A Racket – without Restraint

Name: A Racket – without Restraint
Start: 2024-10-15T19:00:00+01:00
End: 2024-10-15T21:00:00+01:00
Location: 16-18 Queen Square, Bath BA1 2HN

Schedule

Tue Oct 15 2024 at 07:00 pm to 09:00 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

16-18 Queen Square, Bath BA1 2HN | Bath, EN

How does genocide in the Gaza Strip fit into the bigger picture of America’s imperial designs?
While the media faithfully report Joe Biden’s hand-wringing over Israel’s relentless assault on the people of Gaza, he continues to provide unstinting military, financial and diplomatic support – and the two principal rivals for his office, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, promise only more of the same.
Far from being an aberration and an embarrassment, Matt Kennard argues, the horrors being inflicted on the Middle East are absolutely germane to what he calls ‘the racket’: a global exercise in domination and exploitation by a Western business and political elite.
In Gaza, we see its true face – and now we have seen it, we can never unsee it again.
Matt Kennard is head of investigations at Declassified UK, which he set up in 2019 with Mark Curtis (a former research fellow at Chatham House and head of policy at ActionAid and Christian Aid).
He began his career as a staff writer for the ‘Financial Times’ in London, New York and Washington, enjoying extraordinary access to the political and financial elite, who told him candidly how the global economic system actually works, and in whose interests.
From 2015 to 2017, he worked at the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London, first as a Bertha Fellow and latterly as acting director. He has written for the ‘New York Times’, the ‘Guardian’, ‘New Statesman’, openDemocracy and ‘The Intercept’ among many others.
His first book, in 2012, was ‘Irregular Army: How the US military recruited neo-Nazis, gang members, and criminals to fight the War on Terror’. His second, in 2015, was ‘The Racket: A rogue reporter vs the American empire’, which has just been republished by Bloomsbury Academic in an expanded and updated edition.
He is also co-author with Claire Provost, co-director of the Institute for Journalism and Social Change, of ‘Silent Coup: How corporations overthrew democracy’ (2023).