From the article:
     In 1980, 95 percent of the CEOs’ pay was salary and bonuses, and five percent was stock incentives. Today, it’s virtually reversed. About 85 to 95 percent is stock incentives, and only five percent is salaries and bonuses. So that means the price of the stock is all that matters to the CEO, and of course that’s all that matters to the investors – the hedge funds, the private equity companies. They want to see the stock go up. Before 1982, it was virtually illegal to do that because it was considered stock manipulation. When a company buys back its own shares, it reduces the number of share owners, and therefore every share is worth a little bit more. If you do this, all things being equal, you’re going to boost the share and manipulate the price. The free market’s not doing it, you’re doing it. 
     In 1980, about two percent of a company’s profits were used for stock buybacks. By 2007, 75 percent of all corporate profits were used to buy back their own shares. Forget about R&D, forget about workers’ wages, forget about all that kind of stuff. All that matters to a CEO today is raising the prices of the shares through stock buybacks.
     This financial strip mining is phenomenal. The net result is, in 1970 the ratio between a top-100 CEO’s pay and an average worker was 45-to-1. Which is a lot if you think about it this way: if an average worker could afford one car, the CEO could afford 45 cars. Or one home versus 45 homes, or one home that’s 45 times the size of an average worker’s home. We just crunched the numbers again for 2014: it’s 844-to-1. You can’t even conceive of how big that gap is, and it’s a direct result of financial strip mining.  
      Capitalism was still capitalism from World War II to the late 1970s, but the productivity, which is output per worker hour, basically has risen every year except five from 1947 to today. The line just goes up on a 45-degree angle. Average worker wages, taking into account inflation, also grows from 1947 to around 1977. Rose every single year.  Once this Better Business Climate model hit, you look at these same two lines and they just split apart. Worker wages actually go down in terms of real buying power. The gap between the two lines today is so large that if worker wages stayed on that productivity line that they taught us was an iron law, which of course they then repealed as soon as I graduated, if the two lines kept going up together the average weekly wage would be double what it is today. That’s how big a gap took place. Something really big changed.