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,
listen
http://www.againstthegrain.org/files/files/atg/atg_2014.11.12_401ks.mp3
Zulu Sharod is Chairman of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party which is based in New Jersey.
Ali Abunimah is Director of electronicantifada.net, an independent online news publication and educational resource focusing on Palestine.
In this week's segment we hear about the state of Black politics in Newark and across the country.
Thanks for your support of Black Agenda Report in 2023. We are taking our annual break and we'll be back on January 10, 2024. Power to the people!
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