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


  • Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright
    Exorcising AI: The Ghost in the Machine is white “supremacy,” and it Aims to Haunt the World with Human Redundancy, Neocolonialism, and Militarism
    28 Oct 2026
    Reflections on Valerie Veatch's documentary, Ghost in the Machine.
  • Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
    For a neighbor: Hall of Fame Herb
    28 Oct 2026
    "For a neighbor: Hall of Fame Herb" for Herb Boyd from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
  • Francy Natalia Mosquera Garcia , Caroline Shenaz Hossein
    Afro-Colombian Women and the Making of the Black Social Economy
    28 Oct 2026
    Colombia's constitution recognizes Black communities as collective rights-holders, but extractivism and dispossession have undermined those guarantees, inspiring people to build their own…
  • Johari Diata Osei , Dhoruba bin-Wahad
    The Black Panthers Didn't Start in Oakland. The History We Tell Does.
    28 Oct 2026
    The Black Panther Party did not begin in Oakland on October 15, 1966, but emerged from earlier organizing in Harlem and Lowndes County, Alabama. Celebrating only the famous founders erases the…
  • Coleen Littlejohn
    NicaNotes: Historic Solidarity between Nicaragua and Palestine
    28 Oct 2026
    Coleen Littlejohn presente! Our late comrade gave these remarks detailing how Nicaragua and Palestine share a long history of revolutionary internationalist solidarity, demonstrating a shared anti-…
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us