MICK MCSHANE is roused by a band whose socialism laces every line of every song with commitment and raw passion
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How UK politics is corrupted by US money
JOHN GREEN recommends a revelation of the brutality, mendacity and cruelty meted out by the global Leviathan that is the US empire
US ASSET: Ruth Smeeth, now Baroness Anderson and CEO of Index on Censorship, with Sir Keir Starmer in 2020. A Wikileaks diplomatic cable published in 2010 named her as an informant for the US embassy in London and as someone [we need to] “strictly protect”
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ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
The Racket (Second Edition)
Matt Kennard
Bloomsbury Academic, £14.99
THIS new edition of Matt Kennard’s explosive book should be obligatory reading for anyone interested or involved in politics. I cannot praise it highly enough.
He meticulously dissects the corpus of the US empire, to reveal a massive conspiracy to maintain its world hegemony. Kennard, though, is no wild conspiracy theorist but a first-class journalist on a mission to explain the mechanisms used by the global empire that is the US. Working as a staff writer for the Financial Times, he became increasingly alarmed at what he was discovering and the realisation that virtually all mainstream journalists and politicians ignore the facts even though they are staring them in the face. He decided to investigate and reveal the monstrous truth.
As Chris Hedges says in his pertinent introduction: “The empire, we are told, fosters democracy and liberty. It spreads the benefits of “Western civilisation”... these are deceptions repeated ad nauseum by a compliant media and mouthed by politicians, academics and the powerful.”
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