Click here to access article by David Wessel from The Wall Street Journal.
Despite more than twice the productivity in 1973, employed male workers are earning slightly less now compared to 1973.
Here is my take on this phenomenon. As the Vietnam War was winding down, except for a few who went underground to continue their attacks on the ruling class, most activists quietly returned to focus on their careers or dropped out of conventional society to join rural communes in a back-to-the-land movement. They were tired after many years of protests, disillusioned with the pretensions of a democratic government during years in which they witnessed the full fury of the fascist ruling capitalist class: the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, Black Panthers, and Malcolm X; the killing of student protesters by the National Guard on the campuses of Kent State and Jackson State universities, etc; the lies and deceptions of mainstream media while leaks grew about the horrible war crimes committed by American soldiers, and the devastation of Vietnam and nearby areas with heavy bombing, Agent Orange, etc.
Although losing control of Vietnam and southeast Asia, the ruling class had contained the rebellion at home by using the most vicious policies and tactics. This together with the slow decline of union power gave our masters new confidence in their ongoing class war with workers. They were also angry with the youth of the country which dared to challenge their wars and the construction of their Empire. They wanted revenge. While celebrating the ending of the Vietnam War and taking credit for it, alternative media--or what was left of it--failed to alert ordinary Americans to this new war against workers. Thus most Americans were quietly passive while this new assault on workers began.
In 1980 ruling class directors appointed Ronald Reagan, a former General Electric salesman and Hollywood actor to serve as their chief of public relations (aka "President") to sell their new policies, went about consolidating their control over the economy, further destroying union opposition, brought in a number of Zionists in the government, and wrecked mayhem on the rest of the world. As they say, the rest is history: trickle-down theories, wars, austerity, stock market booms and crashes, a phony "War on Drugs" while secret government agencies facilitated the importation of illicit drugs to finance their illegal wars (Nicaragua for example), bank bailouts by the government, proliferation of prisons and privatizations, neoliberal policies, etc.
This article furnishes data that illustrates another result of this new class war strategy: the capitalist appropriation of most of the profits resulting from the dramatic expansion of productivity--a productivity created by workers.
