One the most immoral and pernicious forms of employment discrimination is discrimination against people over fifty years of age. That discrimination hits hardest those persons who are not yet eligible for Social Security. They fall into the age bracket known as, "Those who are too old to work for Corporate and too young to collect Social Security." Of course the age bracket itself includes people in the highest ranks of the power elite; for instance, President Bush, Jr., Governor Bush, and many others who happen to control by inheritance, chance and merit over half the wealth of the richest nation on earth.

John Helyar pointed out in a recent FORTUNE article ('50 And Fired' May 16, 2005) that middle managers and executives over 50 who lose their jobs now look forward to a much longer job search than they did fifteen years ago, and they are likely to wind up with much less pay than their old jobs. Even worse, they may never land another job. Mr. Helyar suggests that they look out for telltale signs of age discrimination at work and start looking for another job even before they get fired for being too old and expensive to keep around the corporation. He does not mention the fools over fifty, who did not know at the time what he now knows, and who quit their jobs thinking they could pick up a better job right away or change careers. Once out of a job, fired executives might try temping for a high-end staffing firm, or go into their own business; for example, Tom McGoldrick bought Paws In Heaven, a pet crematorium business, and sank $1 million into it. 

Mr. Helyar provides no advice at all for fired middle managers who have gone through their savings and have no money for basics such as rent and food. His prime example is one Bob Miller, who has 20 years of stellar performances and an impeccable résumé yet has been out of work for two years. Alas, we read that discarded executives of his age group may never find that new position.  However, "Money isn't the problem" for Mr. Miller: self-esteem is his issue. Incidentally, half of the 550 members of the New York chapter of his professional organization - Marketing Executives Networking Group - are unemployed, so it appears that a lack of sales skills is not the problem with that small aging population. We also read that 42% of the 983 members of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers are currently unemployed; and this while  businessmen and educators are calling for higher immigration quotas not only to "rejuvenate" our aging population but also to fill the scientific and technological jobs American citizens allegedly are not qualified for.

Yes, it's your age, stupid! Oh, the luck of the economy drawn is partly to blame for your fortune and misfortune: you were riding high during a "perfect economic storm." Now you're down and out. FORTUNE writers are worried about you, unless you have run out of money and are dirt poor; why bother talking about those who don't stand a chance because they are too old and too poor? Now there is an egregious case of economic and age discrimination in journalism! But never mind that. The economic waves shall favor the mature worker again; today's 35-year-olds will face a new situation around 2012: a shortage of busters to replace boomers. If only the morons (morae: fools) in charge paid attention to the demographic effusions of demographers such as Ken Dychtwald, they would hang on to older workers. "The managers trying to move everybody in their 50s out the door are taking their companies off a demographic cliff," Dychtwald indited. But few listen, hence educators and editors prattle on and on about immigration as the solution to our moribund and stupefied U.S. culture. Well, all right: to allow labor move around as freely as other goods in the "free" market might be good for corporate business.

No, ma'am, we do not find advice for impoverished persons in their fifties in FORTUNE. After all, FORTUNE in the main is for those readers who had the wherewithal or foresight to sock away a million or so and invest it in a pet crematorium. A million ain't worth so much now, especially to the upper echelon of executives whose average compensation is $ 8,000,000 per annum after getting rid of their older, more expensive underlings; but $ 1,000,000 certainly is a tidy sum that most poor working stiffs over fifty could live well enough on until they are qualified to collect Social Security. Indeed, at 6 percent compound interest it would fund a twenty-year annuity of around $80,000 per annum.

Quite naturally there are a multitude of others between 50 and 65 who are not so well off. They might not have been as ambitious for property and power as the man over fifty who got fired and sunk $1 million into a business or an annuity, yet they held down jobs and are still willing and able to work; most importantly, many of them must work for their subsistence.  Believe it or not, many mature workers are not retarded: they might not do the heavy lifting, but they have the wisdom of experience, of knowing where the pitfalls are and how to get around or over them. History is a mistake for no success is perfect. Yet the corporate world, preferring as one Help Wanted advertiser recently advertised in the Miami Herald, "someone around thirty", would be rid of them no matter how many years of good service they contributed to Corporate. Never mind that they may have the "excellent communication skills" so much in demand, for they went to school in the good old days; Corporate talks up "innovation" and "excellent communication skills" provided the innovators and communicators do what they are told - in fact, there is little demand for independent thinking, particularly liberal thinking along long lines.

Get rid of the old hands. Get some cheap young virgins in here and break them in. Mr. Helyar might favor the wealthy but he certainly writes a dynamite article - thanks for the explosive material! He identifies Jack Welch as the "icon" at General Electric, the "paragon" of the movement to rid Corporate of middle-aged "blockers" who were blocking the way for the rise of the "high pots" (high-potential youth). Corporate was quick to emulate Jack Welch's "vitality curve" and rid itself of those on the "dead man's curve." That figures to those of us who followed his career.

