The demise of work in America

I started working for real with the US Army in 1961, and the pattern of the job with the Army has, generally, been the pattern of ALL the jobs I've had since. Well, not quite, but close. What do I mean?
In the Army I pushed paper, and much of the time I had no paper to push. So, I spent many, many hours on my job there with nothing to do except read books, listen to music or...anything else I could think of to do to break the monotony.
My best job may have been during college when I worked part-time as a sports editor of a small New Mexico daily newspaper. I worked during the hours I was doing my job. I worked a lot, and I enjoyed every minute.
On my next job, I and two other reporters (rewriters they called us) spent every night at the Union-Leader in Manchester, New Hampshire, waiting for someone to call us with stories. We waited to hear from undertakers, because if you died in the state of New Hampshire, you were a news story in the Union-Leader. The paper had "stringers" or correspondents around the states, and they'd call in with local government news. Most often we got information on mayors' courts.
A few nights we did work, like the night we three took 42 obituaries. The rest of the time, however, we did nothing, I mean absolutely nothing. We just waited. Some people on the copy desk got so bored that they developed a sort of hockey game in which they used bent paper clips (large ones) as hockey sticks and pucks made of paper wads warped in Scotch tape. Then they'd flip the paper puck back and forth with their paper clip sticks! Sometimes they would get caught up in the game. You could tell by all the loud talk! But, my, what a waste of time, talent and money!
I don't think that ever, not one time, struck the management.
A few years later I got a job at a newspaper in Ohio, a big one. Same thing: hours and hours and hours of doing nothing while waiting for something to happen. The paper eventually folded, and it should have for all the money wasted on talented reporters who did nothing, or next to it.
Then there came the government jobs, and the same thing: hours and hours and hours (squared) of wasted people with talent! I do not mean to suggest these people could not have contributed positively to state government. I say that the government managers of these people simply wasted them, as did the editors of the newspapers and Army mentioned above.
I can honestly say I've had only one good boss in 40 years of work in the US of A and only two or three of those years being worthwhile work!
I suspect much of the rest of the work force in the country can claim the same experience.