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
Think of peoples having the most tanks, the most drones, the most missiles, bombs, aircraft carriers, guns, ammo and night vision goggles
This week the Black Misleadership Class, sexual violence and colonialism, and the crisis of US imperialism were on your minds.
Black and brown volunteers were considered both “essential” and “dispensable” in past disease-ridden US conflicts, just as they are in today’s Covid crisis.
Immigrants that moved to Britain as children were deported to Jamaica as “foreign criminals.”
The celebration of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste reflects the continued priority of elite preferences over the needs and struggles of ordinary people.
