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


  • Edward Rhymes
    What Changes For Palestine?
    21 Oct 2026
    Disregard for Palestinian rights is a feature of Israeli politics rather than a bug. The upcoming Knesset election will change nothing for Palestinians, because every candidate across the political…
  • Orinoco Tribune
    Colombia’s First National Strike Against De la Espriella Met With Police Crackdown
    21 Oct 2026
    Thousands of people took to the streets across Colombia on Wednesday in the first national strike against President Abelardo de la Espriella’s administration, as police used tear gas, rubber bullets…
  • Issa G Shivji
    Positioning Pan-Africanism In The Geopolitical Turmoil
    21 Oct 2026
    As we are experiencing a world order in disorder, with war and conflagrations and a shifting balance of power, Issa Shivji calls for a Sovereign Pan-African Project. The analyses recap the…
  • BAR Radio
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Black Agenda Report October 16, 2026
    16 Oct 2026
    In this week’s segment, we see through supposed disagreements between the US and Canada and recognize their partnership in settler colonialism, enslavement, and imperialism. But we begin with a…
  • M23
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Congo's Elite Struggle for Power While Imperialist Control and Violence Decimate the Country
    16 Oct 2026
    Joseph Kabila, former president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, named himself president of the Front for the Rebuilding of the Nation. He is now formally allied with M23, the Rwanda-backed…
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us