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
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire, an international electronic press service.
Mary Hooks is National Field Secretary with the Movement 4 Black Lives based in Atlanta.
Brooke Floyd is co-director of the Jackson People’s Assembly at the People's Advocacy Institute.
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…
