By Matt Kennard
The tale american citizens are wont to inform themselves approximately their country is a compelling one: the USA is a strength for solid on this planet, a haven for filthy rich upward mobility, and a stalwart defender of democracy and human rights abroad.
With The Racket, veteran investigative journalist Matt Kennard pulls again the curtain and divulges a far darker fact. the image of the US he paints is considerably at odds with that noble photograph: via Kennard’s eyes we see one other the United States, one who has lashed the realm to a neoliberal imaginative and prescient and has rewarded filthy rich elites on the cost of normal humans, real freedom, and the worldwide surroundings. development his case from greater than 2,000 interviews with officers, intellectuals, and artists world wide, together with Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Howard Zinn, John Pilger, and Banksy, Kennard finds how we're bought a dream and the way that dream obscures the truth of the company kingdom, mass incarceration, and the evisceration of human rights.
A ringing polemic that’s powerfully rooted actually, The Racket is as absolute to be arguable because it is to fire up critical reform and revolt.
http://zed-books.blogspot.com/2015/04/a-capitalist-conspiracy-theory-matt.html
“Matt Kennard threw away a soft occupation with an institution newspaper simply to allow you to in on a mystery: you don’t get the tale, you get the cover-up. From Honduras to Haiti to Washington to London, Kennard we could us in at the information of buried truth.” —Greg Palast, writer of The top Democracy funds Can Buy
“A an important exposé of the strong, of injustice, and of the struggle opposed to the bad. it's going to motivate we all to struggle back.” —Owen Jones, writer of Chavs and The Establishment
“In this significant publication, Kennard explores the direct affects of militarized, globalized American capitalism on essentially the most battered elements of our global. With devastating precision and a powerful experience of urgency, he studies on company surprise medical professionals in Haiti, imperialist drug warriors in Honduras, pillaging coal and mining giants in southern Africa and Appalachia—and a lot more. most significantly, he by no means loses sight of the growing to be numbers of resistors preserving directly to their creativity and self-determination within the face of those forces.” —Naomi Klein, writer of This adjustments Everything and The surprise Doctrine
“A fantastic atlas of what Kennard calls ‘heavy history’—the hurricane-like direction of worldwide destruction wrought by means of neoliberalism and wars opposed to the poor.” —Mike Davis, writer of Planet of Slums and In compliment of Barbarians: Essays opposed to Empire
“Matt Kennard’s perceptive direct reporting and research of coverage objective to reveal ‘the racket’ that dominates a lot of worldwide society and to ‘blow their cover’. His in-depth stories, starting from Haiti to Palestine to Bolivia to Honduras to the destitute in ny urban and much extra, carry domestic in shiny and illuminating aspect the truth of lifestyles and struggles of a lot of the world’s inhabitants, their defeats and victories, their anguish and energy and hope.” —Noam Chomsky, writer of Hegemony or Survival and Failed States
“Matt Kennard’s The Racket is a robust software for self-education: it bargains crucial information regarding the insatiable and sordid nature of world, elitist, exploitive, profit-blinded governments and associations that experience, jointly, perfected the duty of constructing billions of individuals depressing, terrible and fatally unsatisfied. It additionally bargains testimony from activists and artists who're now not giving in, giving up, or mendacity down.” —Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of The colour Purple
“This firecracker of a publication, written by means of a former insider journalist who realised the genuine, exploitative time table of company media, unleashes a gonzo trip internationally people empire. From Palestine to Bolivia and the US to South Africa, reporter Matt Kennard presents a roadmap of deformed economics, nation violence and encouraging resistance. The Racket’s key message is that one other, extra simply global is feasible whilst political and media courtiers of strength realize their very own complicity in Washington’s harmful regulations within the identify of ‘development’, ‘humanitarian intervention’ and ‘liberation’. learn this booklet, be startled after which take action.” —Antony Loewenstein, dad or mum columnist and writer of Profits of Doom
“Matt Kennard unearths the ruthless felony dynamics of world imperialism. His research is richly researched, keenly illustrative, and regularly on track. may possibly this ebook get the vast readership it deserves.” —Michael Parenti, writer of The Face of Imperialism and Profit Pathology and different Indecencies
“The Racket is difficult, offended, relentlessly researched and riveting, within the grand Chomskyian culture yet with the extra price of the journalist’s mobility and instantaneous insurance. Kennard’s diversity is large, either geographically and topically, yet with a unmarried target—the depredations of the united states superpower’s company and political elites all alone domestic turf and overseas that the lap-dog media infrequently touch.” —Susan George, writer of The Lugano file: On keeping Capitalism within the Twenty-first Century
