Portside

The crisis in funding for pensions, both private and public, is a manufactured one. It's rooted in the Enron-style accounting and "something-for-nothing" financial engineering that set off the 2008 financial meltdown. Now that state and local governments are swimming in red ink because of tax cuts and the Wall Street meltdown, unions are caught flat-footed. Their erstwhile allies, after testing today's political winds, now line up to ax their pay and pensions.

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Continuing to attack pensions and thereby promoting these vastly inadequate personal accounts speeds the U.S. toward a generation of elders living in dire poverty.

The middle class, once the backbone of a strong American society, has been broken, beaten down, pushed further and further toward poverty levels. Here are five well-documented ways that this has happened.

All across America, Wall Street is grabbing money meant for public workers. Not only did these middle-class workers already lose huge chunks of retirement money to huckster financiers in the crash, and not only are they now being asked to take the long-term hit for those years of greed and speculative excess, but in many cases they're also being forced to sit by and watch helplessly as Gordon Gekko wanna-be's are put in charge of their retirement savings.

Conservative activists are manufacturing the perception of a public pension crisis in order to both slash modest retiree benefits and preserve expensive corporate subsidies and tax breaks.

The Dumbest Retirement Policy in the World - A failed public policy experiment is tearing the country apart. It was a bad idea from the get-go, but new research shows that America's 401(k) revolution has left us even worse off than we thought. Here's a look at how we got into this mess, and where it will take us if we don't wise up.