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The Racket

A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire
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The Racket

By: Matt Kennard
Narrated by: John Hopkins
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About this listen

 While working for the Financial Times, investigative journalist Matt Kennard had unbridled access to the crème de la crème of the global elite. From slanging matches with Henry Kissinger to afternoon coffees with the man who captured Che Guevara, Kennard spent four years gathering extraordinarily honest testimony from the horse's mouth on how the global economic system works away from the convenient myths. It left him with only one conclusion: the world as we know it is run by an exclusive class of American racketeers who operate with virtually unlimited weapons and money, and a reach much too close to home.

Owing to the very nature of the Financial Times, however, Kennard was not able to publish these findings as part of his day job. Enter The Racket, now in a fully updated second edition. This tell-all book, reported from all corners of the world, will transform everything you thought you knew about how the world works—and in whose interests. Kennard reports not only from across the United States, but from the United Kingdom, the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. In doing so he provides startlingly clear and concrete evidence of unchecked, high-level, interrelated systems of exploitation all over the world. At the same time, through encounters with high-profile opponents of the racket such as Thom Yorke, Damon Albarn, and Gael García Bernal, Kennard offers a glimpse of a developing resistance, which needs to win.

Now more relevant than ever, this 2nd edition contains a new preface by the author and a new foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges.©2025 Matt Kennard (P)2025 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Activists Corruption & Misconduct Economics Politics & Activism Politics & Government United States World

Critic Reviews

In this important book, Kennard explores the direct impacts of militarized, globalized American capitalism on some of the most battered parts of our world. With devastating precision and a formidable sense of urgency, he reports on corporate shock doctors in Haiti, imperialist drug warriors in Honduras, pillaging coal and mining giants in southern Africa and Appalachia — and so much more. Most importantly, he never loses sight of the the growing numbers of resistors holding on to their creativity and self-determination in the face of these forces. (Naomi Klein)
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)
Matt Kennard left his secure job with the Financial Times on a mission to expose the world financial system as a gigantic racket operated by the United States of America for the benefit of a tiny number of extremely rich individuals. [...] He has travelled the world, and has material to work on. There is no arguing with his Chomskyan analysis of the grotesque consequences of US financial imperialism in Latin America, or Washington’s refusal to confront Israel over its maltreatment of the Palestinian population. (Peter Oborne)
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)
I congratulate Matt Kennard for this brutally honest work. We need Kennard in this world (jungle) 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)
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)
Matt Kennard exposes the failure of US neoliberalism and a major reason why China’s star is rising while American foreign policy is imploding into a black hole. (John Perkins)
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