The Racket

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.

Matt Kennard is co-founder, and chief investigator, at Declassified UK, a news outlet investigating British foreign policy. He was a fellow and then director at the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) in London, UK. He has worked as a staff writer for the Financial Times in Washington, DC, New York, and London. He is the author of several acclaimed books including Irregular Army (2012), and co-author (with Claire Provost) of Silent Coup (2023).

Foreword by Chris Hedges Preface Introduction Part 1: How We Owned You 1. Creating a Modern-day Slave State 2. The Racket 3. Rigging the System 4. Cursing Your Riches Part 2: Enforcement 5. The Mob 6. With Friends Like These 7. Might is Right 8. A Drug War Colony 9. War on Hope Part 3: Reinforcement 10. The First Peoples of America and Their Land 11. Working America 12. Destitute America 13. Lock-up America Part 4: We're Losing You 14. Turf War 15. Freedom Fighters 16. Revolutionaries 17. Successful Defiance 18. Culture as a Weapon of Resistance Afterword Index