The American material life is taken for granted. Things just appear. There is no consideration for what country the Empire destroyed to fuel their cars, which people are earning pennies inside sweatshops for their clothes or how many children’s hands touched the lithium in their phone batteries fresh out of the mine. The U.S. Empire makes sure these realities are out of the public consciousness and only the shiny, finished products end up in the public view, no questions asked. Matt Kennard, founder of the independent investigative outlet Declassified UK, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to talk about his book, “The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire.”
In his book, Kennard details his journey as a reporter for the Financial Times and how his time in the mainstream media permitted him unrestricted access to countries around the world, not to report on the destruction, destabilization and ransacking by the corporate state the U.S. serves but rather on the veneer of what he calls the “empire of acronyms.”
The NED (National Endowment for Democracy, USAID (United States Agency for International Development), DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) all feature in Kennard’s book as the supposed benevolent American representatives abroad. This is what makes them so effective and their strategy unprecedented.
“The United States is unlike all previous empires which did operate on exploitative terms… . It operates on noble principles like freedom, democracy, development, whatever these words are, and it's pervasive,” Kennard tells Hedges.
Exposing this facade, as Kennard does, quickly exposes the true nature of the “benevolent” US organizations operating overseas: “The U.S. is the major impediment to human progress.”
His reporting and research paints a clear picture of how the modern day empire works. U.S. subversion in Bolivian elections, U.S. presence on military bases around the world, U.S. undermining of anti-imperialist British politicians and, of course, U.S. subservience to Israel all paints this bloody picture. “The primary role of the U.S. Empire is to make a global economy run in the interests of American corporate power.”
The Chris Hedges Report 