You know what the last four years (at least) show?

That we are living in the 21st century nationalized equivalent of a 19 century company store.

Stay with me now...

Company stores were usually part of company towns, whole towns set up by a big, local company--a mill or a mining operation. Some had their own police, fire, PO, laws, yes, even a store.

Employees were expected to live in town, in company houses rented to them, shopping at company stores for product marked up ridiculously. Often employee "pay" was only good in these company stores.

Liberty? Constitutional representation? Fairness? Nope.

For a while, America let this happen. Admittedly, we let a lot of things happen, actively or not.

Now, with money in politics and corporate ownership of everything, it feels like we are right back there...only worse.

Corporations squeeze all of us. Healthcare? Housing? Food? Suddenly, those aren't rights guaranteed to all. Taxes? For chumps.

The evangelicals are right, there's certainly a devil at the heart of America, and it's runaway capitalism.

Take, for instance, what's going on in Texas right now. When did we get away from the notion of public utilities-power, water, sewage-being PUBLIC? We turned them over to corporations, and then we're surprised when these same corporations don't have our best interests at heart?

And what do our elected officials do? Well, they're bought and paid for by these same corporate interests. So they lie, they deflect, they leave the country (looking at you, your miserable turd @tedcruz.

Because of corporate money in politics, these officials don't even have to pretend they're working for us. We don't really pay them, not to the extent the corporations and PACS and interest groups do.

These corporations take our labor and our money, and give damn little back. Less and less all the time. And yet, people still believe that the @GOP are for the little guy, the working person. The family.

When are we all going to wake up and realize what the @GOP realized 50 years ago?

We're not the side they're bread is buttered on.

No elected @GOP official is going to work against their own self interest. Never.

And before anyone says, "Yeah, but the Democrats..."

It's both sides, sure, to some extent. But, man, the @GOP seems as if it's going for extra credit here.

Don't want to live in a corporate town, making corporate wages and having to spend it how corporations dictate?

Get money--ALL MONEY--out of politics. Stipends for elections. Term limits.

They can dress it up all they want: God, the flag, security against the great enemy of the "other."

Whatever.

It's all about the money.

We need to think about changing that...