Heard Herman Cain this morning on NPR calling the Occupy Wall Street protestors "un-American." He continued to say that "to protest Wall Street is to protest capitalism. These people are anti-capitalism."
Nice straw man, Mr. Cain. Let me proceed to knock it down.
There are numerous knock-down opportunities in your attack on your opponents' patriotism, as well as your calling the protests un-American. Apparently irony is not dead -- were you standing anywhere near the Martin Luther King statue when you said that? But, for time and space's sake, let's focus on the last charge, that protesting Wall Street means you are against capitalism.
So, for you, Mr. Cain, Wall Street == Capitalism. Really? You want to defend that in a debate? To equate Wall Street with capitalism itself means, of course, that Main Street doesn't even matter. Apparently, in Herman Cain's world, the only capitalism that matters is that involving large amounts of paper assets being manipulated by serious people in expensive suits so they can earn massive bonuses. It doesn't matter whether or not the money serves as actual capital for a real business, or is used to actually create real goods or services. No, all that matters in Mr. Cain's type of capitalism is that the Too Big To Fail banks get to continue playing with massive amounts of other people's money.
Here's a message for you, Mr. Cain: the people in the Occupy movement, and many hundreds of thousands like them, aren't anti-capitalism. They are anti YOUR type of capitalism -- the capitalism that rapes and pillages; the capitalism that destroys jobs instead of making them; the capitalism that believes in "privatize the gain and socialize the pain."
Your kind of capitalism, Mr. Cain, will continue piling wealth into the hands of the 1% while starving the rest of us. THAT is what Occupy Wall Street is about, Mr. Cain -- that the Gods of Wall Street get reigned in, that the rich and very rich pay it forward so our society doesn't collapse, and that people in the two Ws of Washington and Wall Street pay attention to the pain across the nation and do something about it, instead of figuring out how many more zeroes they can add to their bonus check or their campaign coffers, or both.
We're not anti-capitalism, Mr. Cain. We're anti YOUR brand of capitalism. We're going to keep fighting for fair markets, fair taxation, and fair regulations. In the end, our goal is a capitalism that works for everyone, and not just for the wealthy.
So here's my question back to you, Mr. Cain: Do you share that goal, or not?