Herman Cain yesterday became the latest politician to whitewash Martin Luther King, Jr.’s record, attacking Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) for citing King while promoting his proposed financial transaction tax. Cain said that King wouldn’t support such a measure because “class warfare wasn’t his thing.”

Class warfare wasn’t his thing. … The demonstrations and the proposed tax were initiated by U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minnesota). He has introduced an actual bill to tax all Wall Street transactions to provide a pool of money to help those, mostly minorities, who have not achieved financial success. The bill is HR 1579, the “Inclusive Prosperity Act of 2013”. When Stuart Varney asked me what I thought of this tax, I said the bill is simply a class warfare attack on those who represent financial success – and it dishonors the memory of Dr. King, because he did not preach class warfare. … Dr. King did not fight or die for a new tax. Please! His memory deserves more respect than that. Some of us understand that.

That would have been news to King, as the late civil rights leader claimed that he was in fact “involved in the class struggle” and was a strong ally of the labor movement.

In fact, Ellison’s bill is much more moderate than King’s economic views.

King’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom strongly focused on issues of economic justice and called for an increase in the minimum wage along with “a massive federal program to train and place all unemployed workers — Negro and white — on meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages.” He later said that he hoped “a program will emerge to abolish unemployment, and that there will be another program to supplement the income of those whose earnings are below the poverty level.”

He also supported a guaranteed basic income and advocated a “radical redistribution of economic power” in order to curb poverty and inequality, even citing Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism.

King also said an “economic and social bill of rights” was needed to aid “the majority of Negroes locked up in an economic underworld of poverty, joblessness and unemployment” and correct the “monstrous contradiction between the American idea and reality” of “two centuries of oppression and terror.”

Cain certainly wouldn’t be the first one to offer this sanitized version of King, who believed that government should play a key role ending poverty: