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


  •  Black Agenda Radio for Week of May 17, 2021
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    Black Agenda Radio for Week of May 17, 2021
    18 May 2021
    Israel Deliberately Provoked Violence
  •  Military Industrial Complex Poisons Black Town
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    Military Industrial Complex Poisons Black Town
    18 May 2021
    Water and land in the small Black town of Tallevast, Florida, was for two generations contaminated by beryllium refined for Lockheed Martin, NASA and other big players in the US war and space busin
  •  US Fakes ISIS Threat in Congo to Justify AFRICOM Presence
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    US Fakes ISIS Threat in Congo to Justify AFRICOM Presence
    18 May 2021
    The US continues to insist that ISIS is to blame for recent violence in the Congo, where six million people have died since 1996, despite the fact that hardly any Muslims reside in the mineral-rich
  •  October Tribunal to Probe US Crimes Against Humanity
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    October Tribunal to Probe US Crimes Against Humanity
    18 May 2021
    “We’re going to present expert witnesses to flush out” centuries of genocide and other US crimes before an International Tribunal on US Human Rights Abuses, said Jihad Abdulmumit,
  •  Israel Deliberately Provoked Violence
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    Israel Deliberately Provoked Violence
    18 May 2021
    The bloodshed that has taken more than 200 Palestinian lives is the result of “a planned provocation to feed the ultra-right” in Israel, said Sara Flounders,  of the Internati
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us