BY SHARON MARTIN

The marchers in Times Square know it. Policemen in Tulsa know it. So do the National Board Certified teachers in Oklahoma.

Cutting taxes does not create jobs or opportunities.

Ask the public employees who have been laid off. Ask high school seniors who crowd, 40 or 50 to a classroom in Tulsa, what opportunities the tax cuts have given them. Ask the English teacher who spends every evening and weekend grading the papers of 240 students what the tax cuts have done for her.

The bailouts didn’t create jobs, though they were probably necessary. The American taxpayers are still waiting for a thank you. A job would be nice.

One of the bailed-out banks is cutting 30,000 jobs, 6,000 of them by the end of the year. Layoffs give the bottom line a temporary boost. Money that could have kept workers on the job becomes management bonuses and lower wages for new workers. Yep, even as they were announcing layoffs, Bank of America held a job fair to add 30 new workers in California.

Bailouts may have saved the national economy, but they didn’t save family economies. Families have lost their incomes, their homes, and their hopes.

The United States isn’t broke. Forget all the dire predictions as the best Congress money can buy jerks the rugs out from under constituents. There’s money in circulation, but it isn’t creating jobs; it’s buying elections.

It takes a lot of money to run a campaign, and the folks who hand out the political dollars expect something in return. Some of them are brazen enough to write the legislation they want passed – lower taxes, fewer regulations, the average taxpayer be damned.

Hard to trace PAC money is used to make ads and support fake movements. Some of the ads tell outright lies. Front groups spread dissidence and fund rallies. The disabled and unemployed are provided buses and money to promote policies that hurt them. They have been bought, cheap.

Not everyone is fooled. There is a movement afoot. For every marcher in Tulsa, Toronto, New York, and DC, hundreds of citizens in their kitchens and living rooms and at their minimum-wage replacement jobs are shouting, “I’m with you.”

The unemployed and underemployed are tired of rhetoric. The lied-to and disillusioned want campaign finance reform and fair elections. The 99% want the peoples’ voices to be heard.

We aren’t asking for a handout. All we want is what should be ours – democracy, opportunity, and our share of the American Dream.

– Sharon Martin lives in Oilton, OK and is a regular contributor to The Oklahoma Observer