STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
No Retirement: Misled Baby Boomers May Die at the Office
By Joe Jarvis - February 23, 2012

For boomers, it's a new era of 'work til you drop.' When Paula Symons joined the U.S. workforce in 1972, typewriters in her office clacked nonstop, people answered the telephones and the hot new technology revolutionizing communication was the fax machine. Symons, fresh out of college, entered this brave new world thinking she'd do pretty much what her parents' generation did: Work for just one or two companies over about 45 years before bidding farewell to co-workers at a retirement party and heading off into her sunset years with a pension. Forty years into that run, the 60-year-old communications specialist for a Wisconsin- based insurance company has worked more than a half-dozen jobs. She's been laid off, downsized and seen the pension disappear with only a few thousand dollars accrued when it was frozen. So, five years from the age when people once retired, she laughs when she describes her future plans. "I'll probably just work until I drop," she says, a sentiment expressed, with varying degrees of humor, by numerous members of her age group. – AP

Dominant Social Theme: Too bad for the baby boomers! They shoulda invested better.

Free-Market Analysis: There are 78 million boomers, and apparently they are not going to retire. Does anybody notice an irony in this?

The dominant social theme of retirement has been one of the most pervasive of all elite memes. Never has any group of people been subject to more propaganda in the history of humankind, in our view.

Maybe TRILLIONS of words about "investing" have been spoken and written in the past 50 years, most of them aimed at US workers. And now we find that perhaps it has all come to naught.

In Europe and the US, this generation of older citizens will not have the time nor leisure, for the most part, to tan (and rot) on the beach. They will not be able to drive around in large motorhomes or cultivate lousy art as they descend into a second childhood.

As you can see, dear reader, we are not big fans of retirement anyway. But this is what the Anglosphere power elite is best at, in our view − creating promotional belief structures that prove chimerical and are discarded as necessary.

Attacking families is a special, elite skill. They have introduced numerous concepts intended to break up the family unit. It used to be that a family was a homogenous whole. Grandparents, parents and kids lived together. But now we've got kids, "teenagers," adults and "retired" people, each group with its own agenda, supposedly.

At the end of the day, you "retire" to a hostel or hospital to die. Few seem to die at home anymore, certainly not in the US. The idea of breaking up the family unit into disparate parts is that it foments further social disorder and alienation. As families fracture, the state benefits.

Why is this to the power elite's liking? Because the powers-that-be operate via mercantilism. The stronger the state, the more power they accumulate behind the scenes.

The Anglosphere intends to run the globe via a New World Order. But to consolidate their gains, nationally, and to buy time to create an international sociopolitical and economic facility, they needed the "buy-in" of millions of citizens. This was especially true in America.

It is the US that is yet, culturally anyway, a bastion of small-R republicanism. Libertarianism, freedom and free markets are culturally significant in the US. It is part of the "pioneering" heritage.

The elites run economies for themselves and their own benefit. They have set up central banks producing fiat money that generates endless booms and busts. This monopoly fiat system is intended to consolidate and centralize the economic vitality of the societies to which it is applied.

In order to get people to go along with their own destruction, the elites had to create a system in which the average person was invested. In the US, especially, they did so through the creation of the "investing" meme and by inventing the inflatable fiat dollar, which virtually demanded that people had to do something with the eroding value of their "money."

Even today, amidst the wreckage of their portfolios, middle-class Americans still view the breakdown of the elite's banking system with fear and are even confusedly elated when the US Federal Reserve prints trillions to salvage the elite's corrupt and devious monetary system.

Too many remain trapped in the system as it is, and the "investing" meme is responsible, even though it is increasingly a threadbare and tattered one. The powers-that-be are beginning to cast it aside. It has served its purpose.

What's the new dominant social theme? Work 'til you drop? Those in their Golden Years will indeed continue working, but not in the bosom of their families. They will end up at Walmart, McDonalds and Burger King as cashiers and order takers. Here's some more from the article:

Symons and her husband had the misfortune of approaching retirement age at a time when stock market crashes diminished their 401(k) nest eggs, companies began eliminating defined benefit pensions in record numbers and previously unimagined technical advances all but eliminated entire job descriptions from travel agent to telephone operator.

At the same time, companies began moving other jobs overseas, to be filled by people willing to work for far less and still able to connect to the U.S. market in real time. "The paradigm has truly shifted. Now when you're looking for a job you're competing in a world where the competition isn't just the guy down the street, but the guy sitting in a cafe in Hong Kong or Mumbai," says Bill Vick, a Dallas-based executive recruiter who started BoomersNextStep.com in an effort to help Baby Boomers who want to stay in the workforce.

Not only has the paradigm shifted, but as it has the generation whose mantra used to be, "Don't trust anyone over 30," finds itself now being looked on with distrust by younger Generation X managers who question whether boomers have the high-tech skills or even the stamina to do what needs to be done.

"I always have the feeling that I have to prove my value all the time. That I'm not some old relic who doesn't understand social media or can't learn some new technique," says Symons, who is active on Twitter and Facebook, loves every new time-saving software app that comes down the pike, and laughs at the idea of ever sending another fax. "Ahh, that's just so archaic," she says.

Do you notice that Symons and her husband had the "misfortune" of approaching retirement when the stock market crashed? How would Symons feel if we could prove that this was no misfortune at all, but elite social/economic engineering?

We're bracing for a deluge of promotional propaganda on the benefits of working for fast-food joints at the age of 80. The whole investing meme seems to be something of a fraud, after all. But it's too late for many millions of Baby Boomers.

So many TV programs. So many gurus. Several dedicated channels educating the credulous public about "investing" 24/7. Stock options. Futures. Modern portoflio theory. An ever-expanding regulatory regime designed to make people's investments "safer." Mutual funds. Index funds. Passive investing. Active investing. Financial planning. Retirement planning. 401Ks …

We could go on and on (as those in the investing "industry" tend to do.) All that cogitating, worrying and general concern yielded little. Turns out a steady paycheck is the only real solution to solvency.

But that's hard to come by, too. The falsity of the system extends well past unfulfilled promises of an investment-funded retirement. Western central banking economies are built around central bank money printing, and they're horribly distorted and shedding jobs rather than creating them. Most jobs that remain support power-elite paradigms.

What does that mean? Well … if you're a teacher, you're working in dysfunctional public schools dedicated to dumbing down students. If you're a doctor, you're working in an increasing dysfunctional health care industry and peddling poisonous pharmaceutical cures as well. if you're a lawyer, you're supporting an increasingly unjust criminal justice system, or clogging the courts with frivolous civil lawsuits.

This is somewhat true throughout the West. The modern economy has been developed to support elite priorities but unfortunately, what the top Anglosphere elites seem to seek are dysfunctional and impoverished societies that won't oppose their globalist schemes. They're trying to create a dumb, poisoned, litigious middle class.

It's both infuriating and diabolical. Western middle classes have been coerced into partcipating in their own demise. This is hard for people to accept. But perhaps as Western economies continue to sour and globalist intentions become clearer, there will be an awakening of sorts.

After Thoughts

One can hope! People need to educate themselves about the ways they are manipulated. That's the only real defense. Fortunately, there's the Internet … and the Internet Reformation.

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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