Today is Memorial Day when we are to mourn the U.S. military personnel who died while serving in the armed forces.
We will hear a lot about freedom and preserving our way of life, but what exactly is that today in the US? Why are young men and women from across the country being asked to serve—and die today?
While the propaganda slogans (“fight em over there”) remain largely intact it’s hard to recall a recent time when so little effort was put into concealing the fact that the US military functions to spread freedom for the capital class. And it comes at the same time a particularly crass president is controlled by foreign interests and transnational capital is feasting on US societal collapse. So who is being served this Memorial Day?
Serving the Great American Sellout
Trump: We lost 13 people. In other wars, you lost hundreds of thousands of people. I get a kick when I look at somebody on television and they say, ‘he’s lost 13 people.’ pic.twitter.com/0qGnvpCdTw
— FactPost (@factpostnews) May 20, 2026
While Trump’s comments reveal his thoughts that troop deaths (the numbers are likely much higher and hundreds have also sustained serious injury) are but a number on his ego trip, the argument that the military is protecting America and its way of life doesn’t hold much water when the country’s financial overlords continue to loot the country.
To briefly recap, it was American elites’ greed that caused the American working class to lose 3.7 million decent paying jobs from 2001-2018 – and that’s only from shipping jobs to China. Les Leopold in his book Wall Street’s War on Workers calculates that Wall Street strip mining of the US (including China, NAFTA, stock buybacks, etc.) has led to 30 million laid-off Americans since 1996.
Under MAGA, the great American sell off is accelerating. From Asia Times:
On April 26, 2026, India’s largest pharmaceutical company, Sun Pharma, signed a definitive agreement to acquire New Jersey-based Organon for US$11.75 billion in an all-cash transaction.
It is the largest acquisition by an Indian biopharmaceutical company in history. Sun Pharma will become the world’s seventh-largest biosimilar seller and a top-three player in global women’s health.
In January 2026, Mitsubishi Corporation announced a $7.5 billion acquisition of Aethon Energy’s US natural gas assets, which would be the largest Japanese acquisition ever in America’s energy sector…
The aggregate numbers tell the same story. Total Asia-Pacific M&A activity in 2025 reached $946 billion, up from $687.7 billion in 2024. Japan-related M&A surged to $385.9 billion. Greater China M&A reached $399 billion, up 46% versus 2024. India recorded $113 billion in 2025, up 42% year-on-year.
Foreign capital flowing into the US in 2025 hit $385 billion. The Americas accounted for 60% of global M&A deal values.
Serving a Nation that Will Not Feed Its Own People
In an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity during his trip to Beijing, Trump defended Chinese purchases of U.S. farmland arguing that restricting foreign ownership would hurt American farmers by driving down land values.
China’s total holdings of US agriculture land might be small, but foreign ownership continues to rise. From Investigate Midwest:
Nearly every state in the country has seen an increase in foreign interests owning farmland since 2014, according to USDA data.
Foreign countries and interests own more than 45 million acres of farmland in the country, which accounts for just over 3% of the nation’s private farmland, but the number of agricultural acres owned by foreign interests increased by 67% from 2014 to 2023.
The growing acquisition of farmland by large corporations, investment funds, and institutional investors means that number is likely to grow. If there isn’t much industry to send overseas anymore, why not sell off the land? According to Farm Progress:
…nearly 348 million acres of US farmland were rented out in 2024. Surprisingly, 79% of these acres are owned by non-farming landlords—people who collect rent but don’t work the land themselves.
Will the AI Grow the Food?
Tech companies, too, are increasingly interested in farmland… for their data centers. They are embarking on the largest corporate land acquisition spree since the railroad boom. And while the total agricultural land they occupy might be a small percentage, that doesn’t take into account their effect on water and electricity supplies for farms that produce things humans actually need.
A scandal far larger than data centers or foreign ownership continues to be the fact that the US still produces massive amounts of agricultural commodities, but while much of it is earmarked for exports, working-class communities are targeted with ultra-processed —and ultra-profitable— products, and many still struggle to afford even that. Hunger affects 48 million Americans, including 20 percent of its children.
No matter. Even if the AI can’t make food, or help Americans get clean drinking water, or healthcare, or housing, ungodly amounts of social investment flows towards AI. Four of the main private arms of the US government— Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon— are forecast to drop $650 billion on AI in 2026 alone. So what can it do?
It can reinforce neoliberal structures built by the titans of death:
It threatens to narrow our institutional imagination to the dreams of monopolistic firms and flood the zone with propaganda to reinforce these nightmarish visions, rehabilitate reactionary ideologies that pine for the ancien régime, and serves to enrich some of the least among us: white South Africans who don’t seem to have gotten over the end of apartheid. The concern about the Subprime AI crisis, as Ed Zitron puts it, is that it will not only misallocate resources in a bubble that’ll burst and leave behind immiserated masses, dessicated public institutions, and an increasingly withered capacity for political action not aligned with Wall Street/Silicon Valley’s interests BUT that it’ll empower masters of the universe like Peter Thiel who seem interested in building the worst possible future for all but themselves.
