TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Occupy protestors have decided to shut down ports to shut down capitalism:

The protesters, who targeted ports from San Diego to Anchorage, said they wanted to highlight the plight of average Americans who have suffered from home foreclosures and soaring unemployment while the largest U.S. banks have recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. “We are the 99 percent,” their slogan, refers to economist Joseph Stiglitz’s research that found the richest 1 percent of Americans control 40 percent of the wealth.

“This isn’t about the truckers,” Charles Rachlis, 55, of El Cerrito, California, said in an interview at the Oakland protest. “We have to shut down the wheels of capitalism at the port. This scares the bejesus out of Wall Street.”

Let’s set aside that shutting down the ports, which—if successful—threatens many jobs of the “average Americans” they claim they want to highlight the plight of, and also that shutting down ports to show the plight of regular people is a non-sequitur.

Let’s look at what they’re really trying to do. They aren’t trying to show that the middle class and poor have been terribly hurt by the recession and need help. They aren’t trying to show that income inequality is harmful and so we should try to raise the incomes of the poor and middle class. No—they’re trying to hurt “Wall Street,” or rather, hurt businesses and the capitalist system. They want to punish them.

Maybe you agree that capitalism should be eliminated. Fine. We can have that conversation. But we at least need to acknowledge what shutting down the ports is really about. And it has nothing to do with merely raising the tax rate for the highest income tax bracket from 35 percent to 39.6 percent.