We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Jamie Dimon’s Legacy: GAO — Americans Face Stark Retirement Prospects

Click here to access article by Pam Martens and Russ Martens from Wall Street on Parade.

Americans in their retirement years depend on investment income that is managed through various job-related retirement programs by Wall Street mega-banks to supplement their very inadequate Social Security retirement income. However, due to the large management fees that are being charged to handle their savings plans, many working people face retirement with very inadequate means of supporting themselves. 

In contrast to these workers the authors refer to today's announcement, as celebrated this morning by Bloomberg TV, that Jamie Diamond, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has recently become a billionaire . (I watched this announcement on Bloomberg TV this morning and the TV hosts went gaga over his achieving billionaire status.) It's clear that the mega-bankers are, like all of the One Percent, doing very well while most ordinary working Americans are facing a dreadful future in their retirement years.
The conclusion to draw from this study is that millions of Americans will never be able to stop working, to enjoy a financially-worry free retirement, to have a nest-egg into their 80s, or even to eat nutritionally balanced meals in retirement because Wall Street’s megabanks that Jamie Dimon concocted with Sandy Weill have eaten America’s lunch – and its future. Occupy Wall Street was right: the megabanks got bailed out; Americans got sold out – and are still being sold out by the self-declared felonious megabanks who have found ever creative ways of siphoning off trillions from the pockets of the working class while paying back pennies on the dollar, courtesy of the revolving-door regulators and sycophants in Congress.