Asked about the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that posted today, GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain said he suspected that they were “orchestrated” to help President Obama. Cain went on to blame the unemployed for their woes, saying, “if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself!”:
CAIN: I don’t have facts to back this up, but I happen to believe that these demonstrations are planned and orchestrated to distract from the failed policies of the Obama administration. Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself! [...] It is not someone’s fault if they succeeded, it is someone’s fault if they failed.
Watch it:
Cain’s conspiracy theory that the protests are a plot to help the White House is pretty far fetched, especially considering that there seems to be no love lost between the protesters and Obama.
But Cain’s claim about the unemployed is especially heartless and uninformed. There are simply not enough jobs to go around, with 4.32 unemployed people for every job opening in the country. So even someone looking hard for a job will have a difficult time finding one. Moreover, Cain fails to understand the astronomical income inequality in the U.S. and the negative effect it has on economic growth.
Blaming unemployment on the unemployed is a common trend among conservative politicians, but it’s a as wrong as it is offensive to the millions of Americans looking for a job.
