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


  • Jackson MS Organizations Petition EPA for Emergency Relief on Water System
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Jackson MS Organizations Petition EPA for Emergency Relief on Water System
    18 Aug 2023
    Brooke Floyd is co-director of the Jackson People’s Assembly at the People's Advocacy Institute.
  • Trump Indictment Distraction
    Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
    Trump Indictment Distraction
    16 Aug 2023
    The latest Donald Trump indictment is no cause for celebration. The oligarchs still rule, the military industrial complex still gets public money, the criminal justice system he now faces is still…
  • LETTER: For George, The Seventh of August Movement, 1971
    Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    LETTER: For George, The Seventh of August Movement, 1971
    16 Aug 2023
    A letter commemorating George Jackson speaks to the origins of Black August.
  • Manchild in the land of cotton
    Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
    Manchild in the land of cotton
    16 Aug 2023
                                                         
  • Black August for the Pendleton 2
    Too Black
    Black August for the Pendleton 2
    16 Aug 2023
    Black August is an important month of political education, but it should not solely be about the past. The continued existence of a mass incarceration state targeting Black people…
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us