Mr. Welch may have been an icon to some, but many whose lives he ruined despise him. It was not just the fact that he fired people who had helped build up the company that employed him: it was the way he terminated people that offended so many. He was known as "Neutron Jack" because entire buildings were summarily depopulated without notice - the lights were on, the printers were cranking, the phones were ringing, but nary a worker could be found on duty, as if a neutron bomb had hit the place. Neutron Jack was also known for his willingness to downsize his own family. America's greatest business icon retired with a quarter billion dollars at least and with a $ 10,000,000 per annum pension. General Electric learned its lessons well; for instance, the company cut health care costs, which were small in comparison to revenues, in order to add  $30,000,000 to the bottom line.

Experts of all persuasions from all ranks below that of the $8,000,000 per annum executive class pretty much agree that executive compensation is obscene. And almost everyone who delves into the subject very deeply will discover that many of the icons worshipped are not really great men, not in the heroic sense of old, but are great in their conformity and mediocrity - they are exemplary little efficiency men, who have come to believe their success is due to their supposedly sublime genius for scientific management.

Once upon a time, Tabor Manufacturing Company, with 90 employees in Philadelphia, became a model for Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management principles and practices. President Wilfred Lewis of Tabor said the work of planners and managers themselves could not be subjected to time-and-motion studies because their work was "creative and full of harmonies" and depended "upon inspiration", hence "there is no superior intelligence to direct its progress." At about the same time, George Perkins of International Harvester, made a most absurd statement to Harvard students, that managers "can look upon all labor questions without bias, without any personal axe to grind, solely from the broadest possible standpoint of what is fair and right between public's capital, which they represent, and the public's labor, which they employ." Well, the public at large does not own the means of production - still, those means would be worthless if the products were boycotted, an act recently called "treason" by a neoconservative television show host. Welfare enthusiast William Tolman summed up the attitude of employers at the outset of the scientific-industrial revolution when he said the employer saw himself as "something more than a producer: an instrument of God for the upbuilding of the race." By virtue of our neo-gilded age of unmitigated greed, the instrument of God has become an icon. When he gets into his fifties, he had better watch out - he will probably need $500,000,000 for a suitable retirement. It is high time for iconoclasm in this great nation of hours.  

Any white-collared simpleton who has been around the office long enough knows very well that there is a lot of fat around that could be summarily  trimmed. But many workers, in order to have their basic needs fulfilled, are forced to be involved in the production of the enormous quantities of garbage, trash and junk that other people want. The number of hours could be drastically reduced, or many people could be sent a guaranteed subsistence income providing they did something productive that they wanted to do, and business would still manage to profit. The only reason the bureaucracies grow obese is because the archaic work ethic assumes a priori that everyone has to be busy at work for forty hours per week, and even more if one is a "good" employee and “hard worker.” The bureaucracies are therefore rank with resentment.  When the axe falls, many are those even within the butchered ranks who enjoy the bloodshed, providing  they are personally spared. And a few corporate icons relish wielding the axe in the name of the god Efficiency.

The older, more expensive workers, who have built the scaffolds of business, are the first to go. Age discrimination is against a law that is seldom  enforced and is nullified by neoconservative judges when the few cases are brought to court.  Of tens of thousands of complaints filed with the EEOC, 1% were litigated, and of those 15% were settled out of court. The Age Discrimination Act of 1967 prohibits age discrimination against those over 40 years of age.

The federal courts have required a "conscious bias" to make a charge stick. Sigmund Freud is considered old hat today; his Primal Horde theory has been deemed unscientific;  it is obvious from the young age of the anarchists and delinquents who take to the streets to run rampage that they "have a problem with authority", that they are unconsciously or subconsciously predisposed to resent authority. Do we not all have a bit of rebellion in us? It certainly is not a matter of "conscious bias" for the most of us; in fact, that is the very thing that Freud strived for: to make the unconscious conscious so we can deal with it appropriately, in a civilized and humane  manner.  Many people  discriminate against and otherwise abuse the old, the sick, and the poor; they would keep them and the dead out of sight, not because they consciously hate the particular persons but because they unconsciously fear death and the poverty and sickness and aging that leads to it. 

