[Peace-discuss] A Rogue Reporter Takes On The Masters Of The Universe

[David Johnson]

A Rogue Reporter Takes On The Masters Of The Universe

Description: roarmag

 <https://www.popularresistance.org/category/educate/> Educate!
<https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/economy/> Finance and the Economy,
<https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/journalism/> Journalism,
<https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/media/> Media 
By Matt Kennard,  <http://roarmag.org/2015/04/matt-kennard-racket-reporter/>
www.roarmag.org
April 10th, 2015

  Powered by  <https://translate.google.com> Description:
https://www.google.com/images/logos/google_logo_41.pngTranslate

 
<https://www.popularresistance.org/a-rogue-reporter-takes-on-the-masters-of-
the-universe/> 17

 
<http://www.printfriendly.com/print?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.popularresistance.
org%2Fa-rogue-reporter-takes-on-the-masters-of-the-universe%2F> Description:
Print FriendlyPrint Friendly

The media would have you believe that it's simply an accident that 85 people
now own more than half the world's wealth. It's time to blow their cover.

This essay is excerpted from Matt Kennard's new book,
<http://www.zedbooks.co.uk/node/20801> The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs. the
Masters of the Universe, just out from Zed Books.

I started working as a reporter at the Financial Times soon after the
financial crisis began and at the height of the so-called "War on Terror". I
was a young, ambitious reporter assigned to one of the world's most
respected broadsheets, ready to speak the truth. I learnt soon enough that
this was not the place to do it. Maybe I should have guessed. In the
aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, I
had had a partial awakening. As the war drums sounded in 2003, I learnt that
the United States and the United Kingdom, despite now pushing for a war with
him, had, in the 1980s, been supporting Saddam Hussein.

The man we were presenting as the devil incarnate had only years earlier
been our buddy. Soon after, I saw that my government thought nothing of
rewriting intelligence to trick its own citizens into a totally illegal war.
I thought, maybe naively, that working at the FT would allow me to continue
learning, and in some senses I was right, though not the lessons they
intended. There I was exposed to the other side of this war-industry coin -
the world of high finance. These wars were not the vanity project of deluded
leaders; they were merely the latest stage in a global elite's prolonged war
on the people of our world with the sole aim of pumping up their bottom
line. I saw the real rulers of the world up close now - they were not the
politicians but the big money men behind them, the puppeteers who made
everything move. I was stationed at their house organ, so raising the alarm
did not, to put it politely, go well.

Over the following years, I witnessed first-hand how powerful the propaganda
system that covers for these racketeers really is. It is almost impossible
to go up against it as an individual on the inside (I tried). I was based at
the FT in Washington, DC and New York, but I also traveled extensively
during this period, reporting from four continents, more than a dozen
countries and the same number of cities within the US itself. Everything I
saw contradicted what I had been told about how the world works. But as I
wrestled with what I was doing, I knew in the back of my mind that, as a
journalist, speaking out against this contradiction is a bad idea: doing so
will instantly, and adversely, affect your career, which I suppose is why so
few do it. If you speak out against the racketeers, well, you are instantly
anti-American, you hate freedom, you love terrorists and so on.

Ideological "training" of this kind is at its most potent in the
racket-supporting media of the western world where I once worked (and it
usually works to dispel independent thinking). I was actually taught this
eyes-wide-shut philosophy first when I went to do a Masters at Columbia
University's Journalism School in New York, apparently the best of its kind
in the world, but in thrall to the racket and its lies, like the rest of the
American elite. And the attempt to beat these critical thoughts out of my
head continued as I progressed further up the hierarchy of the ideological
system. On the day I left the Financial Times, for example, my boss told me
simply: "Go away and do your 'save the world' stuff and maybe you can come
back when you're a bit older." I took his advice, but I won't be back.
Instead I present, eyes open still, the report they wouldn't send to press.

The racketeers

The United States emerged from World War II in a position of peerless global
power. Western Europe and the Soviet Union were in ruins after six years of
devastating warfare, and the imperial structures that had previously ruled
most of the world were falling apart. The Americans meanwhile had made a
miraculous recovery from the economic depression that had consumed the
nation since the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and its place as No. 1 had been
planned for quite consciously throughout the war. When it was realized in
1945, attention switched to extending the American elite's customer base,
and so, at the close of World War II, the racket was set in place.

