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


  • Lousiana
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    The Struggle for Black Electoral Power in Louisiana
    08 May 2026
    C.C. Campbell Rock is a New Orleans-based journalist. She recently wrote Louisiana v Callais: They Stole Black Power Again" for the site Black Source Media. She discusses the recent Supreme Court…
  • Mali
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Mali Attacked By Western Backed Proxies
    08 May 2026
    On April 25th, the West African nation Mali experienced a coordinated attack carried out by Western-backed proxy forces seeking to undermine the Alliance of Sahel States confederation. Abayomi…
  • Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
    The Voting Rights Act and the Need for Movement Politics
    06 May 2026
    From the 1870 15th Amendment to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, voting rights for Black people have proven to be ephemeral. Laws can be unenforced or gutted altogether. Black people’s rights must be…
  • Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    LETTER: Pedro Pérez Sarduy to Carlos Moore, 1990
    06 May 2026
    “I felt proud to be black in a country in revolution with a leader of Iberian ancestry who had launched Operation Carlota, in one of the hardest terrains on the African continent…”
  • Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
    Eritrea and the “Internal Government Document Seen by Reuters”
    06 May 2026
    Reuters reports on a mysterious government document seeming to confirm that sanctions will be lifted on Eritrea.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us