“I congratulate Matt Kennard for this brutally sincere paintings. we'd like Kennard different writers like him who've the braveness and artistic brain to reveal the lies and deception of the unfastened industry, loose Elections, unfastened offerings, Democracy, Peace, Cooperation, Friendship, Partnership, Equality, Justice and different attractive phrases hiding savage brutality, violence, terrorism, colonialism, and imperialism.” —Nawal El Saadawi, writer of Woman at aspect Zero
“Drawing on his wide-ranging in-depth investigations of exploitation and resistance from Haiti to Tunisia, Matt Kennard presents a important portrait of the constitution and dynamics of the world’s greatest felony company. A masterpiece of engaged journalism.” —Walden Bello, member of the home of Representatives of the Republic of the Philippines and writer of Capitalism’s final Stand
“The Racket is a well-researched political journey via weaponized corruption and tyranny, destitution, theft, mass homicide and concluding within the censoring of the humanities within the usa and Britain. Matt Kennard places no deodorant at the reptiles waste within the imperial barnyard.” —Gavin MacFadyen, director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism
“Matt Kennard exposes the failure folks neoliberalism and an important this is because China’s celebrity is emerging whereas US overseas coverage is imploding right into a black hole.” —John Perkins, writer of Confessions of an financial Hitman
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Extra resources for The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs. the Masters of the Universe
The impression on family employees is usually disastrous. Sanders persevered: “My personal view is that, specially for this kingdom, the proof is overwhelming that the functionality of those so-called unfastened alternate agreements isn't really to open up international markets for American items made in the US, yet to offer enterprises the chance to close down right here, and circulation out of the country, and make the most of affordable sixty five THE RACKET hard work. ” The influence for operating americans, and the economies of the weaker nations is obvious. Sanders endured: “What astounds me approximately this entire debate is i feel the proof is simply crystal transparent that China has rate us hundreds of thousands of jobs, NAFTA has expense us thousands of jobs, and why humans are looking to proceed to head ahead in a coverage which simply doesn't paintings for American employees, it particularly does communicate, getting again to funds, to the facility of company the USA. You examine the polls available in the market; Republicans have been announcing, no, we don’t imagine loose alternate has performed good for the United States, and but, you’ve obtained Republicans and lots of Democrats who're defying the preferred will, and defying the entire facts, and that simply speaks to the facility of cash. ” the firms take advantage of unfastened alternate, that's why it truly is maintained. a big a part of all loose exchange agreements is the entrenchment of a criminal regime that enshrines “investor rights”, this means that household constituencies are usually overruled in desire of international pursuits. it really is a part of extra integrating international locations right into a international economic climate run within the pursuits of foreign capital instead of humans. “Free alternate agreements” truly frequently don't have anything to do with alternate – within the experience of a mutual reducing of price lists. they're used, as an alternative, to entrench company possession of society via alterations to the legislation in desire of traders. The unfastened exchange agreements, and linked bilateral funding treaties (BITs), usually comprise a mechanism referred to as “investor–state dispute payment” (ISDS) which permits multinationals to sue a nation, in foreign venues, that regulates or acts in a fashion the corporate doesn’t like. energy is tired from nominally sovereign governments and hence their populations. via this big net of treaties and “agreements” criss-crossing the globe, our world’s actual rulers take regulate. sixty six R igging the S ystem And not anything however the fact: reduction and funding yet “free exchange” isn't a lone celebrity. relief, and with it the obsession with “foreign investment”, are the others jewels within the crown. The Marshall Plan – or the eu restoration Act – which used to be the $13. three billion reduction package deal ($1. five billion in loans) given to sixteen Western eu international locations by way of the USA in 1947 is an effective position to begin. One Harvard historian describes the Marshall Plan as “the high-water mark of professional unrequited transfers to overseas governments”. Dexter Perkins, writing in 1948, stated: “The feeling that protection and the protection of unfastened associations are at stake supplied the motive-power at the back of the Secretary’s software. ” the previous US president George W.