The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs. the Masters of the Universe

By Matt Kennard

The tale americans are wont to inform themselves approximately their kingdom is a compelling one: the USA is a strength for strong 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 miles darker fact. the image of the USA he paints is greatly at odds with that noble photo: via Kennard’s eyes we see one other the United States, one who has lashed the area to a neoliberal imaginative and prescient and has rewarded prosperous elites on the rate of standard humans, actual freedom, and the worldwide surroundings. development his case from greater than 2,000 interviews with officers, intellectuals, and artists around the globe, together with Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Howard Zinn, John Pilger, and Banksy, Kennard unearths 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 certain to be arguable because it is to fire up severe reform and revolt.

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“Matt Kennard threw away a soft profession 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 shall we us in at the info of buried truth.” —Greg Palast, writer of The top Democracy funds Can Buy

“A an important exposé of the robust, of injustice, and of the battle opposed to the bad. it may encourage we all to struggle back.” —Owen Jones, writer of Chavs and The Establishment

“In this significant booklet, Kennard explores the direct affects of militarized, globalized American capitalism on probably the most battered components of our global. With devastating precision and a powerful feel of urgency, he reviews 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 conserving 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 terrific atlas of what Kennard calls ‘heavy history’—the hurricane-like course 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 big apple urban and much extra, convey domestic in shiny and illuminating aspect the truth of existence and struggles of a lot of the world’s inhabitants, their defeats and victories, their affliction and power and hope.” —Noam Chomsky, writer of Hegemony or Survival and Failed States

“Matt Kennard’s The Racket is a strong instrument for self-education: it bargains crucial information regarding the insatiable and sordid nature of worldwide, elitist, exploitive, profit-blinded governments and associations that experience, jointly, perfected the duty of creating billions of individuals depressing, terrible and fatally unsatisfied. It additionally bargains testimony from activists and artists who're no longer giving in, giving up, or mendacity down.” —Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of The colour Purple

“This firecracker of a e-book, written by way 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 USA to South Africa, reporter Matt Kennard presents a roadmap of deformed economics, kingdom violence and encouraging resistance. The Racket’s key message is that one other, extra simply international is feasible while 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 ebook, be startled after which take action.” —Antony Loewenstein, parent columnist and writer of Profits of Doom

“Matt Kennard finds the ruthless felony dynamics of worldwide imperialism. His research is richly researched, keenly illustrative, and continuously heading in the right direction. may possibly this booklet get the large readership it deserves.” —Michael Parenti, writer of The Face of Imperialism and Profit Pathology and different Indecencies

The Racket is hard, offended, relentlessly researched and riveting, within the grand Chomskyian culture yet with the further price of the journalist’s mobility and instantaneous insurance. Kennard’s variety is extensive, either geographically and topically, yet with a unmarried target—the depredations of the USA superpower’s company and political elites on their lonesome domestic turf and overseas that the lap-dog media hardly ever touch.” —Susan George, writer of The Lugano file: On holding Capitalism within the Twenty-first Century

“I congratulate Matt Kennard for this brutally sincere paintings. we want Kennard different writers like him who've the braveness and artistic brain to reveal the lies and deception of the loose industry, unfastened Elections, loose offerings, Democracy, Peace, Cooperation, Friendship, Partnership, Equality, Justice and different appealing 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 firm. 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 people neoliberalism and an immense for the reason that China’s superstar is emerging whereas US international coverage is imploding right into a black hole.” —John Perkins, writer of Confessions of an fiscal Hitman

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The CIA had much to do with the coup. Obama with the hot coup, he didn’t realize the de facto govt of [Roberto] Micheletti; notwithstanding, he by no means did a advertisement blockade, like in Cuba. when it comes to Honduras he merely criticized six months of de facto govt, then well-known the govt of an identical coup,” extra Mungia. 166 A D rug W ar C olony Mungia believed that the USA favors a few cartels over others, a view that's gaining expanding forex in vital the USA and is sponsored up by means of revelations from Mexico. He held that “the DEA is particularly corrupt, it’s a cartel, and they're operating with the cartels, in Mexico as well”. Like in Iraq and Afghanistan, the place somebody who has a ranking to settle will erroneously inform the americans that their enemy is al-Qaeda, the cartels in critical the United States are informing on their enemies to the DEA within the wish that the most important army strength on the planet might help them vanquish their competitors. “In Mexico, the rustic begun going undesirable at the beginning of the struggle on medicinal drugs, and in Honduras we're worse than even Mexico,” stated Mungia. The activists in LIBRE, like many others who're status opposed to the US-backed coup regime, think in consistent threat. “Many humans people are lower than possibility of dying, we now have obtained many threats,” he stated. “I have associates which were assassinated, the mayor, the deputies. I misplaced a chum who used to be very shut six months in the past. the 1st deputy candidate [from the LGBT community], he used to be killed. ” That activist used to be a tender guy via the identify of Eric Martinez, who used to be murdered via nameless forces for conversing out too forcibly opposed to the US-backed regime. Mungia stated that the majority of the assassinations have been the paintings of the police or army, a state of affairs reflected in international locations that the united states controls throughout important the USA. LIBRE is an extraordinary beacon of desire in Honduras, the place a feeling of hopelessness pervades. In a rustic the place dissent and democracy is attacked mercilessly, its activists, within the face of violence and homicide, are organizing from a grassroots base to tackle the oligarchy and their backers within the US embassy. earlier than they're winning, even if, loads of blood must be spilt. It’s a similar for these scuffling with US-backed tyrants worldwide, from Egypt to Saudi Arabia. “Honduras is the main anti-democratic kingdom in Latin America,” stated Mungia. and naturally it needs to be this manner, simply because once genuine democracy appears to be like 167 THE RACKET and threatens US pursuits, it is going to need to be slash. What the U.S. likes, and promotes, is “low-intensity democracy”, a political approach within which there are formal elections each 4 years however the social kin of the society, the keep watch over of a wealthy elite, isn't wondered and the troubles of the country’s bad everyone is by no means heard. now not lengthy sooner than I arrived in Honduras there has been what turned an notorious bloodbath. On may possibly eleven, a gun helicopter send, US-owned yet it appears Honduras-piloted (and overseen via DEA agents), murdered 4 humans, together with pregnant ladies.

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