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 US 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 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 United States 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.  But they’re there to enforce US power and enforce US corporate power.

Exposing this facade, as Kennard does, quickly exposes the true nature of the “benevolent” US organizations operating overseas: “The US is the major impediment to human progress.”

His reporting and research paints a clear picture of how the modern day empire works. US subversion in Bolivian elections, US presence on military bases around the world, US undermining of anti-imperialist British politicians and, of course, US subservience to Israel all paints this bloody picture. “The primary role of the US Empire is to make a global economy run in the interests of American corporate power.”

Republished from The Chris Hedges Report, Substack, Dec 05, 2024

The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel

TRANSCRIPT

Chris Hedges

The consequences of US intervention abroad are impoverishment for workers and the installation of puppet governments that are enemies to national sovereignty, the reality of US imperial power, Riley notes, is not covered in domestic media, which continues to pump out the fictitious narratives of the US as a light among nations and a beacon of human rights and democracy. But the ugly face of American power, especially with its complicity in the genocide in Gaza, has turned the country into a hated global pariah. Joining me to discuss his book The racket：A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire, as Matt canard, who is head of investigations at the investigative journalism website Declassified UK, which he cofounded with author and historian Mark Curtis. I think the power of the book is that, by the time you’re done, you have delineated most of the patterns of control, most of the methods or tools the US uses, and not just in the Global South, but even within the UK and we can talk about that. But let’s begin with some of the examples I alluded to in the introduction. Bolivia, I mean, maybe we can start with Bolivia and then talk about Honduras and Mexico, but let’s start with Bolivia.

Matt Kennard

Yeah, Bolivia is a very interesting case, and should be much more widely talked about amongst progressive forces around the world, because, in my opinion, it might be the most successful, sustained experiment in democratic socialism in history. Evo Morales won the election in 2005 and took power in 2006 and he was the first indigenous president of Bolivia. This is a country which had effectively been under the control of white-skinned elite since the Spanish came and the indigenous people have been brutally repressed in all sorts of ways for centuries. And he came up in a democratic revolution and really straight away, transformed the society. So within the first 100 days, had a program of nationalization of different industries, investment in education, healthcare, all the stuff we’re told that the World Bank and others are concerned with but actually promote policies which do the opposite. But anyway, he was a huge success, and I was quite inspired by watching this democratic revolution from the UK at the time. And then I went to the (United) States and continued to follow it.

And then in 2008, straight away, there were attempts at subversion. In fact, there’s a quote in the book from an American I interviewed when I was in Bolivia who was an activist, but he went on his trip in Bolivia, and there happened to be some US embassy, USAID officials on it as well. And he’s quoted in the book talking about, he overheard them talking about how we got to get rid of Morales, quite explicitly. But the US subversion started right away, but it picked up in 2008 when the eastern provinces threatened to seed from Bolivia, which has been one of their goals ever since they didn’t control central government, they basically went to break up the country. In fact, that was only kind of reversed, because Hugo Chavez was in Venezuela at the time, and he threatened to invade if they overthrew democracy, or at least illegally ceded. Anyway, I went there when I was at the Financial Times, and it was a real window into how the US Empire operates because, essentially, all the institutions you’ll talk about, the patterns, I call it empire of acronyms. When you go to these countries, you see NED (National Endowment for Democracy), USAID (United States Agency for International Development), DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), if you look hard enough. And what all these institutions have is huge amounts of ideologies bolted onto them to justify them as benevolent organizations which take great things to the developing world. So Drug Enforcement Administration, we’re told, is about stopping drug production and cracking down on narcos. National Endowment for Democracy is about promoting democracy. USAID is about aid and bringing wonderful benefits to poor people. And that kind of works okay in that ideology and that propaganda works okay when things are running as they should, which is you have some client ruler who basically just does whatever he’s told by Washington and by corporations which want to ransack the country for resources. But obviously that wasn’t the case in Morales’s case and so all the different pressure points were exposed, and all those organizations became exposed as well.

So I started looking into the National Endowment for Democracy and looking into, okay, what are their programs in Bolivia? And you realize, actually, it was nothing to do with promoting democracy. What was it? They were funding groups which were opposed to Morales and trying to bring him down. USAID is the same thing. And I got internal reports when I was in the Financial Times in Washington, and sent Freedom of Information Act requests and had tons of data. And then also read every single cable, when the WikiLeaks cables came out from 2005 to 2010, which is when they were up to. And it just shows that there was a wide-ranging effort to destroy this really promising development, not just for Bolivia, not just for Latin America, but for the whole world. Because we’re constantly told, Oh, socialism doesn’t work. You can’t run an economy based on the needs of the people. You need foreign corporations to come in and develop resources. That’s like the strongest ideology they promote. And obviously they promote it for a reason, because it enriches corporations and the 1 percent. And they say, well, if you have socialism, what you do is you get dictators and they end up basically just exploiting their people for the regime, rather than corporations. He showed, actually, this is a movement based democratic society. And the point is, that is what happened, that occurs naturally a lot of time and huge amounts of resources are put in by the US to try and smash that hope when it arises. And they nearly did it in under Morales. And in fact, there was a CIA-backed coup in 2019, which involved other organizations as well, based in Washington, the OAS (Organization of American States). And again, not talked about enough on the left, but that was a majorly historic moment, because he was taken out in a US-backed coup in 2019 but returned and democracy was restored the following year. And I don’t know of any other case where a CIA coup like that has been reversed that quickly, and democracy has been restored. And his party, which had won the election in 2019, won the following elections the following year.

