to work at a skilled or professional level for 15 years will have to pay for the entitlements of the many who are not? Pay them for half of the lengthening human lifespan?

Or will these people finally realise their "19th century" attitudes (thanks for that, Malcolm) are altogether unsuited to the 21st century? Shutting down the working and purchasing potential of half the population is a recipe for permanent economic crisis. And why does it happen? Either because the people making these decisions cannot rid themselves of age perceptions that are more than a century old...or because they can't face their own fears of mortality. That fear makes the people in the middle of the working demographic fear equally those older, and those younger, than they. I believe fear motivates this two-front war they wage.

In a LinkedIn thread on this subject, I commented that legislation and torts won't entirely cure age bigotry. So far, all they have done is motivate concealment. The model for such business is the cultural shift away from smoking. When this behaviour becomes shameful, or at least uncool, it will fade away.

Whether that happens in time to help those of us between 40 and 65 is another matter.