[qikInNdOutReply]

The west defeated the socialist alternative lurking behind the iron curtain and all bargaining power of unions went to hell. Rollback started right after the discovery what a brittle giant the Sovjet Union really was (about 1970s-1980s) and kept going ever since.

Stand alone, with no gun to its head, capitalism auto decays into the neo-feudalism of the guilded age. And alot of the gullible citizenry supported this return to nothing.

[badpun]

Without the politics angle, just adding a new ~two billion poor people to capitalism, over the course of mere ~10 years, will depress wages (imagine US took in a a couple hundred million very poor refugees from Afria and Asia, that are happy to work for half the US minimum wage or less - that's the equivalent of what happened thanks to globalization and free trade). Things might stabilize now, as we enter into de-globalization and the wage levels in Asia will not influence wage levels in the US as much.