So it really opened my eyes to the nefarious nature of the US Empire, the fact that it is the biggest enemy of human progress, I believe, around the world, because it smashes any leader, any movement that wants to do things differently. And the key point is it wants to use the resources of their country for the people, rather than the global market and global corporations. And obviously, the key point of all this is that this is the opposite of the propaganda we’re fed from the moment we’re born, effectively, in the US—and the UK as well—which is that the United States is unlike all previous empires which did operate on exploitative terms, but the US is different. It operates on noble principles like freedom, democracy, development, whatever these words are, and it’s pervasive. You have to believe that to work in the mainstream media, effectively. For the Financial Times, you can’t believe what I’ve just said about US power. So it works in a filtering mechanism. And I realized as well, when I was at the Financial Times, I couldn’t write about US subversion of Bolivia, which I was seeing, which, if you actually had a free media, you’d be free to write stuff about that. If I wanted to publish stories about Chinese or Russian interference in a country I was visiting, they’d welcome it and promote it and pay me to do it. But when it was US subversion, I was getting no’s from all editors about specific stories. So what I’ve realized quite early on being at the Financial Times was I’m not going to stay here because I can’t do the journalism I want to do. So what I want to do is collect as much information as I can from the coalface to try and expose how the system works when I leave, which is what the racket is. And effectively, what the racket does is use a lot of the information I gathered at the Financial Times, and obviously you have access, which is amazing. Like when I went to Bolivia, I could interview the chargé d’affaires (a diplomatic official who temporarily takes the place of an ambassador). There wasn’t an ambassador, because they’d been kicked out. But I went to the US Embassy and interviewed the chargé d’affaires. I interviewed USAID and then cross referenced that with the WikiLeaks cables. Because the WikiLeaks cables are the best window we’ve got into how US Empire really works and how US foreign policy really works, because they’re talking, they think privately, and they’re much more honest, obviously, and there isn’t the space for the ideologies, which I’ve talked about, so you can get the real information. And what you see is that they just admit in private that all the stuff they’re saying in public is rubbish.

And actually the cables showed, in the case of Bolivia, that they were actively working with the opposition to take down Morales. So I think that Bolivia is actually the longest chapter in the book, because I feel like it’s such an important case study, because, as you say, it’s also patterns. What I’ve described in Bolivia has happened in countless other countries. Anytime a Democratic left leader who wants to use their resources comes along, the NED are mobilized, the USAID mobilized. DEA is mobilized. And it’s very, very hard to move in that in that ecosystem, and that’s why they want it. It’s a straight jacket. And actually, Evo Morales realized that quite early on, and he kicked out USAID, and he kicked out the DEA, which I think is a prerequisite for, actually, any leader in the global south wanting to run their country as a sovereign country, you need to get rid of these agencies, because these agencies aren’t there to help you. They’re there to enforce US power and enforce US corporate power.

Chris Hedges

Well, they also work in tandem with a banking system to strangle the economy. That’s certainly what they did with Syriza (the third largest party in the Hellenic Parliament) in Greece. So there are the internal organizations. You have a line in the book that the NED just does publicly what the CIA used to do in private. But they have the ability to essentially shut the country down.

Just before we go on, I want to talk about the WikiLeaks cables. But that pattern has been—I actually studied Spanish in Bolivia and Cochabamba and lived in Latin America for six years—that pattern has been repeated for decades. Whether it’s (Salvador) Allende in Chile, whether it’s (Jacobo) Árbenz in Guatemala, any time there was movement, a popular movement, that sought to reclaim sovereignty, control over… of course, in Bolivia, a lot of it is tin, the famous tin mines that the US intervened on behalf of corporations. And I think a lot of people—you and I do—but a lot of people don’t realize how important the WikiLeaks cables were not just for the debacles and war crimes in Iraq, but for shining a light on US complicity. I mean, Haiti being one of the most—you write about Haiti as well—but the WikiLeaks cables exposed that the US government, on behalf of US corporations, which ran sweatshops in Haiti—you also write about this in Honduras—but was working to essentially suppress a movement to raise the minimum wage to, I mean, something insane. Were they trying to get $2 an hour? I don’t remember how much. But talk a little bit about the importance, because in independent media in the Global South, the WikiLeaks cables—which was also true in Tunisia—were huge, a huge revelation.

