Poor? Jobless? Your Fault.

"Don't blame Wall Street.  If you don't have a 

job and you're not rich, blame yourself."

Presidential candidate and CEO of Godfather's Pizza Herman Cain has a little news flash for all you poor, jobless Americans (particularly the protestors): It's your fault your life sucks.  This is the United States of America after all, where anybody with the proper motivation can go out and make millions of dollars overnight.  If you have no money and no job, then get motivated and fill a niche in society.

Cain needs a little dose of reality.  It is a lot harder today than it was even twenty years ago to become a multi-millionaire, even if it is on something as simple as selling fucking pizza.  Look at some of the recent up and comers in the wealthy club.  Most of them are able to do something new and exciting with computers - Zuckerberg, the founder(s) of Twitter, the guys over at Apple, etc.  And those aren't things you can just do.  You need to have a bit of computer know-how coupled with a nice, expensive college education in order to get anywhere.  

Sure, it's not the high-caliber PhD you'd need to make and sell pizza, but you get the idea.  In a time when companies look at their employees as if they were unwanted fat on a rather perfect body, I'm not really sure how Cain has the balls to say something so completely out of touch with more than 97% of America.  Men and women are being fired from their supposedly secure jobs each and every day just so their employers can save a few extra pennies a week.  How, then, does the blame possibly reside in the jobless? 

Cain went on to say that the protests on Wall Street were "anti-capital[ist]," and that they were "planned and orchestrated to distract from the failed policies of the Obama administration" (although, to his credit, he admitted to not having the facts to back that last statement up).  

Now, I'm not going to correct him.  The ridiculousness of both statements is obvious.  But I will say this: whenever Cain moves ahead in the polls, he says something that's so fucking stupid, it pushes him back to square one.  It's a very similar situation to the comments he made a few months ago on Fox News Sunday, where he stated that the Freedom of Religion protects "us" from anyone that wants to build a mosque on U.S. soil.  On the contrary, Mr. Cain.  The Freedom of Religion protects anyone that wants to build a mosque on U.S. soil from people like you.

But there's an interesting experiment that I would love to try, and if Herman Cain wants to take on the challenge, I would be sincerely honored.  I propose that Cain gives all but a thousand dollars of his life's savings away, and allows us as a nation to watch as he attempts to make it all back.  It would make for great television.  Oh!  And while he's at it, let's slap him with some student loans.  $400-$500 a month should do the trick.

Listen.  I am insulted by Cain's remarks, and unless you're in that top 1% of wealth, you should be too.  Hundreds of thousands of others - myself included - are trying.  I'm in school for a career that I probably won't be able to find a job for; a career that will cost me more tuition-wise to learn than I'll make in a year of actually doing that job.  That's my choice, and I'm not complaining, but to have someone running for president say that companies, employers, and corporations share none of the responsibility for this shit storm of an economic crisis? That's fucked up.