The Harvard evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker once told me that power
itself perverts human notions of morality and justice: "Dominance, fairness,
and communality are three very different modes of thinking about social
relationships. Someone in power will tend not to think of his relations to
his or other peons in terms of fairness," he said. The American elite, its
powerful big business players and allied governments (regardless of
political party) are motivated by dominance, not fairness. The people in
power know this - it is the population that is lied to. Of course, the need
to pierce the propaganda bubble is not new. Every emperor, fat cat and
superpower from time immemorial has willingly entertained myths about their
actions so as to utilize the good-will of their people to pursue their own
criminal enterprises.

The historian Cornelius Tacitus said it best at the height of Roman
dominion. "The Romans create a desert," he wrote, "and call it peace." These
myths that Americans are treated to from a young age - and this ideological
training reaches out beyond US borders - still present the US as an
impressive discontinuity in the world of power politics. Unlike all previous
superpowers, the United States is a "moral" power, driven by principles and
values, as opposed to domination and greed. America is "exceptional" we are
told - not exceptionally violent, which is the truth, but exceptional to the
extent that it has a "higher calling"; it is a "shining city upon a hill". A
brief foray into the world with eyes open teaches you quickly that this is
the opposite of the truth. But keeping your eyes open will always be harder
than seeking solace in your own divine moral superiority and the turpitude
of your enemies. And so the myth takes hold. Repeat after me: when the US
does it, Terror is Peaceseeking; Domination is Partnership; Fear is
Stability. It's easy.

The believers

A couple of years after my initiation at the Financial Times a few things
started to become clearer. I came to realize a difference between myself and
the rest of the people staffing the racket - the United States Agency for
International Development (USAID) workers, the economists in the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), and so on. While I was coming to
understand how the racket really worked, I started to see them as willing
dupes. There was no doubt they seemed to believe in the virtue of the
mission; they imbibed all the theories that were meant to dress up global
exploitation in the language of "development" and "progress". I saw this
with American ambassadors in Bolivia and Haiti, and with countless other
functionaries I interviewed. They genuinely believe the myths, and of course
are paid handsomely to do so.

To help these agents of the racket get up in the morning there also exists,
throughout the West, a well-stocked army of intellectuals whose sole purpose
is to make theft and brutality acceptable to the general population of the
US and its racketeering allies. And this system of indoctrination is so
ingrained in the media and university system that it is near impossible to
even divine it. I remember writing an article for the Financial Times about
former Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, who was backed by over a billion
dollars of US aid; the editors got rid of the factual prefix "US-backed"
before Mubarak's name without even thinking. When I submitted another
article using the prefix "Iranian-backed" for the Lebanese militia
Hezbollah, it sailed through. That is how thought control operates and that
is how the racket survives with its moral sheen intact. Power has completely
corrupted the minds of these people.

When Rafael Correa, president of Ecuador, was closing down Manta, the US
military base in his country, he told the Americans that they could keep it
as long as they allowed Ecuador to put a military base in Miami. This was
preposterous to Washington and its lackeys in the media - for them it is
apparently a natural law that the US should be allowed the hundreds of
military bases that disfigure sovereign states all around the world. That is
the imperial mindset and it infects the entire American elite.

What will become clear as you read  <http://www.zedbooks.co.uk/node/20801>
my new book is that the patterns and modus operandi of the racket are
repeated all over the world, over and over again. So, for example, the
manner in which I saw American "aid agencies" and the National Endowment for
Democracy (NED) subvert groups organizing independently in Bolivia is
repeated in Ecuador, Venezuela, Brazil, all over Latin America, and in the
rest of the world. The names of the individuals involved in each case are
different but the dynamic is similar; the racket's method of control, so
clever and hidden, is the same, and the names of the oppressors are
interchangeable with any of the racketeers of the "American era". All have
served the institutions that work to undermine individual or group
sovereignty and increase the racketeers' control, whether the individuals
staffing the racket be nice or horrible, good or bad, well-meaning or
psychopathic - the institutions they serve continue to extinguish the
yearning for independence of people the world over.

There is another, more insidious, part of this global control that I discuss
in my book as well. In addition to the dominance of the US elite, the succor
given to American corporations by the racket has made the proliferation of
US "culture" inevitable, creating a new dimension of so-called soft power.
But, as you will see later, the racketeers are genuinely afraid of the
creative arts. There exists the potential within our culture, and the arts,
not just to expose the racket for what it is, but to help dismantle it. For
this reason the racketeers continue to co-opt the arts and culture as much
as possible: the CIA was supporting US arts throughout the Cold War, and no
doubt continues to do so.

