February 15, 2011 - Over the Edge Propoganda Campaign Against the Baby Boomers Raising the Retirement Age and Trimming the CPP PAUL STRICKLAND CONTRIBUTOR major propaganda campaign against Baby Boomers, or the post-war genera- ion, and the elderly has been in progress for more than 15 years. It is intensifying now as Stephen Harper and his Conservative govern- ment want to raise the retirement age to 67 from 65, trim on the Canada Pension Plan and pull the rug out from under vulnerable seniors. Since the early 1980s American newsmaga- zines like Time and Newsweek, followed even- tually by Maclean’s in Canada, have been run- ning articles every couple of years portraying the post-war (or Baby Boomer) generation as spoiled, rich, lazy and over-privileged. One is reminded a little of Stalin’s propaganda cam- paign in the late 1920s and early 1930s against the Kulaks, who were painted as undeserving wealthy farmers who achieved their success at the expense of ordinary Russians. The main- stream media in the United States and Canada have created the impression that all Baby Boom- ers dropped out as hippies for five or six years; then resumed their education to study law or commerce at Harvard, Yale, the University of Toronto or the University of London; got their first jobs out of university making $100,000 or more on Wall Street, Bay Street and Howe Street; and bought McMansions in the Napa Valley of California, in the Rosedale area of To- ronto, in North Vancouver and West Vancouver and in the Hart Highlands in Prince George in order to raise 2.3 children. Then--in the view of these newsmagazines, centre-right corporate newspapers and right-wing think tanks--these Baby Boomers took out second mortgages on their homes to finance lavish lifestyles like eat- ing out at three-star restaurants every other night and taking three-week vacations in Tahiti every winter. They engaged in investing in real estate and flipping properties in the early 2000s and made piles of cash through these manoeuvres. Now, the establishment media commentators say, these Baby Boomers, having lost a substan- tial portion of their investments in the 2008 fi- nancial panic, are entering their early retirement years with substantial amounts still owing on their mortgages and are greedily holding onto their jobs in order to block younger generations from advancing in their careers, while at the same time these very same Baby Boomers are retiring at 55 (“Freedom Fifty-Five”) in order to shirk their responsibility to society to work and contribute, and, in so doing, impose crush- ing pension and medicare costs on shrinking number of workers among younger generations. These thoughtless Baby Boomers drive huge motor homes across North America all summer, golfing at every city or national park where they stop, and they take fabulous cruises all winter long. The reality is different. There are well-to-do people lacking in a social conscience in every generation. There may be more among members of the post-war or Baby Boomer generation be- cause of the era of prosperity for many groups from the late 1950s through the early 1970s, but the wealthy people the newsmagazines say are representative of the generation are still only a small minority. In the U.S., 55,000 soldiers, also Baby Boomers, died in Vietnam and a large percentage of veterans were scarred for life. Others died in mine explosions. In B.C., across Canada and in the U.S., there are plenty of hard- ware store and bakery clerks, greeters at big-box stores, bus drivers, postal clerks, custodians, se- curity guards, caregivers, and librarians in late middle age who never invested in real estate in order to flip properties and get rich and who never took luxury cruises to Tahiti. The recessions of 1974-75, 1979-80 and 1982- 83 in both Canada and the U.S. hampered the job searches of many who had been told a university degree would be a ticket to a good job and then, as they continued their job searches, saw 200 or 300 resumes on every hiring officer’s desk and were told they were “over-qualified.” Others started out at small non-union daily newspapers in the early 1980s making about $14,000 while working 70- to 80-hour weeks with little or no pay for the overtime. Some baby-boomers in Canada and in the States saw their small family farms go bankrupt as a result of loan rates for seed, fertilizer and equipment of over 20 per cent. Inflation had reached 14 per cent by the late 1970s. From about 1976 on, mortgage rates started getting out of hand until by 1981, they had reached more than 21 per cent. Houses in Medicine Hat then ranged from $69,900 to $99,900. These prices sound cheap compare to today, but compounding interest made homes unaffordable for those who weren’t wealthy enough to pay cash. Families in the mid-1960s could buy a decent suburban home for about $12,500 when a respectable annual middle-class salary was around $8,000. It was a rude surprise, then, to see average home prices rise from about $20,000 in the early 1970s to almost $100,000 by the start of the 1980s. My objective is not a message of “I had it tough and got through it, and so you can, too!” People who speak that way to members of younger generations are among the most contemptible of souls. My purpose is to dispel myths of a dreamlike life of uninterrupted peace and uncomplicated prosperity during the late 1960s and during the 1970s and early 1980s, the period during which current newsmagazines, the corporatist press and rightist think tanks say Baby Boomers were living lives of ease, safety and wealth and walked into fabulous highly- paid jobs on graduation. An advantage for Baby Boomers was lower university tuition in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I paid $228.50 per semester as in-state tuition for a full load of courses at the University of Nevada-Reno during the 1968-69 academic year. At this time Uncle Sam held the threat of the draft over male students. Constant protests were distracting and upsetting, although I admit I was partly to blame for not reading as much of serious literature as I should have because