(NNPA)—Some weeks ago I had a discussion with a very wealthy businessman. When I was getting ready to leave I mentioned to him the devastation being brought about by the credit crisis. His response, which actually should not have surprised me, nevertheless infuriated me: “Yes, it is too bad,” he said. “People were trying to live beyond their means.”

Barely had the words left his mouth than I was ready to jump at him. I realized, however, that none of my arguments would make any sense to him because his vantage point was that of a rich person who was determined to stay rich, who was not able to see life through the eyes of working people and he had to justify the current state of affairs in order to sleep at night.

So, how was this businessman so fundamentally wrong? After all, in the media we often hear the same thing. Yet the reality is very different.

First, the living standard of the average U.S. working person has been in decline since the mid-1970s. In other words, after you factor in inflation, our earnings have been dropping, so much so that we are at or beneath what workers were earning in 1967, again, factoring in inflation.

While productivity has been rising, our incomes have not. They have been kept down by various things, including layoffs, the restructuring of work, forced givebacks by employees, efforts to smash labor unions and changing workplace technology.

Coupled with this have been policies, particularly those instituted beginning with the era of Ronald Reagan, to enrich the rich and the corporations through tax policies, and at the same time, cut or erode what was once called the “social safety net” (unemployment, food stamps, etc.).

The other thing that happened was that much of what we once received for free, or very low cost, started to cost. This would include items such as parks, public transportation or garbage pickup.

The response to this situation was complicated. Generally speaking, people tried to handle these challenges on their own.

In fact, as they found themselves being squeezed they tended to believe that the problem was them. So, people looked for individual solutions. The most common was credit or debt. Particularly with banks giving out credit cards as if they were candy on Halloween, working people who were squeezed made greater and greater use of credit in order to stabilize their living standard.

This is not about people living beyond their means, contrary to what the rich businessman suggested, but instead was about people trying to live. By the 1990s, the average person who possessed a credit card was carrying over roughly $5,000 per month in credit card debt.

This was on top of housing payments and car payments. Yet when the housing “bubble” unfolded, homeowners thought that they had discovered the golden goose and that the value of homes would continue to rise with the result being that home owners could continue to borrow against the increasing value of their homes.

Things did not quite work out that way.

In the case of the housing bubble, what happened was the equivalent of the pyramid schemes you are probably familiar with. The first people to enter the game and leave, usually do very well. It is the rest of us who get stung when the pyramid collapses.

So, what does this say? Well, frankly, that too many of us thought that the problem we faced was a problem of our own making rather than realizing that the economic system has been operating against us.

While a small percentage of the population has become fabulously wealthy, the bottom 80 percent has found itself either stagnating or in a free fall. Most of us hoped that credit could keep us afloat, but even a life preserver becomes waterlogged after long periods in the water.

The answer to this situation is collective action. Sure, if you are lucky to hit the “number” you may be able to walk away free and clear, but that is really not an option for most of the millions of people who are pulling their hair out trying to figure out what to do.

Not only do we need to demand of politicians, such as Sen. Obama, that if elected they will take steps to address this, but we must also organize ourselves through unions and community-based organizations to insist that the public is protected against the ravages of the economy.

That means that we not only need to improve our living standards, but we need to make sure that society is looking out for those who are falling through the black hole created by conservatives.

Taking personal responsibility in this case—to borrow the term that the conservatives love to throw around—means joining with others to fight back.

(Bill Fletcher Jr. is a senior scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies and is the immediate past- president of TransAfrica Forum. He is the co-author of the recently published “Solidarity Divided,” which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA. He can be reached at papaq54@hotmail.com.)