The Racket (Second Edition)
Matt Kennard
Bloomsbury Academic, £14.99

THIS new edition of Matt Kennard’s explosive book should be obligatory reading for anyone interested or involved in politics. I cannot praise it highly enough. 

He meticulously dissects the corpus of the US empire, to reveal a massive conspiracy to maintain its world hegemony. Kennard, though, is no wild conspiracy theorist but a first-class journalist on a mission to explain the mechanisms used by the global empire that is the US. Working as a staff writer for the Financial Times, he became increasingly alarmed at what he was discovering and the realisation that virtually all mainstream journalists and politicians ignore the facts even though they are staring them in the face. He decided to investigate and reveal the monstrous truth.

As Chris Hedges says in his pertinent introduction: “The empire, we are told, fosters democracy and liberty. It spreads the benefits of “Western civilisation”... these are deceptions repeated ad nauseum by a compliant media and mouthed by politicians, academics and the powerful.”

Here, Kennard reports from around the world, from Bolivia and Turkey to Palestine, Mexico and many other countries. In doing so, he details the brutality, mendacity and cruelty meted out by the global Leviathan that is the US empire, in pursuit of its own interests. 

In the past, the US waged its wars on two levels: through covert action and, if needed, brute force. They were waged under the guise of “combatting communism” against the poor and all those attempting to combat exploitation and ameliorate their living conditions. 

Of particular interest to us, he also examines the institutions that are central to the maintenance of the US empire and their role in Britain. “The colonisation by the US empire of Britain,” he says, “became particularly clear when the Labour Party elected Jeremy Corbyn leader in September 2015.” Then US secretary of state Mike Pompeo, in a private conversation that was nevertheless recorded, made it clear that a government under Corbyn would not be tolerated by the US.

Organisations like The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the British-American Project (BAP), The Atlantic Council, and the Trilateral Commission are among the key players. The BAP in particular has cultivated links to the media and progressive organisations in Britain to ensure they adopt clear pro-US policies or are neutered.

The infiltration of progressive organisations like CND, Amnesty International, Index on Censorship and others has become an open secret. The US spends billions of dollars fostering such links and “buying” key figures. Just one example: Kennard reveals how a close Starmer supporter, Israeli lobbyist and Corbyn witch-hunter, Ruth Smeeth, now Baroness Anderson after losing her parliamentary seat, was appointed as the chief executive of Index on Censorship. A WikiLeaks diplomatic cable published in 2010 named her as an informant for the US embassy in London and as someone [we need to] “strictly protect.” That information has not hindered her political career in the slightest.

Kennard’s reporting and the mountains of factual evidence he lays before us make a case that is irrefutable. As long as the US dollar retains its status as the dominant international currency, the US treasury can print as much money as it wishes and provide virtually unlimited finances to the military industrial complex and these associated propaganda organisations. The military machine, by diverting funds and resources to endless war, also disembowels and impoverishes the US itself.

The Racket is a vital source of information about what is happening on a global scale to entrap us all in the empire’s web of deceit and megalomania, if only we are prepared to open our eyes.