Serving Eugenicist Oligarchs
Ah, yes. Peter Thiel. The co-founder of Palantir, which has been in the news quite a bit recently—and much longer here at Naked Capitalism—for its quest to become the towering global panopticon (and executioner).
Those who serve are serving Thiel, Palantir, and the AI machine.
The Pentagon is now using Palantir for its kill chains and is expanding its use. And like all the equipment and ideology used on the battle fields “over there” it is increasingly coming home to the national Night City:
keep coming back to this quote from “Neuromancer” as of late:
“But he also saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself.”
— COSMIC 🖖🏾 SLOP (@afrocosmist) March 2, 2025
What of the ideology being served? One could argue Thiel is now the leader of the tech-based section of the military-industrial complex, and he has for years tutored Vance. Does the latter share Thiel’s vision for “post-democratic” rule? As Thiel has said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Are service members serving the United States of America or “The Technological Republic”?
Because we get asked a lot.
The Technological Republic, in brief.
1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.
2. We must rebel…
— Palantir (@PalantirTech) April 18, 2026
That’s a fair question to ask if we consider three points:
The support for “post-democracy,” which is rampant in the Trump administration.
Lest we fall into the trap of believing this is only a Trump phenomenon, consider the following from Imperfect Guardians published by California Law Review, which lays out in detail what we already knew about the dominant ruling mindset on the other aisle of the uniparty:
‘…confidence in the comparatively reactionary character of ordinary, working-class, and poor people in the United States is in no way proportional to the evidence. That confidence reflects less a grounded finding, and more ideology or faith in the need for elite rule. To allow these commitments to go untested is particularly dangerous in the face of the authoritarian politics of hyper-concentrated wealth and power that has become a feature of contemporary life. Such discourse diverts attention from the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the U.S. state and allows governing elites to blame “the people” for problems elites have a disproportionate hand in creating.’
3. The immense power of these oligarchs whose lines of thinking are very much out of tune with what people think of when they invoke the defense of “our way of life.”
The billionaire vampire Thiel, for example, spent part of his childhood in South Africa where his father was helping the apartheid regime mine uranium in a secret effort to obtain nuclear weapons. More from the Financial Times:
Southern Africa under apartheid offered an extreme version of some of the main themes of American life today. First, there was tremendous inequality. The mine where Thiel’s father worked was “known for conditions not far removed from indentured servitude”, writes Thiel’s biographer Max Chafkin. “White managers, like the Thiels, had access to a brand-new medical and dental centre in Swakopmund and membership in the company country club.” The mine’s black migrant workers lived in work camps.
To whites of a certain mindset, this inequality wasn’t due to apartheid. They thought it was inscribed in nature. Certain people were equipped to succeed in capitalism, while others weren’t. That was simply the way it was, and it was pointless to try to mess with nature. Two of Thiel’s contemporaries at Stanford in the 1980s recall him telling them that apartheid “works” and was “economically sound”.
Thiel is just one of many reactionary influencers with roots in Southern Africa who found a natural home in Silicon Valley. The eugenist policies pushed by men like Thiel, Musk, and David Sacks have found fertile ground there dating back at least as far as the founding of Stanford University in 1885. Leland Stanford, for example, went from breeding horses in a particularly ruthless way to trying out such practices to weed out the weak on humans.
So while Thiel, Musk, and friends look to correct what they see as failures in South Africa they also continue a long line of Silicon Valley eugenicists who want to gift Stanford’s equine engineering for all of us:
The tech billionaire [Musk] frequently invokes IQ, a flawed and long-debated measure of intelligence. His fever dream of a crumbling civilization can only be salvaged when “smart” people pump out more babies. What constitutes a smart person, he doesn’t make explicit, though in tech-natalist circles they usually mirror the entrepreneurs declaring the mandate. To that end, Musk has personalized his advocacy for pronatalism by challenging himself to help “seed the earth with more human beings of high intelligence”.
How does that play out beyond Musk sowing his seed far and wide? It’s been playing out for a long time through neoliberal social murder, but it’s becoming increasingly brazen:
In case it’s not clear to some people, this is classic eugenicist rhetoric and a core feature of fascist politics. It implies that sick and disabled people are failing ‘the nation’ and are thus a burden to be stigmatized, shamed, and eliminated. pic.twitter.com/esdqmkSClP
— Eric Reinhart (@_Eric_Reinhart) May 12, 2025
On the policy side, Trump-DOGE cuts to Medicaid, Social Security, Housing and Urban Development, SNAP, USAid, etc. can largely be viewed as efforts to cull the herd.
Meanwhile, nepotism bums like Hunter Biden and all the Trump offspring who survive and profit off their connection to government would probably be getting by on the public’s dime in another way if not for their bloodlines. They put the entire eugenicist argument to shame from the likes of the South African apartheid enthusiasts, but serve our military members must in order to preserve the hierarchical falsehood by helping to enrich Hunter in Ukraine and the younger Trumps through their drone business.
Serving for Zionism and Epstein’s Secrets
And now we come to the most obvious, which is increasingly obvious nowadays, although I think focusing solely on Israel lets the above-mentioned forces off the hook. There is overlap, however.
When Trump says “we only lost 13 people” who or what were they serving? This?:
For Miriam Adelson’s dreams?
WOW!
At the Israeli-American Council, Miriam Adelson is asked how she is buying influence over American politicians.
Recognizing that it probably isn’t smart for her to talk openly about this, she hesitates and answers:
“Can you allow me not to answer? … I want to be… pic.twitter.com/gOGXm8xMDR
— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) January 18, 2026
To help keep the Epstein secrets of high-place paedophiles, human traffickers, and other sexual criminals?
Overlapping with the Zionists’ zealotry are the dreams of the windfall from a conquered West Asia. As the Zionist think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies notes, the US is also sacrificing up its service members in pursuit of a “trillion-dollar opportunity”, which shows yet again how “defending US interests” really means spreading freedom for transnational capital:
The energy sector alone could deliver $300 billion in non-ownership revenues through services, reconstruction, equipment, and technology licensing. Upstream drilling tech, midstream pipelines, downstream refining upgrades, and risk-management services would flow to companies like ExxonMobil and Halliburton…additional sectors from water infrastructure and AI networks to biotechnology, healthcare, finance, and entertainment could add $350 billion. U.S. firms in IT, pharmaceuticals, and consumer goods would tap into an educated, 90+ million-strong market eager for American products. Tourism could boom with resorts and hotels, while mining critical minerals would secure supply chains for American tech. Wall Street could be the main driver of many of the deals, which will generate significant fees and other services revenue.
Will that money flow to the strip mined hinterlands of America? Let’s not kid ourselves. And just like all those abandoned towns scattered throughout the imperial interior, those who serve can look forward to one day being abandoned as well.
Pain at Home for Gain Over There?
The number of homeless veterans sits at more than 30,000, and the Trump administration is doing away with one successful policy putting a dent in the numbers: a housing first program targeting those who served.
Is it any wonder the US is facing a military recruitment crisis? From the Georgetown Security Studies Review:
The inability of the military to meet its recruitment goals is well-documented by the Department of Defense (DoD). Nearly all of the DoD Inspector General’s Top Management and Performance Challenges reports from FY2016 to FY2025 raise concerns about “Building the Future Force” and “Increasing Military Readiness,” of which recruitment is a critical part. These challenges have gained the attention of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, garnering over 30 mentions during Secretary Hegseth’s confirmation hearing in January.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, and others are trying to appeal to a white christian nationalism and the freedom to commit war crimes. And perhaps that appeals to some, although hardly enough to man a global empire.
Ultimately, it comes down to the economy. More from the Georgetown Security Studies Review:
…the recruitment crisis is not a new phenomenon—it is a dilemma as old as the all-volunteer force itself. Historical trends show that ever since the draft was abolished in early 1973, military recruitment has risen and fallen with the economic tide. When the economy is strong, fewer Americans enlist due to higher-paying opportunities in the civilian workforce. By contrast, when military wages compete with civilian jobs, enlistment is more stable. For example, in the 1970s and 1980s, military recruitment benefited from wage stagnation and a poor economy.
Many “serve” because they have precious few other options and are looking for a paycheck, a one-way ticket out of all the death, despair, and dead ends all around them. Oftentimes they’re sad about that. And they’re pissed off and looking for someone to blame. And the violence flows outward. As Joe Bageant wrote in “Deer Hunting with Jesus”:
The tide of our national meanness rises incrementally, one brutalizing experience at a time, inside one person at a time in a chain of working-class Americans stretching back for decades. Back to the terror-filled nineteen-year-old girl from Weirton, West Virginia, who patrols the sweat-smelling halls of one of the empire’s far-flung prisons at midnight. Back to my neighbor’s eighty-year-old father, who remembers getting paid $2 apiece for literally cracking open the heads of union organizers at our textile and sewing mills during the days of Virginia’s Byrd political machine. (It was the Depression and the old man needed the money to support his family.) The brutal way in which America’s hardest-working folks historically were forced to internalize the values of a gangster capitalist class continues to elude the left, which, with few exceptions, understands not a thing about how this political and economic system has hammered the humanity of ordinary working people.
So here’s to this Memorial Day remembering who the real enemies are.
