US exploiting own people to prosecute war: Analyst

This file photo shows US Treasury Department in Washington DC.

Press TV has interviewed E. Michael Jones, editor of Culture Wars Online Magazine in Indiana, about the US Treasury Department saying a record number of Americans living abroad are renouncing citizenship due to a stringent US tax policy.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: When it comes to this story obviously some people are going to say who wants to give up their American passport? Aside from the money aspect which seems to be one of the reasons, are there other reasons such as the way that the US exercises its foreign policy abroad?

Jones: I think you are talking here about the logic of empire. Once a country turns from being a republic based on the people’s will to an empire which is basically ruled by a small clique of oligarchs, the empire needs to exploit its own people and so it starts off with the low end of the food chain and exploits labor for example, but the demands of the empire take on the life of their own and so it keeps moving up the food chain and it gets to more and more well-to-do people and finally it reaches these people.

So I think that what happens is that people just make a kind of economic calculus and they say ‘what is the benefit? What is the downside?’ and they say there is no more benefit here and so they leave, they hand in their passports.

Press TV: And what about some of the wars that the US has conducted where obviously countries that are being targeted perhaps then translates into some people like one of our analysts Ken O’Keefe who used to be a US marine renouncing his citizenship because of some of these foreign policy adventures that the US has had?

Jones: There is no question that foreign policy drives the wars that are basically the wars of the empire. But what you see as the demands become increasing, they turn on the people who used to be their allies.

Look at the oil industry for example. Basically the war against Russia right now is to drive down oil prices. Well that wrecked the fracking industry; that wrecked the domestic oil industry in the United States. Well they were always the classic allies, if you go back to let’s say 53, the Mossadeq coup, the alliance with Saudi Arabia. The problem with the empire is that it has no boundaries and it keeps turning on its own people in order to generate the income and enthusiasm it needs to prosecute the war. The war takes on the life of its own and people just check out. They say it is not benefiting me and they check out.


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