Matt Kennard

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s the best repository for historians and journalists there’s ever been for understanding the global system. Because US power is the governing dynamic in world affairs. If you look from what’s going on in Gaza to regime change in Venezuela, Syria, wherever you look, American power is the overriding factor. And we were given decades of them speaking privately—what they thought was privately—about how they operate. And actually its significance is why that is completely ignored by the mainstream media in the US and the UK because their role is not to reveal truth. They say it is and we’re told it is in civics class and journalism school, we’re a check on power. But what you realize when you work on the inside, and I’m sure you saw this at the New York Times as well, is that, actually, if you start doing proper journalism, like Julian Assange did, and really revealing truth, as we’re told we should, then you get attacked by the journalists that operate at the top of society. And one of the awakenings I had when I was at the FT was I was there in Washington—this was under the Obama administration—when the WikiLeaks cables first started coming out, and I remember being really enthused and excited about this. I was thinking, this is a treasure trove for journalists. And I remember the first editorial meeting at the FT’s Washington Bureau and it was just everyone attacking Assange and basically dismissing the cables. And I was just thinking, wow, if that is their reaction to the revelations that might give us some clue about how the system really works, then they don’t see their role as really exposing power. What they see their role is—and I still believe this—is that they project an image of that through covering frost stories, scandals like small fry but never, ever do stories which impact on our understanding of how the system works at a much deeper level. That’s the red line for these journalists, because, effectively—in fact, the liberal class may be even worse than the right wing. In fact, that I think they are—because they essentially believe in the system, and they have to believe in the system to get where they are. So I think the WikiLeaks cables are hugely significant, and they just appear all throughout the book. In fact, the book is dedicated to Chelsea Manning, because she changed history by what she did, and it was completely heroic. And again, it wasn’t supported by the media in the way that she should have been. It wasn’t supported by the Guardian in the way they should (have) been. Julian Assange wasn’t supported by the Guardian. Look at—not to go off track too much—but this is very linked to the US Empire, because this was a historic moment in exposing the US Empire, what Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning managed to do. But the Guardian was the paper that published most of those early leaks, and then they later on became the biggest vehicle for the information war, which was being fought against him by the CIA, the British state and other elements. Outrageous. He was in Belmarsh Prison for five years, maximum security prison, without a conviction for anything. The Council of Europe just voted—which is the highest human rights body in Europe, of which the UK is a signatory— they got their parliamentary institution just voted to declare him a political prisoner for the five years he was in. It’s quite incredible that not one UK newspaper has written a single word about it. You would think that the highest human rights body in Europe ruling that we held a journalist as a political prisoner for five years in our highest security prison would interest journalists, and at least should be on the front page of every paper if we had a genuinely free press. Nothing. And that’s because Assange is the enemy, because he took journalism too seriously. And he exposed them, he exposed the American empire. But he also exposed journalism because he set the standard for, actually, how you really do what we’re told you meant to do, which is help our understanding of how our society works.

And in the case of Haiti, I used the cables throughout because, as you say, I think that Haiti is maybe the emblematic example of how this system operates, an emblematic example of how the US Empire destroys countries. Because I was sent there the year after the earthquake in 2010, which was an unbelievable disaster. You know, 300,000 people died instantly. I remember getting there, and I was just, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was apocalypse. The presidential palace had collapsed, all the government ministries, the whole of Port au Prince, which was where I was, was living in tents, the whole of it, just incredible. And I started looking into the history, and that time I was working for the FT so I got the tour that you get as a corporate reporter for an elite paper. And that is how it works. You stay in the five star hotel. You get taken around in an air conditioned 4×4 by the World Bank to the nice projects that they’re funding, and they’re telling you all these wonderful things that they’re investing in and restarting the economy and blah, blah, blah. And it’s very seductive and in fact, if you don’t come in to journalism with a very, very defined idea of how the world works, or at least some kind of backbone to resist that ideology in that seductive system, you don’t go against it. And not many people do go against it. And they were taking me to these special economic zones which were being opened, funded by USAID. One of them was in the north. We flew to the north, and they took me. And I remember we went to another special economic zone which had been set up previously by a company from Dominican Republic, but with aid money. And I was taken in and interviewed the CEO, and they had a union. So I was talking to him about the union, and he was saying, well, we had some teething difficulties, but now we have the best running union in the country. And I remember I looked at the WikiLeaks cables afterwards. And firstly, I found that that SEZ (special economic zone) had been built on peasants’ land that didn’t want to move and had been actually removed by corporate and state forces. And then I found out that the union had been talked about by US officials, because the union had taken its role too seriously and was demanding better rights for the workers, and then was disbanded and then replaced by this, what’s called a yellow union, which basically just works for the corporation. So you saw there’s these two worlds. There’s the fantasy world, the hyper-reality world, which is created for you, if you’re a corporate journalist and you go to Haiti, and it’s very easy to accept, because what’s your interest in not accepting it? And then there’s the real world, which is evidence based and really exposes the dynamics which govern the decision making of the US and (inaudible) in Haiti and other places. And they’re completely at odds, and they never can meet. And that’s why there was a brief opening when WikiLeaks cable started coming out. We did have some real evidence of how the world works. This hyper-reality was smashed.

But actually, I’ve been thinking recently about that because it was an amazing moment but the powerful forces who create the discourse in the US and the UK, they have all the resources, and they managed to—even though we had amazing revelations like the Collateral Murder video and others, which showed that the US just gunned down, journalists and kids and others—it didn’t dent this what we talk about, this overarching ideology of the benevolent and benign American power. It didn’t dent it in the long term, and that’s because they have all the resources to kind of just squash the evidence that comes up. And if it was sustained, it would be but the whole point is, it’s not sustained. It’s this little brief blink, and then you put Assange in prison, and it all goes back to how it was before. So I think us in alternative media, that’s why I think what’s going on in alternative media and the power the Internet gives us to circumvent the mainstream media is so important, and obviously does worry the powers that be, because the Empire operates on propaganda. That is why they took Assange so seriously, because one of their biggest priorities is that the truth about how the world works and in whose interest is being run is central to them being able to project power. If you damage that, and people understand how the world works and what we’re involved in, for example, Gaza, then there will be pressure to change.

And in fact, I do believe that’s what makes a journalist complicit in what’s going on in Gaza now, because we at Declassified, have been doing a stream of stories about the use of the UK base in Cyprus. This is a bit off topic, but it is related to the US, but because the US has been flying flights from there. And that’s caused an absolute scene in Greece. I mean, sorry, in Cyprus, in Greek Cyprus. There’s been demonstrations at the UK base. Presidents on both sides of the border have had to talk about it. Never a word has been written about in the UK media. But if the resources of the BBC and the Guardian were used to really expose the US Empire and its little poodles like the UK, then I think that it would really make the system running as it does, much harder, and they would have to change it. They might get more sophisticated way to propagandize and but that pressure is not there at all, and this is not a left right issue. (The) Guardian, which is held up as the kind of like liberal-left, you can get an anti-imperialist perspective, they’re signed up to the American imperial project and all the propaganda that goes with it. So it’s not about a left-right, the whole of the left-center-right in the establishment, all regurgitated stuff and believe that stuff, and you have to believe that stuff to get into the media and get a column or become a news reporter.

Chris Hedges

That’s what Noam Chomsky told us several decades ago. Just on Cyprus—I think it was Declassified UK, which you run—broke the story that arms shipments were being flown from Cyprus to Israel to fuel the war, the genocide in Gaza. That’s correct?

Matt Kennard

Yes and this is actually really relevant to what we’re talking about, which is US Empire because, obviously, Britain is part of the American empire. We are a junior partner. We’re an adjunct to the whole system. But one of the major ways we remained relevant to the United States after the Second World War, which is the time when we’re told the Empire died but which never happened. It just got repackaged in different ways. But one of the ways we remained relevant was we basically opened up our bases, which we have all around the world— from Falklands to Cyprus to Bahrain to Nepal—we made them also US bases, and Diego Garcia being a emblematic example. That’s actually called a joint base, but unofficially, all the others are joint bases. And I went to Cyprus—so a bit of background on this base as well, which shows how the Empire never died, as the British Empire never died. So Cyprus was a British colony until 1960 when it got independence under Archbishop Makarios, who was a deliberation leader, the first democratically elected leader of independent Cyprus. But in that treaty that the British signed, they retained 3 percent of Cyprus, which we still own, and no one knows about this, even in Britain. So it’s these huge swathes of land which aren’t just military bases. There’s military bases on them, but you’re talking about 3 percent of the island, so they’re big. And I went there and did a series of stories. One of them revealed for the first time the real presence of the US Air Force there, because the British and Americans had said for 50 years, the Americans have a presence there. But they wouldn’t say that size, and they wouldn’t say the complexion, what units were there. But I found that 129 US airmen and were permanently stationed at RAF Akrotiri, which is the main base there. But, as I say, one of the services we provide is not only use, but all UK sites around the world—and this is very important people know this, no one knows this, and I only know this because I’ve been trying to get information—but they operate as black sites for the Americans.

You cannot get a single bit of information about US activities on UK bases. (Inaudible) from the UK side, I’ve tried and they come up with a blanket statement, which is, “We don’t comment on allies’ movements or activities on our own bases.” So it’s more secret, effectively, than our intelligence agencies and our Special Forces, what US do. And they’ve got huge presence within Britain as well. There’s over 12,000 US troops permanently stationed in the UK. Most of them are two sites just outside London called RAF Mildenhall and RAF Lakenheath. Lakenheath, they’re talking about, which rumored and it seems likely that they’re redeploying nuclear weapons, the US is to that. Plus you had the intelligence occupation of Britain. You know, Edward Snowden’s leaks showed that GCHQ Bude—now, GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) is the UK’s largest intelligence agency, it was exposed extensively by Snowden’s leaks. And it has a site in Cornwall, which is in the West of England, by the beach, and it’s called GCHQ Bude and all the transatlantic cables go there. And his leaks showed that the NSA, the National Security Agency, pay for half the maintenance of GCHQ Bude. So it’s effectively a US site. You can’t get any information about how many US personnel are there, or anything, because there’s just a blanket statement saying we don’t comment on intelligence matters. But then you have RAF Croughton, which is another base within the UK itself in the Midlands, where they say that there’s 1,000 CIA officers based there. It’s 25 percent of all communications which come from Europe back to America. Go through RAF Croughton. And that’s also the site where the alleged CIA officer, Anne Sacoolas, killed Harry Dunn, that child. Which was a case which got very big here, I don’t know if it was big in the States. But what you see when you start looking into it…

Chris Hedges

Let me just interrupt Matt, because she (Sacoolas) was then spirited out of Britain, and all the requests to extradite her were met with this false claim that she had diplomatic immunity.

Matt Kennard

Exactly, yeah, and they first denied that she was working for the CIA because it’s not official. None of this stuff is official. They’ve never acknowledged that RAF Croughton is a huge CIA station. So it was all very embarrassing for them. But effectively, the UK just takes its orders from Washington. And the quid pro quo is that the US, I guess, gives us—we can have the pretense that we’re still this powerful force. And the British establishment really care about that. Just on a personal level, there’s an arrogance in the British establishment which has been festered and pickled over centuries of ruling the world, and they don’t want to let go of it. So they’re willing to do anything for Washington if they can stay part of the US Empire. So we have this huge occupation, which means that we’re not a sovereign country. And I know it’s a cliche to say Britain’s the 51st state, but it really is. We cannot go against the US. And actually, the preface to the book is all about this. And again, this was really exposed during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, because that was a historic moment in British history. He was elected Labour leader in 2015. He was the first, well, the second non-Atlanticist Labour leader ever to be elected post-the Second World War, the other one being Michael Foot in 1980 to ’83 but he was destroyed again. But Corbyn really showed that the power that the US still has here.

And actually, when I started looking into all the agencies that you mentioned like the NED—through the whole of my career, I’d always looked at those in the Global South who were operating in weak states and basically running the show and I kind of assumed that even before I was going there, because in a country like Haiti, the states are weak, even one of those institutions is more powerful than government. My hunch was, okay, well, this doesn’t operate the same way in Britain, where we’ve got a longer history, we’ve got these strong institutions. But I realized pretty quick, when I started looking into what these agencies were doing in Britain, that the same patterns were occurring, and in fact, even more resources were going in. Because obviously, as an imperial center, financial capital is at the top priority to keep the UK pro-Atlanticist. So Jeremy Corbyn was a massive, massive nightmare for the US. And in fact, it became really explicit. Mike Pompeo, when he was Secretary of State, who was previously Director of the CIA, came to the UK in the summer of 2019—this was six months before the election of 2019 which Jeremy Corbyn lost to Boris Johnson—but he was recorded privately saying to a group of people, we will do our “level best to stop Jeremy Corbyn becoming Prime Minister of Britain.” And he said it’s too hard to do it once he’s Prime Minister, so we’ll do it now. And it was reported for a day in the papers, but then it just disappeared. And you’re sort of thinking, this should be a huge, huge scandal. This is a senior official coming to the UK and basically saying, we won’t allow it. And there was no investigations of what he meant by that and obviously he was referring to certain programs they had and I think those programs are like the NED.

So I did a story about the NED in the UK, and their investments in the UK, in media organizations picked up massively after Corbyn became leader. And they included groups like Index on Censorship, Bellingcat, Article 19, open Democracy, all had received money since 2015 and it was in the millions of pounds. Plus there’s—I’ll finish with this because there’s a very, very interesting organization, which, again, is the dynamics of it, and the setup of it and how it works is very, very much part of this pattern of how the US exercises power, sort of covertly. But as I mentioned, the only other leader of the Labour Party post-1945 who was non-Atlanticist was Michael Foot, and he was elected leader in 1980, he lost the election in 1983 and left. But the election in 1983, he was really radical. Well, comparatively, like, if you read that manifesto from 1983, he called for the UK to withdraw from NATO, for example. And really showed that he wanted to move Britain away, not towards the Soviet Union, but away from the United States. He wanted Britain to be a kind of non-aligned country. And he lost the election badly and it was called the longest suicide note in history, but declassified US CIA files have shown that they were massively worried about Michael Foot’s leadership and what had brought him to power, which was a real sort of anti-imperial movement within the Labour Party, and the US Embassy, at that point, started this organization, which is called the British-American Project, and it was quite explicitly about kind of cultivating the progressive left end of the British political spectrum into a pro-American position. And it developed massively during the ’80s, and it still exists today. And it was mobilized massively during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour and many, many senior figures in that organization became the biggest critics of Corbyn, and you saw they had to come out the shadows. Because how it’s presented is it’s a nice membership organization where journalists, politicians—intelligence officials as well by the way, UK military as well—get together and they have dinners and events, and they have a conference every year in the US and the UK, alternate years. But what it is actually, is about trying to cultivate and bring the left of the political spectrum away from any anti-imperialist position.

It’s been very successful, and I actually interviewed a MP, or a former MP, called Emma Dent Coad. She won her seat in Kensington for the first time for the Labour Party in 2017, served till 2019 and she’s told me that she was recruited, well they tried to recruit her to the British-American Project in the ’80s, when she was a journalist. And she said that they said, come to this conference. It’s just about helping develop relations between Britain and America and helping poor kids and stuff like that. And she said, something smelled fishy. And this was a senior official in CND, by the way, which was the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which called for the UK to unilaterally decommission its nuclear weapons. But she found out subsequently, she told me this, and this is not a fringe figure or a conspiracy theory, she’s quite a prominent figure here in the UK. She said the boyfriend, who was no longer the boyfriend of this woman that tried to recruit her, told her, actually, I found out that she works for the CIA, and she was working for the CIA at the time. And that’s Emma Dent Coad said that and we put that in the article. Obviously didn’t get any pick up in the mainstream media, but you see time and time again that the CIA, its main focus in the UK has been to try and stop the anti-imperialist left getting anywhere in the Labour Party, and they really had to come out of the shadows during the Corbyn years, because he is a genuine anti-imperialist, and he has a long history of opposing US wars and UK wars. And he was kind of the biggest nightmare for the United States. And they successfully did it, you know? Like Jeremy Corbyn, in 2017, was, what, within 2,000 votes of becoming Prime Minister spread across different constituencies. If he hadn’t been fighting a guerrilla war against these different elements for two years, he would have won that election, and British history would have been different, but the whole point about the British political system is it’s never been allowed to, we’ve never been given a real choice, and we’re not allowed to have a real choice, partly because we’re controlled by the US in all these different ways, military, NGOs, intelligence, and you can’t talk about it. It’s an interference that, literally, you can’t talk about.

