I'm finally starting to understand why the 1 percent is so supportive seriously right wing candidates.

Think about the combined effect of what Gingrich, Santorum, Mittens and their ilk are proposing:

1. Reducing people's chances to go to university/stigmatizing the idea of going to university at all. This will reduce people's access to ideas that go against the status quo of what the 1 percent want to present to people. It will also limit social and economic mobility.

2. Destruction of unions. This would allow companies to pay the lowest possible amount of money that people will accept without starting a revolution. In other words, you'll just have to pay them enough to keep a roof over the head and food on the table. Nothing more, nothing less.

3. Less or no access to contraction/abortion/sexual education. This means that more people will be burdened with the responsibility of raising and feeding children. The end result is being willing to stay at the shitty job with nominal pay without forcing a strike or walking away from it, because food for babies trumps personal pride.

4. Limited access to health care for people not in the 1 percent. The purpose of the 99 percent is to grow old enough to reproduce and get some work done. Once they've reproduced and gotten some work done, if they get sick they are a burden on the system. Having them die takes the burden away from the system and the worker, because of the extra babies created by #3, is completely replaceable. It's like any other tool a business uses. If it's an expensive tool then when it starts to break you fix it. If it's a cheap tool, then you simply buy another tool and throw out the tool that is breaking. Because of #2, human labor essentially becomes one of the least expensive and most cheaply/easily replaceable tools in any business.

5. Lack of oversight over the mortgage industry even though it forced many people out of their homes and into rental apartments over the past few years. Home ownership is a way to build wealth and become part of the middle class and does nothing to help the 1 percent at all. However, when people rent, they are not building wealth and are generally paying rent to members of the 1 percent. So, much of what little money the 1 percent have to pay people in wages, comes back to them in the form of rent.

If this system seems somewhat familiar it should - because humans did it for hundreds of years. It was called "serfdom." Just substitute "tribute to the lord" for "rent" and "droit de seigneur" for "escort." (escorting is the one sector of the economy that is experiencing job growth, because you can't get laid off and it's often the only way women can actually make the rent.) And, the thing is, for royalty (which is what the one percent are in all but name) serfdom is great. It sort of sucks for the serfs, but once it's established serfdom is really, really hard to break out of. It's a system that if you can get it in place has long term staying power as a self perpetuating system.

What's interesting is that in the old days serfdom was imposed from above. Today, they are convincing people to vote themselves into serfdom.