There’s elder abuse and there’s elder abuse. Explicit and implicit. And we’ve got multitudes more of both, thanks to the economic crash.
Jenefer Duane, the founder of the Elder Financial Protection Network, defines a type of abuse that is on the rise: financial abuse. Older people are often ripped off by those on whom they are dependent – from relatives to care workers, from advisors to scam artists. Duane’s group puts the number of abused at 5 million. Of those, we are told by The Institute of Aging in San Francisco, about “50% of cases of elder abuse involve financial exploitation.” So it’s not enough that your skin is looking like MapQuest and your eyesight is so faded that you can’t pluck your own chin hairs. Nope, now the Congress has spent the last eight years saying “Fine, do as you like,” to your abuser. He’s gone to a nice new mansion in Texas and you’re eating dogfood.
And it only gets worse. The Boston Globe recently reported on the astronomical rise in abuse of older people. “Confirmed cases of financial, physical, emotional, or sexual mistreatment of elders more than doubled in each of the first four months of this fiscal year [my emphasis], compared with monthly averages the previous year, according to a Globe analysis of state figures.” Organizations working in the field have received more reports of elder abandonment and abuse than in decades of record-keeping.
The financial vulnerability of older people is profound. As one New York Times article put it, “There’s a terrified older population out there,” said Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. “If you’re 45 and the market goes down, it bothers you, but it comes back. But if you’re retired or about to retire, you might have to sell your assets before they have a chance to recover. And people don’t have the luxury of being in bonds because they don’t yield enough for how long we live.”
Even homeowners lucky enough to have paid up their mortgages are finding it impossible to pay property taxes which may have doubled or tripled in the last decade. And as for pulling themselves up by their comfort-shoe-straps, older people can forget getting back into the workforce. Not only are there no jobs, they’ll face huge discrimination against over-50s in hiring.
There’s a lot to turn your hair grey here – if it isn’t already white, not the least these figures around personal ruin: “From 1991 to 2007, the rate of personal bankruptcy filings among those ages 65 or older jumped by 150%...The most startling rise occurred among those ages 75 to 84, whose rate soared 433%.”
Here’s the thing: note those dates and then just imagine what has happened after 2007, since capitalism ate itself alive and began spitting us out. Many boomers and seniors have spent our lives fighting for social and economic justice. And this is the hand our free market democracy has dealt us.
I guess each of us has to focus our annoyance on something that is small enough to cope with. I choose Bernie Madoff, who is still living under “house arrest” in one of his gazillion-dollar domiciles. The rest of his generation and that of his parents can’t pay their rent, their mortgage or their taxes. I am reminded of one of our favorite phrases from the 60s: Eat the rich!
Ummmmm, I'd rather not eat the rich, they probably taste really nasty...LOL
However, I don't think it's right to blame the entire free market for the greed and dishonesty of the few who created this mess. And lets not forget the politicians who allowed it.
I don't know what the answer is, I just know that we the people need to pull our heads out of the sand (or our asses) and start taking back our constitutional republic.
Posted by: LyndaF | 19 February 2009 at 12:42