Have you heard? The "poor" in America aren't really poor.

[Mark D.]

66. Short View

Personal responsibility. It's like a broken record. I know people shouldn't go into such debt. But it's like holding the perfect fishing lure over a fish, and yelling at it for biting the lure. The 50s through the 70s gave the middle class the idea they could buy and furnish a house, go on vacation, and drive a relatively new car. Paid for with wages. Wages that fell when women started working, because employers saw an excuse to lower them. Personal responsibility does nothing there. Quit and get another job elsewhere that is paying the same falling wage. 1980 or so, with their hero and a new path to feudalism in the Whitehouse, knocking out our last chance at rising wages (unions) we saw wages go flat, and they have been since.

Things get more expensive, the only way to fill the void is with credit. I know people didn't have to get the credit. They could have lived more simply. But rather than protest stagnant wages, they were too distracted by the banks waving easy credit in front of them. Living on the wages they got, without credit, would have meant no way out but to realize the elite was screwing them. It took until recently for enough to notice this screwing, when the bank of their home dried up with falling home values.

There's no credit to get, there's no equity to borrow against. So I'm hoping this will change. My point remains, we can sit around blaming victims for being misguided by the financial elite, we can try to find a time machine to go back to 1980 to start preaching to them then. But it's akin to running down the middle of the street holding up a sign saying 'don't get into an accident'. Good luck with that. Every call for personal responsibility is a call to accept less and less for our hard work, to accept an America where you MUST struggle and work almost all the time to barely break even.

Raising one's voice to say it's unjust just gets that same line. Move the blame from the corporations that pay less to increase the wealth of owners, upper management, wealth investors, and that's pretty much it. Call every attempt to get that wealth back down to the workers 'socialism' and every attempt to have them stand together 'corrupt unions', because it's worked so well so far. But as OWS has shown and as more are waking up to this nonsense, we aren't going to stand for it much longer.