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
African Stream is an anti-war, anti-imperialist video and text website based in Nairobi, Kenya. Ann Garrison spoke to its founder, Ahmed Kaballo.
"When bagman Vigor Moribund came to town" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
Book Forum Editor, Roberto Sirvent, interviews Onyesonwu Chatoyer about her political organizing and work as a writer and editor.
New York Democrats are fueling the panic over a fictional crime wave to increase surveillance and police presence in NYC.
Anti-Black racism in Libya is stoked by the west to justify intervention and maintain dominance over the nation. The path toward liberation is to reject Europe and embrace a political Pan-Africanism.
