The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire – Kennard Matt (2024)

While working for the Financial Times, investigative journalist Matt Kennard had unrestricted access to the highest levels of the global elite. From confrontations with Henry Kissinger to afternoon coffees with the man who captured Che Guevara, Kennard spent four years collecting remarkably candid testimony from those directly involved about how the global economic system operates beyond its convenient myths. He reached one conclusion: the world as we know it is controlled by an exclusive class of American racketeers with virtually unlimited weapons, money and influence extending far too close to home. Because of the nature of the Financial Times, Kennard could not publish these findings as part of his day job. The Racket is the result, presented here in a fully updated second edition. Reporting from across the United States, the United Kingdom, the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, Kennard offers startlingly clear and concrete evidence of unchecked, interconnected systems of exploitation around the world. Encounters with prominent opponents of the racket, including Thom Yorke, Damon Albarn and Gael Garcia Bernal, also offer a glimpse of a growing resistance that needs to prevail. This second edition includes a new preface by the author and a new foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges.