We, the 99% are mad as hell

• with the leaders who loudly proclaim to be working in the citizens' best interests yet never stop promoting their own agendas long enough to actually accomplish anything.
• with the elected whose hands are more occupied with grasping for reelection money than signing legislation to help their struggling constituents.
• with the business leaders who keep shipping jobs overseas so to keep their pockets full while draining holes in the economic health of our nation.
• with the uber wealthy who believe that their privilege extends to carrying a lesser fiscal responsibility than those overburdened and straining to hang onto the middle class.
• with all the leaders who walk away from responsibility and return each night to a warm and comfortable home, plenty of food, money to spend and health care when they're sick while millions of others work (or work to find work) without this same security each and every day.

This is NOT about taking things away from people with means just because they have them, nor any form of socialism or communism.

This is NOT about frivolous complaints, about people who have had to rein in vacation plans, about people who have had to cut back on dining out or entertainment, about people who are making do with one new coat rather than three, but about those among us who are facing imminent eviction, who regularly forgo meals each day, who lay awake in stress every night recalculating the little money coming in just in case they might have made a mistake in how they'll pay the bills.

This IS about

• telling those who have that there is such a thing as being fair. There is such a thing as spreading the fiscal responsibility for our society evenly throughout each level, not laying the shortfall burden for both extremes on the shoulders of the shrinking middle class.
• accountability for those who pillage our economy, and then blithely skate away without penalty, protected from any responsibility by others who are paid to keep the status quo.
  
• telling all these people that for millions the American dream has become the American nightmare.
• telling the uber-wealthy, the politicians, the business super-leaders that being fair is simply that -- being fair. And that being so does NOT make them weak, make them less than they are so stop acting as those it does.
• taking back our power of the people.
• not allowing ANY of the so-called leaders in our society to try and make us -- the citizens who helped them attain their privileged status -- believe we are somehow less worthy of a safe home, decent food, and relative health than they are.

Perhaps the time has come for everyone to reread the declaration on which our nation was founded. We are not a perfect nation, but we were intended to be a fairer one to its citizens. Today we are embroiled in another kind of Revolutionary War, beginning just the same as the first with the protest of poverty vs. privilege, a call for equal representation under the law vs. unfair governance. 11 score and 15 years ago, President Lincoln so eloquently wrote:

"...our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal..."

It is time to remind our leaders that We the People are no longer willing to support the status quo of self-serving, lazy, or weak leaders. That our nation was founded on the rights of every citizen for the equal opportunity to work for -- and achieve -- a decent life, to wit (and with a slight modernization):

"...We hold these truths to be self-evident, that [all] are created equal, that they are endowed...with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted ... deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government...”

We refuse to be disenfranchised any longer, and reassert our rights for the present and future security of all our nations' hardworking citizens,

for we ARE the 99%,
THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES