Back from a mini tour of Yorkshire and Stockport and cheering for supporting act Indignation Meeting
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
racket
ALISTAR FINDLAY is mesmerised by this multiple ‘Visions of Scotland’ assault on the audience’s eyes and senses
The Star's critics ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA reviews I Am Love, The Penguin Lessons, Freaky Tales, The Thicket
MAYER WAKEFIELD has reservations about the direction of a play centered on a DVLA re-training session for three British-Pakistani motorists
New releases from Steve Knightley, Jupiter & Okwess, Jason Palmer, Lisa Knapp and Gerry Driver, Kin'Gongolo Kiniata, Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey, Dan Sealey, Simin Tande, PAZ
JOHN GREEN relishes photography that unfolds a longstanding and poetic relationship with Leeds
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
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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