So we get endless stories, most of them rubbish, about Russian influence every day, but literally nothing about the fact that we can’t move because we’re controlled by the US. And that figure I mentioned, about over 12,000 US troops permanently stationed, has never appeared in a UK paper, so just omitted from the record. So no one will know that we have this occupation. So it’s a silent empire. And again, as we mentioned, and as you know, this is how it operates across the world. There’s so much propaganda put into presenting the US powers benign and benevolent. But there’s also a whole other side of this, which is propaganda by omission, where all the nefarious things that the US does around the world are just emitted by the oligarchical media so no one knows about it. So we need to change that.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, the first story I ever wrote, I was in college, was a company called Gulf and Western, which owned many corporations, including Paramount Pictures. And I went to the Dominican Republic, they were assassinating labor leaders. I wrote it up, and it was set to be printed in the Outlook section of the Washington Post. I was a freelancer, and Paramount Pictures told The Washington Post that they would withdraw their advertising—millions of dollars of advertising—and the story was never printed. It was eventually printed in the Christian Science Monitor in a reduced form, only because the Christian Science Monitor at the time did not take advertising. So I mean, and of course, you and I both come out of the mainstream media. We understand exactly how that pressure works and journalists, most of the people at the FT or the New York Times are good careerists. You don’t need to write rules on the walls. They get it. They don’t want to become a management headache and end up like you and me. I want to talk about Zionism, because there were two forces that brought down Corbyn. One was this neoliberal American imperial force, but also the way they discredited him was as an antisemite. They got him to purge his own party. You also had the Blairite faction within the Labour Party that was working against him. And part of your book is written from Palestine. So let’s talk about, about that, that force of Zionism, and what you wrote about in Palestine.

Matt Kennard

Yeah, well, I mean, to link it to what I was just saying, I think that Gaza and the horror that we’ve seen over the past year has kind of stress tested the propaganda system, and the propaganda system has failed. You’ve had, like, a year of people, millions of people, and actually the general population, seeing on their phones some of the most awful things they’ve ever seen in their life, just straight terrorism by the Israelis. And yet they’ve seen Joe Biden, who’s a Democrat, and they’ve been told their whole life is a good guy against the boogeyman (Donald) Trump, getting up and defending it all. And ventriloquizing the Israeli propaganda, sending billions in more weapons. And I think that contradiction is really having an impact on a societal wide level. I’ve talked to people who are just—they’re like my worldview has completely changed over the past year because they’re not like us in the sense of that they haven’t worked in it, and they don’t have this kind of understanding because they’re not working within the system, or at least trying to do journalism about this stuff. So if you’ve been fed that propaganda and you’re seeing this, that contradiction has never been as extreme, because obviously US and UK Imperial crimes throughout history, there has been awful stuff happening, similar to Gaza, like what the British did after the Indian Mutiny in 1857, people should look into that. The savagery was off the charts, and then obviously Vietnam.

Chris Hedges

Or the Mau Mau (rebellion in Kenya).

Matt Kennard

The Mau Mau, exactly. And then you have Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. But we didn’t have social media then, like, this is the thing that I think why Gaza is changing the consciousness of humanity, because everyone is seeing it, and the mainstream media, you won’t see it, or you won’t see the real stuff. But there’s a way we can circumvent it. So I think that’s changed the world for the better in that. The cost has been way too high, obviously, because it makes you speechless, often looking at what’s going on. But another part of it is to go to what you talk about Zionism as well, because, previously in the UK, in the Corbyn period, we couldn’t ever talk about Zionism. Even like people around Corbin and stuff, we couldn’t talk about the Israel lobby. We did on the fringes, but we were called cranks and dismissed but it was that people were so scared to touch those two things, and that has also changed. We can talk openly about what is Zionism? It’s a settler colonial ideology which is predicated on the supremacy of Jews over the indigenous people. And its intellectual godfather is (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, who was a fascist and admirer of Mussolini, and kind of his philosophy is one the Likudniks adhere to all that. And the way that the Zionist lobby in the UK and I think around the world, its central goal has always been to present Zionism as a progressive force. They try and link it always with the history of persecution of Jewish people, when Zionism and Judaism are two totally different things. But there’s this real, real attempt to do that. And in fact, within the Labour Party, it was those organizations that really went for Corbyn, because of his pro-Palestine position, nothing else. He’s never said anything antisemitic. In fact, they picked on the most storied anti-racist of his generation in Parliament, by far, Jeremy Corbyn. He’s been a long time supporter of the Muslim community, the Jewish community, every minority. He’s famous for it. So it was kind of like, that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth thing with John Kerry, where Karl Rove said, We got to go for his strength. That’s what they did. Anyway, some of those groups call themselves, have Israel in the title, like the Labour Friends of Israel, but others, like the Jewish Labour Movement, they said they had nothing to do with Israel. But in fact, they’re run effectively as proxies for the Israeli embassy.

