We Are the 99 Percent - Stand Up in Frankfort

Tomorrow, Thursday Nov. 17, 99 Percenters will gather in Frankfort, KY to make themselves heard. They'll be at the Singing Bridge over the Kentucky River at 5:30 p.m.

Find out more here.

Why should you join them - or the We Are the 99 Percent action in your town? Because this is how the One Percenters treat all the rest of us:

Last week, a federal court in Mississippi sentenced a key figure in a $3 million mortgage fraud scheme to two and a half years in federal prison. Just a few days earlier, however, a Mississippi federal judge imposed a significantly harsher sentence on a woman who lied on her benefits applications in order to receive just $4,367 in food stamps to help feed her family:

[I]n moments of desperation, a lie can seem like the only option. Anita McLemore, a Mississippi mother of two, faced one of those unfortunate moments when filling out her application for food stamps — and now she’ll pay the price, by spending three years of her life behind bars in federal prison.

Thanks to a federal ban on food stamps for people with felony drug convictions, people like McLemore are out of luck when it comes to getting assistance with putting food on their tables. Though states can opt out of the ban, those that don’t (like Mississippi) deny food stamps even to individuals who have already served their sentences or overcome previous addictions. It’s true that McLemore’s past isn’t perfect — she has four felony drug convictions and one misdemeanor, which place her firmly in the category of people the federal government has declared unfit to receive public benefits. Hence, faced with the prospect of being unable to feed her family, McLemore lied on her application.

In a compassionate nation, the penalty for drug use is not starvation. In a just nation, the penalty for drug use is not that your two children must be hungry as well. There is no excuse for a federal drug policy that punishes anyone by taking away their ability to put food on the table — and that punishes them so severely for the crime of needing to eat.

And, unlike thousands of Wall Street bankers who helped plunge America’s economy into a catastrophic recession, McLemore actually paid back the $4,367 she received.

The One Percenters can maintain their control over our economy only as long as being poor, being unemployed, getting defrauded on your mortgage, getting bankrupted by medical bills, being gouged by your bank is a crime.

The real crime is how the One Percenters are trying to silence and smother the rest of us. Stand up and tell them STOP.

We Are the 99 Percent.