I was not good at time management while studying. I worked 12 to 15 hours a week at the univer- sity library for, at first, $1.25 per hour, and, at the end of my job there in June 1970, $1.35 per hour. Because of the earnings from this job, my success in getting at least a small scholarship every year, and the fact my parents let me live at home during my undergraduate years, I was able to graduate with my B.A. debt-free. When I started my M.A. program in English at UBC in September 1971, tuition there was $450 per year and $75 for out-of-province medical insurance. I pursued the same strategy of getting small schol- arships of $250 to $500 every year and work- ing summers to help pay costs. My parents paid perhaps half of the approximately $2,100 total cost of living and studying in Vancouver at that time. I had a housekeeping suite in an old house that was $75 per month at first and then, towards the end of my graduate program in 1974, rose to $85 per month. During my second year I had a graduate assistantship that paid $1,250 per year; during the summer of 1973 I won a $1,000 Summer Research Scholarship that made it un- necessary to look for a summer job that year; in the fall of 1973 I had a markership that paid very little; for the winter term of 1974 I had a full teaching assistantship, but, since it was for only one semester, it paid little more than the graduate assistantship I held during the 1972- 1973 academic year. I graduated with my M.A. debt-free. I know most students today graduate with a heavy debt burden that will take years if not decades to pay off, all the while they will try to pay down a mortgage, raise a family and hope to put their children through university. Many will be financially crushed. I know their situa- tion is dire. Another advantage for many Baby Boomers was cheap European travel in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which helped those whose study plans and graduate research called for attending foreign universities. Airline fares were regulated and relatively high if compared in inflation-ad- justed dollars, but on arriving in Europe it really was possible to travel for $5 per day. I didn’t go to Europe, in order to attend the University of Madrid, until the fall of 1976, when I was 26. By then, in the wake of U.S. President Richard Nix- on’s August 1971 decision to sever all connec- tions between the U.S. dollar and gold, and as a result of the Parti Quebecois’s victory in Quebec while I was in Spain, the U.S. and Canadian cur- rencies had declined to the point that it was no longer affordable for students without scholar- ships or relatives in the country of destination to travel in Northern Europe, Switzerland or France. The only remaining choices for cheap travel within non-Communist Europe were Por- tugal, Spain, Italy and Greece. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were also fewer political difficulties for student travellers going through the Middle East, Iran and Afghanistan. A few friends of mine backpacked through these coun- tries, but I didn’t even think of doing anything like that. The advantages of cheaper tuition in the late 1960s and early 1970s were more than taken back by society in the early 1980s with, in the context of the time, skyrocketing housing costs and almost usurious mortgage rates for anyone who wanted to buy a home and raise a family, or hoped to ever do so. Critics of Baby Boomers point out they had only two or three children at most, and some remained childless -- with the result that there are fewer young people avail- able to enter the work force to replace them on retirement and support pension plans and medi- care. This is interpreted as an unanswerable indictment of the Baby Boomers’ selfishness. However, if society wanted people in their twen- ties and thirties in the 1970s and 1980s to marry early and raise larger families, why did they pursue policies that put a home out of reach for so many of that generation? Why wasn’t there a rational housing policy that allowed them to get into a home earlier in their lives? Instead, central bank policy was to raise the bank rate to extremely high levels while other govern- ment policies favouring the real-estate industry caused housing costs to rise beyond the reach of many young people at the time. The policy of usurious interest rates also caused the recession of 1982-83, then the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, creat- ing considerable job insecurity for most Baby Boomers who were then still in their early 30s, a prime period of family formation. The mainstream media’s portrayal of the lives of Baby Boomers as ones of unparalleled, un- interrupted prosperity also leaves out of account that, after the mid-1980s, the growing threat of downsizing was breathing down the necks of practically every corporate and government em- ployee. Many official corporate announcements that an employee or a group of employees “re- tired” masked what were actually downsizings and layoffs. An announcement that a person “re- tired” at 58 or 59 usually means that he or she was downsized. Their pension is much reduced because of having to leave before they reached the more standard retirement age of 65 or, for early retirement, 62. Yet the myth persists that these people are lazy Baby Boomers who are so wealthy they could afford to retire in their 50s, golf, take fabulous vacations, etc. The increasing government and mainstream media attacks on the elderly, “lazy, wealthy Baby Boomers”, artists, and “aimless youth”, calling any programs that help them “unsustain- able”, are part of a strategy to divide people through fanning resentments between genera- tions and among other groups of people. These resentments can then be used to cut services and programs for them, and, eventually, for every- one as governments reduce corporation taxes for multi-national corporations exploiting our resources and as both corporations and govern- ments seek to shirk their responsibilities, end- ing Canada’s social-democratic experiment that began so hopefully in the years after the Second World War.