Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire

Those Ever-Shrinking 401Ks and the Theft of Retirement Security
21 Dec 2011
🖨️ Print Article

For most of the 20th century, until the 1980s, each generation of retirees had a somewhat higher standard of living than the last.  With the Reagan era advent of federal policies encouraging private employers to raid and discontinue defined benefit pensions, that trend stopped.  The current generation of retirees are discovering that their 401Ks are almost never sufficient to allow a dignified retirement.  They've been robbed.  401Ks are subject to the stock market, which favors insiders, and financial managers and the retirement-industrial complex extract as much as a quarter of all 401K savings in parasitic fees.  In this Against the Grain interview James Russell explains why Wall Street loves privatized and individual retirement accounts, and hates defined beneift pensions and social security,



Your browser does not support the audio element.

listen
http://www.againstthegrain.org/files/files/atg/atg_2014.11.12_401ks.mp3

More Stories


  • Bruce Dixon
    Another Black Face on MSNBC: Good News For Joy Ann Reid, Not So Much For The Rest of Us
    26 Feb 2025
    If Fox News is the Republican ministry of TV propaganda, MSNBC is the mouthpiece of the White House and corporate Democrats. The last real journalist in an MSNBC host spot was Phil Donahue, fired for…
  • Ryan S.
    Elon Musk and DOGE Slash Funding for Major Black Kansas City Neighborhood Councils
    26 Feb 2025
    Elon Musk & DOGE are targeting one of Kansas City’s most prominent Black-led neighborhood councils—slashing a federal grant and threatening a vital food sovereignty movement.
  • Chuck Squatriglia
    Feds Lend Tesla $465 Million to Build Model S
    26 Feb 2025
    Elon Musk is Donald Trump's right-hand man and viewed as an evil incarnate, but it was Barack Obama's administration which bailed out Tesla with a $465 million loan in 2009. Both wings of the duopoly…
  • Tamara Nassar
    Palestinians Forced to Flee US-Armed Israeli Military in West Bank
    26 Feb 2025
    Israel initiated a massive assault against the West Bank, displacing tens of thousands of people. As the terror and destruction go on, settlers continue to steal land as part of Israel's expansionist…
  • Kit Klarenberg
    USAID Exported CIA Balkan Terror to Haiti
    26 Feb 2025
    After the CIA orchestrated the 2004 coup in Haiti, the U.S. ushered in a genocidal paramilitary organization from the Balkans to violently remove all resistance to regime change efforts.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us