He is an unlikely Jeremiah, a funds manager in a pinstripe suit with a résumé that includes a stint as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank in Richmond, Va. Yet Thomas Mackell Jr. is warning of a future in which the homeless elderly live under bridges and the old and the young engage in “intergenerational warfare” over disappearing jobs.

Mackell, a graduate of Seton Hall and Rutgers, spoke last week to a convention of Bell System retirees in Atlantic City. He got up to speak at the same time the lawyer for the Christie administration, miles away in Trenton, rose to tell the state Supreme Court it should not bother itself with “minor” breaches of constitutional law involving schools.

There is a connection between the two events. Peter Verniero, the former court member and state attorney general hired by the governor to defend cuts in school aid, represented a strain of political thought that the rich cannot be taxed further to help the poor. His governor regularly bashes public employee unions as “selfish” and “greedy” and wants to reduce pension benefits.

Mackell takes opposite views. Unions protect the middle class, he says, pensions are essential, and, if the rich do not pay a greater share of their wealth, then the “nation faces a horrendous future.”

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“If something doesn’t happen soon, this country will go the same way as every other empire,” said Mackell. Citing the growing income gap between rich and poor, the deterioration of infrastructure, and, most of all, the problems facing the 77 million aging members of the Baby Boom, the financial funds manager called America’s prospects “abysmal.”

“What he had to say was pretty frightening,” said Jack Brennan of Hillsdale, chairman of the Association of BellTel Retirees, a group with 112,000 members throughout the country.

“But his purpose wasn’t to scare us, but rather to energize us into taking action.”

The action — protecting pension benefits and health care for retirees. “We have to keep fighting for what we fought for years ago,” Brennan said.

What’s worrisome about Mackell is his ability to see the future. Years ago, he predicted unemployment would top 9 percent, states would take bargaining rights from public employee unions, and Congress would seriously consider cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits — all ideas that seemed over the top then.

Now Mackell, son of a former Queens district attorney, travels the country warning of the consequences of the shift in pensions from defined benefits — in which retirees are guaranteed a set amount based on the number of years they worked — to defined contributions — in which retirees contribute to and manage their own pension funds, mostly through 401(k) plans.

“It’s a recipe for disaster,” he said in an interview, noting the average 401(k) account amounts to some $50,000. In the past 30 years, Mackell said, the percentage of workers in defined benefit plans dropped from more than 80 percent to less than 30 percent.

“Fewer than half of the Baby Boomers have plans for their retirement and a third saved nothing at all,” he says, adding that 401(k)s were intended to supplement, not replace, pensions.

Many will be unable to retire, says Mackell, who heads an association of benefit administrators and is author of “When the Good Pensions Go Away” published by Wiley. He predicts growing hostility between young and old workers.

“Good jobs won’t be there for the younger workers because older workers will hold on to them,” Mackell said. Unless, of course, seniority rights are taken away as a cost-saving tool.

He says defined pension benefits were eliminated to help corporations improve profit margins and increase shareholder income.

“The risk has been transferred to workers who have no clue how to manage stock portfolios,” he says. “Even people on Wall Street don’t do well predicting how stocks will react, but you’re asking people who don’t know the difference between a stock and a bond to make decisions that could make the difference between a future of comfort and a future of poverty.”

In his speeches, he encourages workers and retirees to lobby Congress to require a restoration of defined benefit pensions. Mackell has a website, AmericansforBenefits. org, that posts a petition asking for the elimination of pension and health-care benefits for members of Congress until workers are guaranteed good pensions.

“If 5 million people sign it,” he says, “it will get their attention.”