And there’s a very good journalist we’ve got in the UK called Asa Winstanley who I think you’ve had on the show before, but he wrote a book recently. But he was literally the only journalist really doing this at the time. There’s more stuff coming out now, but it was completely suppressed. And in fact, I don’t think the Corbyn administration dealt with it at all. They didn’t really realize what they were up against because I think they were quite naive. They kind of got catapulted into this position. No one thought Jeremy Corbyn was going to win in 2015, there was not many personnel around that he could—but they basically, they never pushed back against the smears. They kept saying, We’re sorry, any antisemitism is wrong, which everyone agrees with, obviously, but, they never said, actually, this is a witch hunt which has been instigated by the Israel lobby, actually, and other forces as well, who is useful to destroy the one bit of hope we’ve had in the UK for many generations, which is what they should have said. But again, I think all this has changed now, because I think if we’re looking at what’s going on, and we’re not brave enough to speak in clear eyed terms about what Zionism is and what the Israel lobby is because we’re scared we’re going to get smeared as antisemites or bigots or whatever it is, then you’ve lost your humanity because it’s too serious. And I think there’s a lot of people that have had that realization and are speaking out in a clear throated way, and hopefully it will continue. I mean, I don’t know where it ends. I don’t know what you think, but it seems to me that Zionism is dying in terms of the narrative. I think that—I could talk to the UK side, because we’ve got, actually, a lot of amazing activism in the UK against Israel and pro-Palestine activism. All the biggest marches, actually, about Gaza have been in London, and we have this group called Palestine Action, which is actually making actual strides to shut down Israeli weapons factories, Elbit factories in the UK. But there’s a massive backlash from the state and there’s polls that have come out recently. There was poll that said the favorability for Israel was minus 71 in the UK, and that was the lowest ever in recorded history. And so the population wants an arms embargo on Israel, they want a cease fire, but you’ve got this massive breach now between the ruling class, Labour Party, Conservatives and pretty much the rest of them and the whole population. And that’s not sustainable for that long, I don’t believe.

And what the state is doing in response is to try to discipline the population through legal means. So they’re using these laws that have been that were passed to prescribe Hamas and Hezbollah, which were actually done at the behest of the Israel lobby, by the way. Hezbollah was banned in the UK in 2019 but what the Terrorism Act says in Section 12 is that you cannot voice support for prescribed groups. Now has Hamas and Hezbollah are prescribed, but they’re now using that, they’re wielding that legislation against pro-Palestine activists. So Sarah Wilkinson, who’s an independent journalist, had her house raided by 13 police (officers). This is a woman who runs a Twitter account just giving updates and she was bundled into a van. They threw the urn with her mom’s ashes against the wall. She was held in a police station and interrogated. You had the week before Richard Medhurst, another independent journalist, who was detained for 23 hours in solitary confinement at Heathrow Airport, again, under Section 12 of the Terrorism Acts and charged under it. Richard Barnard, I was just at court the other day in London. He’s been charged under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act for a speech he gave. So they know they’re losing, and they know Zionism is losing because we’re talking about it. People are seeing the real basis of it, which is, it’s a settler colonial ideology, which has no place in the 21st century. We should have left all that behind. But the repression is getting worse here, and we don’t have the culture of free speech that you have in the US. Whatever you think of Hamas and Hezbollah, it’s a massive attack on free speech that you can’t speak freely about resistance groups around the world. It’s kind of tantamount to the US outlawing saying you support the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. It’s an attack on free speech, and it’s attack on the basics of freedom. But it’s being done at the behest of the Israel lobby, and they are clamping down massively now, but I don’t think it will work, because they can’t put millions of us in prison. Well, maybe they can try, but the awakening that has happened here is incredible.

And I see it in the United States as well. Like, look what happened with the student demonstrations. I was a student at UCLA and Columbia at different points in my 20s, and I remember I was a columnist on the UCLA student paper called The Daily Bruin, and you couldn’t say anything about Israel back then, anything. Editors would tell you, don’t say it. If you wrote anything mildly, you’d get attacked. And then you saw UCLA, all these students coming out, doing an encampment. It was the same at Columbia. So things are changing, and I think they know that. But what people are saying, I think it’s quite accurate, is that democracy and free speech is being eroded in the US and the UK to defend the fascistic genocidal regime of Benjamin Netanyahu, which is an absolutely insane scenario. These are victories for freedom that have been won by centuries of popular struggles, and they’re all being dismantled to support this genocidal state, which is smaller than Wales.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, well, they’ve come down very hard on the universities. The universities and colleges spent all summer with security firms, many linked to Israel, to impose all sorts of new rules. You can’t have encampments. You can’t have tables with leaflets, et cetera, et cetera. So yes, the response, especially targeted at the student activists who, perhaps the only people in the United States with a conscience, along with Jewish Voices for Peace and a few others. They’ve targeted them with very draconian means. I want to talk a little bit before we go about the transfer of manufacturing overseas—you raise this issue in particular in your chapter in Honduras—and the role of the US in essentially as the protector of sweatshop labor. So you, after NAFTA, are able to move large industries, the auto industry, etc, over the border into Monterey, Mexico. Workers who were once making $25-30 an hour with union members with benefits, a pension plan. They could buy a house. They didn’t need to work 70 hours a week. They could send their kids to college. That vanished, evaporated and our work in China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, it all becomes the sweatshop labor. But an important point in the enforcer of this sweatshop labor is the US Empire, and that’s something that you write about in the book.