For your own good

The racket is bigger than the US elite, of course, and by now you may be
thinking that it may have something to do with the capitalist system writ
large. Yes, institutions like the World Bank represent a broad global
capitalist class, but the US is the overwhelming power within these
arrangements and the US military is the enforcer of capitalistic forces
throughout our world. The mechanics of the racket have actually been pretty
constant; the institutional structure erected to maintain a pretense of
altruism while practicing savage domination has been replicated across the
world for quite some time now.

I witnessed not long ago, for example, US support for the military coup in
Honduras in 2009, which threw out a democratically elected president so the
racketeers could prop up the business community and their political puppets.
But like I said before, you can be sure that a similar dynamic was in place
when the US helped take out democratically elected presidents Jacobo Arbenz
of Guatemala in 1954 and Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973,  unleashing
decades of hell on the people of those countries. The needs of this
rapacious racket remain the needs of every dominant imperial class,
communist or capitalist - more markets for their products, and complete
subjugation of popular forces in their satellites.

But there is a twist to this story.

The American elite that has grown fat from looting abroad is also fighting a
war at home. From the 1970s onwards, the same white-collar mobsters have
been winning a war against the people of the US, in the form of a massive,
underhand con. They have slowly but surely managed to sell off much of what
the American people used to own under the guise of various fraudulent
ideologies such as the "free market". This is the "American way", a giant
swindle, a grand hustle. In this sense, the victims of the racket are not
just in Port-au-Prince and Baghdad; they are also in Chicago and New York
City. The same people that devise the myths about what we do abroad have
also built up a similar ideological system that legitimizes theft at home;
theft from the poorest, by the richest. The poor and working people of
Harlem have more in common with the poor and working people of Haiti than
they do with their elites, but this has to be obscured for the racket to
work.

Many actions taken by the US government, in fact, habitually harm the
poorest and most destitute of its citizens. The North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) is a good example. It came into force in January 1994 and
was a fantastic opportunity for US business interests, because markets were
opened up for an investment and export bonanza. Simultaneously, thousands of
US workers lost their jobs to workers in Mexico where their wages could be
beaten down by even poorer people.

The inevitable conclusion is that our entire world is at the mercy of an
elite business community who run it in secret. The economic imperatives of
this racket trump even the safety of working Americans. During the Iraq
conflict in 2003, large parts of the Pentagon and the British "intelligence"
community did not want to attack Iraq because they believed it would
increase the threat of terrorism. But the ideological zeal within the racket
to maintain a grip over a region with immense oil production was a higher
priority than decreasing the threat to American lives. The racket, then, is
a disaster for those poor countries submissive to it, but also for the
majority of Americans. The American elite is not in the business of helping
out its fellow citizens.

Perhaps for many the extent of US domination is unknown, or perhaps people
half suspect it, in which case the pages that follow will provide
indisputable evidence. For those readers who feel they already know the
damage done by US foreign policy, the revelation will come from evidence of
the damage done at home where the war against poor and ordinary working
Americans is just as fierce. A vast ideological edifice has been built which
presents brutal violence against the poor at home and abroad as altruism. It
must be targeted at its foundations. As Harold Pinter wrote in his Nobel
Prize-winning speech in 2005, when it comes to the US "it never happened.
Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It
didn't matter. It was of no interest." He continued: "The crimes of the
United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very
few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to the
American ruling class. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of
power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a
brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."

The media would have you believe that there is no racket, that it's purely
an accident that we live in a world where 85 people - 85 people! - own half
the world's wealth while more children die of starvation every year than
died in the Holocaust. Of course it's not an accident, a mere quirk of
history - it is the result of a huge injustice, the policies of a giant mob.
To help our species and planet survive it is necessary to shake off the
hypnosis and see the racket for what it is.

They know who they are; it's time to blow their cover.

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20150412/62d9984d/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 37938 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20150412/62d9984d/attachment-0001.jpg>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image002.png
Type: image/png
Size: 2357 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20150412/62d9984d/attachment-0001.png>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image003.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 1145 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20150412/62d9984d/attachment-0001.gif>