BY SHARON MARTIN

Mitch McConnell, Obstructer-in-Chief, recently took credit for the current economic recovery. Brazen, for sure, but he knows that in politics, truth doesn’t matter. How else could our democratic republic have been replaced with a feudal-type system? Welcome to the dark ages of the United States of America.

This corporate coup relies on ignorance. Hitler’s machine sent college professors and scholars to concentration camps. During China’s Cultural Revolution, professors and students were re-educated in the countryside. In both situations books were burned and art vilified. Here, we destroy education from the inside out by starving public schools and public libraries.

Privatization schemes swallow education dollars. Standardized tests subvert the liberal arts curriculum. Teachers are cast as villains. Oligarchs don’t want whole, thinking people. They want sheep that go along with the idea that corporations are people with rights no human citizen has.

Congress and the courts shred the Constitution by delivering a two-tiered justice system, private jails that require quotas to earn their owners a fat income, encroachments on the right to assemble and protest, a de facto state religion, and a thousand other acts.

I’m tired of being played.

It is time to join those brave teachers and parents who are saying no to the tests. Corporate scoring machines inflict great harm by hiding the real issues and taking the joy out of learning. They deliver little data of any use.

Education should give students the tools to direct their own lives. It shouldn’t require an act of courage and defiance to teach honestly. Let’s rise up against the corporate take-over of government policy.

Workers who labor to make their masters rich but are unable to share in the good life of this country are the real givers. Owners who pay starvation wages as they grow wealthy on the backs of workers are the real takers.

Denounce the propaganda that would have us believe welfare programs are crippling us. Citizens who want a social safety net and workers who want to retire with dignity are not the leeches bleeding the country dry.

We make homelessness and panhandling illegal. The real panhandlers are corporations and lobbyists who take their hats off so legislators can fill them with free money from the taxpayers.

We’ve been played for suckers long enough. Let’s declare our independence again. We need no weapons but our voices, our votes, and our will. Rise up!

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