Abstract

'Kennard reports with devastating precision.'
Naomi Klein

While working at the Financial Times, investigative journalist Matt Kennard uncovered a scam - a deception and rip-off of immense proportions. 

From slanging matches with Henry Kissinger to afternoon coffees with the man who captured Che Guevara, Kennard’s unbridled access over four years to the crème de la crème of the global elite left him with only one conclusion: the world as we know it is run by a squad of cigar-smoking men with big guns, big cash and a reach much too close to home.

But, through encounters with high-profile opponents of the racket, such as Thom Yorke, Damon Albarn, Gael García Bernal and others, Kennard shows that human decency remains. Now it’s time for the world’s citizens to also uncover the racket.

‘A first-class piece of radical investigative journalism.’
The Journalist

'The Racket is an engaging insider’s account of how the United States has spent the past 70 years constructing an intricate web of economic control across the globe, enforced by violence as a last resort, which sucks wealth and resources from the poor world to the rich.'
Julian Assange

'If I was editor of an old-fashioned newspaper, the kind that published and be damned, I'd hire Matt Kennard. The Racket is a front page story.'
John Pilger

'Kennard reports with devastating precision and a formidable sense of urgency.'
Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine

'Matt Kennard threw away a cushy career with an establishment newspaper just to let you in on a secret: you don't get the story, you get the cover-up. From Honduras to Haiti to Washington to London, Kennard lets us in on the details of buried truth.'
Greg Palast, author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

'A crucial exposé of the powerful, of injustice, and of the war against the poor. It should inspire all of us to fight back.'
Owen Jones, author of Chavs and The Establishment

'This is radical journalism of the highest order.'
Socialist Review

'A brilliant atlas of what Kennard calls 'heavy history' - the hurricane-like path of global destruction wrought by neoliberalism and wars against the poor.'
Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums and In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire

'Matt Kennard's perceptive direct reporting and analysis of policy aim to expose 'the racket' that dominates much of global society and to 'blow their cover'. His in-depth studies, ranging from Haiti to Palestine to Bolivia to Honduras to the destitute in New York City and far more, bring home in vivid and illuminating detail the reality of life and struggles of much of the world's population, their defeats and victories, their suffering and vitality and hope.'
Noam Chomsky, author of Hegemony or Survival and Failed States

'Matt Kennard's The Racket is a powerful tool for self-education: it offers essential information about the insatiable and sordid nature of global, elitist, exploitive, profit-blinded governments and institutions that have, together, perfected the task of making billions of people miserable, poor and fatally unhappy. It also offers testimony from activists and artists who are not giving in, giving up, or lying down.'
Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple

'This firecracker of a book, written by a former insider journalist who realised the true, exploitative agenda of corporate media, unleashes a gonzo journey across the world of US empire. From Palestine to Bolivia and America to South Africa, reporter Matt Kennard provides a roadmap of deformed economics, state violence and inspiring resistance. The Racket's key message is that another, more just world is possible when political and media courtiers of power recognise their own complicity in Washington's destructive policies in the name of 'development', 'humanitarian intervention' and 'liberation'. Read this book, be startled and then take action.'
Antony Loewenstein, Guardian columnist and author of Profits of Doom

'Matt Kennard reveals the ruthless criminal dynamics of global imperialism. His analysis is richly researched, keenly illustrative, and consistently on target. May this book get the wide readership it deserves.'
Michael Parenti, author of The Face of Imperialism and Profit Pathology and Other Indecencies

'The Racket is tough, angry, relentlessly researched and riveting, in the grand Chomskyian tradition but with the added value of the journalist's mobility and on the spot coverage. Kennard's range is wide, both geographically and topically, but with a single target - the depredations of the US superpower's corporate and political elites on their own home turf and abroad that the lap-dog media rarely touch.'
Susan George, author of The Lugano Report: On Preserving Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century

'I congratulate Matt Kennard for this brutally honest work. We need Kennard and other writers like him who have the courage and creative mind to expose the lies and deception of the Free Market, Free Elections, Free Choices, Democracy, Peace, Cooperation, Friendship, Partnership, Equality, Justice and other beautiful words hiding savage brutality, violence, terrorism, colonialism, and imperialism.'
Nawal El Saadawi, author of Woman at Point Zero

'Drawing on his wide-ranging in-depth investigations of exploitation and resistance from Haiti to Tunisia, Matt Kennard provides a valuable portrait of the structure and dynamics of the world’s biggest criminal enterprise. A masterpiece of engaged journalism.'
Walden Bello, member of the House of Representatives of the Republic of the Philippines and author of Capitalism’s Last Stand

'The Racket is a well-researched political tour through weaponized corruption and tyranny, destitution, robbery, mass murder and concluding in the censoring of the arts in the United States and Britain. Matt Kennard puts no deodorant on the reptiles waste in the imperial barnyard.'
Gavin MacFadyen, director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism

'Matt Kennard exposes the failure of US neoliberalism and a major reason why China's star is rising while US foreign policy is imploding into a black hole.'
John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman

Matt Kennard is a fellow at the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Irregular Army (2012) and has worked as a staff writer for the Financial Times in London, New York and Washington, DC. He has written for the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and The Guardian.