Skip to content
TrackPodcasts
newsSep 3, 20264:02

Hey Americans! Escape Debt By Going To War With Iran!

JOHNSTONE

About this episode

Today in dystopia, war pundits have begun suggesting that the US could recruit sufficient troops for a ground invasion of Iran by offering young Americans debt forgiveness in exchange for enlisting. Reading by Tim Foley.

Get every episode summarized

Each time JOHNSTONE publishes, we email you a written briefing from the transcript — the topics, who appeared, and any specific claims, with the ad reads skipped.

Email me new episodes

Free for 3 shows. No card needed.

Hosts & guests

Transcript ready

56 searchable segments. Every word is indexed and playable.

Hey Americans! Escape Debt By Going To War With Iran!

JOHNSTONE

0:00
4:02

Full transcript

JOHNSTONEHey Americans! Escape Debt By Going To War With Iran!. Machine-transcribed; use the interactive transcript above to jump the player to any line.

Hey Americans, escape debt by going to war with Iran. Today in dystopia, war pundits have begun suggesting that the US could recruit sufficient troops for a ground invasion of Iran by offering young Americans debt forgiveness and exchange for enlisting. I guess it was only a matter of time. In an article titled, The War with Iran Will not be won through airstrikes, so what's left? The Jerusalem posts, AJ, Jeff writes the following. Recruitment numbers are running below what a ground invasion of Iran would require. Estimates for a successful ground campaign against Iran's 31 provincial commands and its mosaic defense doctrine run between 750,000 and 1.5 million American troops. The current active US Army stands at roughly 452,000. The math does not work, obviously. Based on American history, however, there is a path forward. Not conscription or a draft in a World War era sense, but enlistment through a debt

forgiveness program. The average American aged 18 to 34 carries more than $40,000 in non-mortgage debt across student loans, credit card balances, auto loans and personal loans, with some estimates as high as $100,000. This is the cohort the Pentagon needs, a federally administered debt forgiveness enlistment program that fully discharges student loan, credit card and loan balances after 24 or 36 months of service, and extends the GI bill would produce voluntary enlistment at scale. This is not theoretical. It is the American state doing what the American state has always done when it needed staff it could not otherwise generate. World War II offered the GI bill. Vietnam offered college deferments. The post-911 wars offered signing bonuses in citizenship pathways. The Iran War will need to offer debt relief. The economics of the indebted American 20 and 30 something make this the most efficient

conversion mechanism available to the Pentagon and the Trump administration. The moral reading on this is uncomfortable, but states generate the soldiers they need through the incentives that work on the population they have. In a Twitter essay on the same subject published earlier this month, AJ Jeff used more blunt language. Quote, When the choice is decades changed to $45,000 plus in debt or a few years of service that erases it and hands you a clean start, a huge share of desperate young people will take the offer. Not because they support the war, because the debt was engineered into a cage and service is the only door out. End quote. The Jerusalem Post says that Jeff is a Canadian who currently serves as the head of security for an unnamed multinational organization, describing him in his author bio as a retired officer in the Canadian Armed Forces and a recognized expert in international security,

crisis management and geopolitical risk. There isn't much publicly available information about Jeff apart from this, and yet here he is amplified by one of Israel's largest English language newspapers. So we can expect we'll be seeing this idea pop up again elsewhere. It's just everything ugly about the US Empire all rolled up in one neat little package, isn't it? Struggling American citizens strapped with mountains of bills because they live in a dystopia which plunges people into debt for the privilege of living on the planet they were born on, desperately enlisting to go kill people in an imperialist war of aggression overseas in the hope of one day getting to see their heads above water financially. It just might be the most American idea anyone has ever had.

More episodes

More from JOHNSTONE

View all episodes →