Recently a court held that business must prove a "business necessity" to get away with age discrimination. Of course that is why immoral conduct is engaged in: anything goes for the love of money, the ultimate token of secular power. Integrity in post-modern times as in primitive times means the worship of the objective forms of power. The worship of Mammon is nothing new. Personal icons like Jack Welch or any other celebrity will suffice when might is right. The rise of the money economy bought the fall of the traditional moralities. Business wants younger and cheaper employees; no problem, axe the older ones. As long as age discrimination is for money, then it has nothing to do with the legal definition of discrimination mouthed by California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown, a Bush nominee to the Federal bench. Unlike other forms of discrimination, she said, age discrimination does not subject the victim to the stigma of second-class citizenship or inferiority: it is simply "the unavoidable consequence of that universal leveler: time." Thus here we have yet another member of America's Sublime Porte who either ignores or is blissfully ignorant of the fact that age discrimination impoverishes people who do not have a million or more socked away, that status is all about money in America, where the poverty among the older population is three times what it is among the young. Being poor in America, where the status symbol of status seeking is singular (money) instead of plural, is in fact a stigma. The absence of the stigma of poverty is a biological necessity because a person cannot live without society; the individual must belong to our complex society or perish prematurely.

Wherefore age discrimination runs amok as a matter of course and with virtual impunity in this youth-worshipping age of irresponsible, gilded-individualism, so much so that movie producers made a popular joke of the man over fifty (played by Steve Martin) in Bowfinger - he had to become a conniving con man to survive. Of course Hollywood, a veritable font of youth cult imagery, provided the happy ending desired by Corporate: the washed-up producer and his cast of rejected actors lived happily ever after.

The truth of age discrimination is quite another matter. It does not result in the release of a successful series of wacky films. Unemployed people over 50 see the anti-social threat that renders them eager to take low-paying jobs as burger flippers, Wal-Mart greeters, and the like all around them: they are aimlessly wandering the streets, consigned by Corporate to mental and physical disease and premature death. For example: the former middle manager, age 59, standing in line the other day at Walgreen’s at Lincoln Road and Collins Avenue on South Miami Beach. The store has the highest revenue per square foot retail in the country - or so said its manager. The poor man was dressed in rags, had sores all over his body, and half his nose was rotted off. He was a sorry sight, but the smell was not as bad as a younger man, a clean-cut corporate type sporting a Rolex watch, thought: "Where is the manager!" he yelled. "Get this stinking man away from me! For God's sake! I can't shop here with this stink!" 

The sick man (the impoverished sick man, not the sick corporate man) is in the gap of those who are too old to work for Corporate and too young for Social Security. Now we have all seen the statistics on "homelessness" and poverty broken out into age categories, but we have not seen statistics on the proportion of homelessness and poverty for the age bracket, 50-65. Undoubtedly that category has been growing disproportionately over the last fifteen years. At least we see a growing number of homeless people in our neighborhoods within that age bracket. 

Whether we are conscious of it or not, age discrimination is a fact of life in this great nation of ours. Almost every week we see advice from workplace columnists in the major daily papers on how to deal with age discrimination. Corporate media recommend neither violent nor nonviolent revolution. No, we are advised to be obedient, to go along with the discrimination and try to worm our way around it in order to become part of the woodwork somehow. For instance, a columnist with the Kansas City Star advises us not to wear beards because the gray tends to show up in beards - Just For Men will not do unless one knows the secret of application: three applications, differently timed. The same columnist advises us not to lie about our age, or to try to conceal it by giving only the last two or three references on our résumés; for the employer will be livid at the concealment when the applicant shows up for the interview - one employer told me, "You sounded much younger on the telephone."

Anyone over 50 in our country who has not "made it" by "getting one up" on others is, at least according to the neophytes of the cult of gilded-individualism, "all washed up." People who are relatively comfortable congratulate themselves and fall back on the doctrine of free will and self-help; they claim that impoverished people want to be poor; that houseless people do not want a house to live in; that mentally ill people want to be mentally ill; and so on. Or that they simply have their just deserts according to the competitive law of the concrete jungle - but if this really were a concrete jungle, they would take the law into their own hands along with the guns and explosives to back it up.

No doubt true freedom includes the freedom to refuse work and live in the streets like stray dogs and cats, or as a beach bum or sidewalk prophet, but most people would choose to live a productive life, which Clinton's surgeon general identified with sanity. The idea that "homeless people want to be homeless" is a self-serving misconception entertained by comfortable people ignorant of the nature of the anti-social tsunami now sweeping over this once great nation of ours. It is all too easy to send aid at a great distance to the one million persons rendered homeless by the Great Asian Tsunami, while denying one's immediate responsibility for the conditions that render one's own society sick.

The awful sight of people over 50 living with rats in door ways is a warning to all Americans who have a high opinion of themselves - I saw a rat as big as a small cat in the doorway with one sleeping homeless woman. Let all those over fifty who are employed hang on to their jobs for dear life, and may those who are unemployed frantically seek gainful employment before it is too late.

