The Great American $80 Trillion Heist
Part 1 of 8: 1973: The Day the American Dream Died
Welcome to Frontier of Change. I am Mushin, and for the next eight weeks, I will guide you through the most important story never told in schools: how $80 trillion was systematically stolen from the American people. This is not conspiracy theory. This is documented truth, backed by RAND Corporation research and Senate investigations. This is your invitation to see clearly, act boldly, and join the rising multitude building a new world.
The Silence of 1973
There was no breaking news alert. No dramatic speech. No march on Washington. Just a quiet, compounding shift that began in 1973—a year most Americans don't know by heart, but economists, labor historians, and quiet insiders do.
It was the year the American Dream was interrupted.
From 1945 to 1973, the United States built the most prosperous working-class society in world history. Yes, it was imperfect—riddled with racial inequities, gender discrimination, and Cold War paranoia. But economically, we had forged something unprecedented: a social contract where rising tides truly lifted all boats.
What That Contract Looked Like:
When productivity increased, wages increased with it
Union membership flourished at nearly 30% of the workforce
College tuition was genuinely affordable—you could work part-time and graduate debt-free
A single breadwinner could buy a house, a car, and provide education for their children
Hard work led to upward mobility, not just for the lucky few, but for entire communities
Then, in 1973, something fundamental broke. The gears kept turning, but the direction had changed.
The Moment Everything Shifted
Post-1973, productivity continued its relentless upward climb. American workers became more efficient, more skilled, more valuable than ever before. But for the first time in modern history, wages flatlined.
Where did that immense productivity gain go?
Straight up the chain: into corporate profits, stock buybacks, and CEO compensation packages. The value created by millions of American workers was systematically diverted to a tiny elite who had quietly rewritten the rules.
The Staggering Scale of Theft
Here's what the numbers tell us, and why every American should be outraged:
The RAND Corporation—hardly a radical organization—conducted a rigorous analysis and found that if wage growth had simply continued along its postwar trajectory, the bottom 90% of Americans would have collectively earned $47 trillion more between 1975 and 2018.
A 2023 follow-up by a bipartisan Senate Economic Subcommittee updated that figure to an astonishing $80 trillion.
Let me put this in terms you can feel in your bones:
The average American worker in 2024 should be earning $120,000 annually
Instead, they earn approximately $52,000
That $68,000 difference—multiplied across millions of workers over decades—was captured and hoarded by those who changed the rules
To understand the scale:
$1 MILLION in the span of seconds in time equals 11 days. $1 BILLION in the span of seconds in time equals 30 years, a career. $1 TRILLION in the span of seconds in time equals 30,000 years the span of human civilization itself. $80 TRILLION measured in seconds equals 2,400,000 years INFINITY. Artificial General Intelligent Beyond Calculation in future theft.
Four Pillars of the Great Restructuring
This wasn't an accident or natural market evolution. It was engineered through four systematic changes:
1. Capital Crowned King
In 1973, corporate boards and Wall Street investors began prioritizing "shareholder value" above everything else—worker welfare, community investment, long-term sustainability. The intellectual foundation was laid by documents like the Powell Memo (1971), which gave corporate America the green light to systematically dismantle regulations and worker protections.
2. Unions Under Siege
Union membership collapsed from 30% to less than 10% today. The symbolic moment was President Reagan's crushing of the PATCO air traffic controllers' strike in 1981—a clear signal that labor resistance would be met with overwhelming force.
3. Globalization Without Guardrails
Trade agreements like NAFTA enabled corporations to chase the lowest labor costs worldwide, devastating American manufacturing. But there was no parallel plan to retrain workers, rebuild communities, or ensure that globalization's benefits were shared. Wall Street celebrated; Main Street paid the price.
4. Taxes Rigged for the Rich
The top marginal tax rate plummeted from 70% in 1970 to 37% today. More crucially, capital gains—the primary way wealthy people make money—were taxed at lower rates than the wages earned by teachers, nurses, and firefighters.
The Human Cost
The results of this grand theft are visible everywhere:
Student debt burdens now exceed mortgage payments for entire generations
Suburbs filled with gig workers delivering food for apps that provide no benefits
Rising rates of suicide, addiction, and despair in post-industrial communities
Children who will likely be worse off than their parents—not because they work less hard, but because the value of their work was stolen
This is not merely economic dysfunction. It is structural violence—the slow-burning theft of a society's capacity to care for itself.
Why This Matters Now
We stand at a crossroads. The same extractive systems that drained $80 trillion from working families are now accelerating through AI, financial technology, and surveillance capitalism. The Mega Poly Crisis—debt, unemployment, climate catastrophe, social fragmentation—is not separate from this theft. It IS this theft, compounding.
But here's what the architects of extraction never understood: theft this vast is also traceable. Wealth this concentrated can be redistributed. Inequality this extreme can be reversed.
What began in 1973 can end in 2025.
Your Invitation to the Truthing of Reality
Over the next seven weeks, I will take you deep inside the architecture of this theft. You'll see exactly how they did it—the five domains where extraction was perfected, the psychological tools used to make us complicit, and the regenerative alternatives already emerging.
More importantly, you'll discover your role in the great restoration. Because this story is not a eulogy—it's a resurrection of humanness “Biology of Love”. (Maturana Optimism 2-minute video)
Next Week: "The $80 Trillion Swindle: Five Domains of Extraction" — How housing, healthcare, education, finance, and technology were weaponized against the American people.
What You Can Do Right Now:
Share this truth: Forward this to three people who need and want to understand what happened to their economic security
Join the conversation: Comment below with your family's story of economic pressure since the 1970s
Subscribe for the full investigation: This is just the beginning of understanding how we reclaim our future
Remember: Your attention is sacred. Your voice matters in the “Attention Economy.” Your participation in truthing reality is how we build the world worthy of our children.
In friendship and fierce indignation,
Mushin
Mushin Patric Roberts is an Scott-Irish American veteran Catholic Priest, Zen Buddhist Hollow Bone sensei, and prime mover and facilitator of the Teilhardian Scientific Research Project (TSRP) 1966 to present. His work integrates economic analysis with spiritual wisdom for planetary transformation. Join the movement at Frontier of Change.
Join the Metastabilian “Blessed Unrest” Movement (Paul Hawken author of “Natural Capitalism”) The Metastabilian movement is a song, dance and joyful concern that is already ~ always being revealed to me, we, you and us in our biology of love and adoration in “Building the Earth” (TSRP Poem 16-pages) for the next 30,000 years and Age of Discovering Infinity 2,400,000 years. No one knows the future today. Let’s learn to live together in a “Communication Civilization” in our humorous adolescent moment in the swept along evolutionary drift constituting, sustaining and maintaining 8 billion noble personalities in the Family of Wo(Man).
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