Funding Feudalism

Under the Reagan administration, protecting US-friendly feudalism in Central America went hand in hand with privatizing clandestine military operations. The crimes against humanity committed by foreign death squads, trained at US Army schools, primarily targeted peasants mobilized by liberation theology against brutal feudal systems that had been around since Europeans first enslaved and massacred entire indigenous societies.

Since then, as support for feudalism regained the upper hand within the Roman Catholic church, privatizing US institutions like the military, schools, and Social Security has become both a lucrative form of feudalism as well as a religious battleground. While theocracy and feudalism are core values within the Republican Party, separating the two is awkward for the Democratic Party, which supports privatization, yet depends on peasants for their votes.

As Rachel Tabachnick documents in her article on funding feudalism in the United States, theocracy has the upper hand in mobilizing resources for activism, and with the Obama administration out-privatizing Reagan, forces of liberation in the US literally have nowhere to turn for help. With a growing American peasantry, a key objective in their liberation is an awareness that their freedom is jointly impeded by church and state, and that organizing against this criminal cabal does not come with a paycheck or the blessing of feudal philanthropies.