Perchance the most fortunate persons over fifty shall find someone with the power to get them hired on the spot somewhere instead of passing the buck on down the line to the head of a labor bureau, who will in turn pass it along to the director of a training program or workforce program, who will gladly hand him or her a brochure and talk about the training benefits available. Indeed, it seems that no public official today has the power to provide a job to someone who cannot find one in the private sector. Indeed, it is somehow deemed un-American for government to directly provide jobs to those who immediately need them - as if Franklin Delano Roosevelt were un-American - while handing out positions to officials who are incompetent for one reason or another to effectively and efficient perform their duties.  

Both presidential candidates in the year of my birth called for guaranteed jobs. The war had taught Americans that full employment was entirely possible. 15 million troops were deployed for the war, a number exceeding the total number unemployed during the Great Depression. Another 6 million were employed domestically in the defense industry. Wages were high. Although taxes were at record highs, productivity and after-tax income was way up. Wherefore the original 1945 Full Employment Act, if it had not been watered down by special interests, would have guaranteed all persons able and willing to work the right to useful, remunerative, regular, full-time employment. But today, since the anti-social destruction of the liberal social consensus, such a program is anathema to both major parties. Well, then, what are we to do for our living when involuntarily unemployed by the defective business system? Arm ourselves, and turn to the 'natural right' mentioned by the father of the English Enlightenment, Thomas Hobbes?

For example, when the right to work or to revolt if no other means of support can be found was recommended to President Bush, he passed the buck to Acting Regional Administrator of Region 6 Employment and Training Administration, who passed it to an assistant, Edward Leslie, who, on November 25, 2003, referred the correspondent to local training programs in another state, with the caveat: “(F)ederal employment and training related programs supported by President Bush… cannot… solve the… problem of… unemployment.”  

Some of the most powerful over-privileged persons want to exacerbate the effects of age discrimination in this country. Believe it or not, they would broaden the range of those who are too old to work for Corporate and too young for Social Security, by increasing the age of qualification.  Given the age discrimination at hand, the qualification age should be reduced to age 50, not increased.

The most vicious of the "reformers", all of whom are relatively well off and most of whom are 50 or more, would do away with Social Security altogether. They claim that Social Security insurance is a "hoax"; that the word of the United States in the form of special promises to pay is no good; that the word of Corporate is as good as gold; that we must "permit" "free" people in our "ownership society” to "voluntarily" invest involuntary withholdings in Corporate, or at least to somehow convert our term insurance into whole life insurance. The plan to dismantle Social Security has been a conservative dream ever since the Act passed. Alf Landon called it a hoax in 1936. Goldwater said, "social security should be abolished." At the very least, Goldwater wanted to make it voluntary, allowing the rich to opt out of the fund, thus depleting the fund for the poor and unfortunate and contradicting the very concept of insurance.

"New" conservative thinkers in Germany and the United States held that nothing could get done in a democracy without deception and lies. One way to get things done was to create a constant state of crisis; discourage discussion as "unpatriotic"; put forward favored private agendas for the solution of the pretextual public crises. Since the abolition of social security was opposed by "ignorant" democrats, in 1983 the Cato Institute, as you probably know, published its second manifesto on the subject of social security, outlining the tactic to deceive the public into dismantling Social Security: undermine confidence in the system; build a corporate coalition of those who would profit from management of private accounts; assure those who are nearing retirement that they would get their benefits; pass legislation making tax-deferred savings accounts familiar.  

Undermining confidence in the system includes calling it a hoax and persuading the younger generation that there is nothing in it for them except the burdensome responsibility of supporting the old folks who built up this great nation of ours for them. Thus would the regressive faction repudiate the social welfare clause of the Constitution, and connive to ruin the Social Security system that responded successfully to the gilded-individualism age, the rise of the cult of youth, the glorification of celebrity, and the worship of the money power regardless of the moral worth of the respective potentates.

Now even many formerly enthusiastic members of the youth cult and gilded American Way are in the unemployed category of those who are too old to work for Corporate and too young to collect Social Security. What are they to do when they run out of money? Foment a social revolution that will return America to the radical roots of the liberal social consensus in order to recover the progressive movement and advance from there? That would be a true "rejuvenation". But how far would they get without scientific and technical professionals? They will need competent professionals for the revamped bureaucracy.  Now that so many involuntarily unemployed millionaires have had some light shed on the nature of the organizations they once served, perhaps they will help finance, engineer  and market the revolution. GIven good examples and the excitement of progress, the twenty- and thirty-somethings will be glad to sign up when the time comes. The "public" that employers and politicians claim to represent is getting a raw deal under the present form of political and economic governance. A better deal is called for. A fair deal would be a better deal. Full employment for all those willing and able to work would be part of that fair deal.