Matt Kennard

Yeah, well, I mean, there’s a whole section in the book. One of the four sections is about the Empire at home, and how the imperial elite in Washington and other places when they do have to defend this system, they will say, Oh, well, we get lots of benefits from being engaged in the world for the people, these resources are coming back, and America is prosperous because of it. But it’s all a lie and you realize that when you start looking at the sorry state of the United States society, like the huge levels of inequality, the poverty, the people without healthcare. It’s outrageous when you’ve got the richest country in history and you have a situation like that, but that’s by design, you know. All that wealth comes back and it’s not distributed in society. In fact, the poor subsidize the rich because the military, their taxes go towards the military, which enforces the system, which then benefits the 1 percent. So, it’s a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich globally and domestically, within the United States, and one of the main ways they do that is by offshoring production, because it takes jobs away from Americans and gives them to the poor, but not good jobs to the poor. So they go there because they can undercut the wages, and they can, in fact, often these sweatshops are built on special economic zones as well. And one of the facets of special economic zones, and one of the incentives for corporations in the US, is that special economic zones have even less regulations than the national state on how you can treat labor and taxes and customs. So you open these sweatshops on the special economic zone, you pay the workers pittance, and you get all the resources out without having to pay customs or tax. So the state in Mexico or Haiti or wherever it is, where they’re offshoring this production doesn’t benefit at all either. And that’s by design, you know. So you just see that the coffers of the state are always the ones that never get increased, and it’s the corporations that benefit, and that operates domestically.

And, I mean, there was quite a lot of opposition to NAFTA within the United States and also within Mexico, because there’s a chapter on them in the book on Mexico, which is a kind of section on resistance and successful resistance. And obviously the Zapatistas rose up in night on the New Year’s Day in 1994, on the first day of NAFTA, because they were rejecting the neoliberal model, the sweatshop model for Mexico and it was an unarmed, well, nearly all unarmed, uprising. They took control of San Cristobal de la Casas, where they were based, with like guns carved out of wood, just symbolically. But they fought a battle and won. There was 1996 the San Andrés Accords gave them, well, not gave them, they won 13 autonomous zones within Chiapas. And I went to one called Oventic. And it’s amazing. And again, a story not many people know and they should, but it shows what can happen when this system is resisted. And I do believe, and I think this is also the case with the previous book I did with corporate power, that these institutions project power so forcefully, partly because they project this omnipotence and this idea that they can’t be forced back. But you see time and time again, that they often are paper tigers, that if there is a resistance, they don’t know what to do and they can’t handle it. And the Zapatistas, as I say, they’re a ragtag army of unarmed, mostly, peasants, won these autonomous zones where the military still can’t go in. But just to go back to the sweatshop point, the US Empire and this sweatshop model and the international development organizations, they’re all intertwined. They’re all part of the same system, and they’re all effectively the US Empire. The US Empire is a system which runs for the benefit of corporate power.

And in fact, the book, the title of it starts with “The Racket”, and that comes from a speech by Smedley Butler, who signed up to the Marines in 1898 during the Spanish-American War, when he was 16. The Spanish-American War, by the way, is when historians say the overseas American empire actually began when they took on the possessions, when they won the war from Spain, like Philippines and Guam and Puerto Rico. Anyway, you’ll know this story, but not a lot of people do in the UK, I don’t know if it’s well known in the US, but Smedley Butler died the most decorated Marine in US history. He was very, very senior. He fought in Haiti, Honduras, China during the Boxer Rebellion, but then later in life, had this awakening about what he had been doing all those years. Because obviously you’re told in the military, and you’re told in society at large, well, the military is about defending the national interests of America or Britain or wherever it is. And when he left, he realized, actually, no, I wasn’t defending American people. I wasn’t defending their security. I was defending American corporate interest and enforcing corporate rule. And the speech he gave, which became very famous, he says I wasn’t in Honduras or wherever it was, for national security reasons. I was there for Brown Brothers bank in New York. And then he says I was a high class muscle man for big business. Al Capone could operate in four districts, I operated on four continents, and he said, War Is a Racket. And I think he’s right, that’s why I opened the book with that quote, because that’s what I saw at the Financial Times. The US Empire—there’s two elements. Obviously, it does want geopolitical control as well, but the primary role of the US Empire is to make a global economy run in the interests of American corporate power. It’s called an open door empire nowadays, because it’s not like old empires, where you’d have formal garrisons of troops and formal colonies, but effectively they are formal colonies because you can’t go against American corporate rule. And if you elect a leader who does like Evo Morales, they will take you out, whether it be through intelligence agencies doing it through subversion. If that fails, we’ll send in the military as a last resort. And you see it, as you said, time and time again, throughout Latin America, Africa, Asia. And we need to, as the left or progressive forces, or anyone interested in truth and progress, understand that the US is the major impediment to human progress. And like that William Blum book called “Killing Hope,” I think that’s a great title for a book, because that’s what it is. It’s wherever hope arises, that maybe things can be a bit different. Maybe humans can live at peace with each other. Maybe humans can actually benefit from the resources they’re living on top of. All these things that we’re told that are basic things that I think are very, very possible, they get smashed by the US state, by the US military, by the CIA in infancy. And we need to fight back against the idea that there’s anything benevolent or anything benign about the US Empire, because that is a prevalent ideology, which is just the opposite of the truth. In fact, it’s Orwellian that anyone actually believes it.

Chris Hedges

Great. That was Matt Kennard on his book, “The Racket: A Rogue Reporter Vs The American Empire.” I wrote the introduction. It’s a great book. I want to thank Christian, Sofia (Menemenlis), Thomas (Hedges), Diego (Ramos) and Max (Jones), who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.

Republishing from PEARLS & IRRITATIONS at:  https://johnmenadue.com/a-rogue-reporter-vs-the-american-empire-w-matt-kennard/

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