#theracket

[seims]

TRANSLUCENCE PREMIERE ON TRIPLE J’S THE RACKET

New song! New EP! Feel a little bit sorry for inserting this pretty song inbetween all the brutal djent that’s being played in the show hah!

[gsosa4realty]

#Repost @shaunking with @get_repost ・・・ Somehow, the man on the left just became the highest paid player in NFL history and the man on the right is basically banned from the NFL. It’s gross, honestly. The injustice of what the NFL has done to Colin Kaepernick is despicable. Jimmy Garoppolo has started 7 games in 4 years and he is now paid like the greatest QB of all time. --- #theracket @nfl

[aneuroticsofart]

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GO LIZABETH SCOTT! #theracket #lizabethscott #robertmitchum #hollywood #movie #movies #noir #lesbian #awesome #acting #likeforlike #likeforlike #followforfollow #follow4follow (at New York, New York)

[wailmusic]

The Racket #theracket #wailmusic #wailmusicmag

[notionfilms]

1st shoot for new #mtv politics show #theracket (at Kornhaber Brown)

[mattkennard]

Letter to Guardian re: review of ‘The Racket’

Published: Guardian (16 May 2015)

Dear Guardian Books:

I’d like to clear up a few misrepresentations from the review of my book ‘The Racket’ by Steven Poole in last week’s Review.

Poole begins by comparing the book to the antisemitic conspiracy theory, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but he doesn’t mention – once in the whole review – that a majority of the reporting in the book was done while I was a reporter with the Financial Times not sat in my bedroom watching the Zeitgeist documentary on repeat. Not mentioning that was surely not a mistake, as the whole book is framed by this experience.

Then to furnish his own absolutist take that I use one “conspiracy theory” throughout – of an “evil cabal” running the world – he misrepresents a number of passages from my book. (Incidentally, the term “evil cabal” is Poole’s invention, and I talk at length in the book about ideas of “good” and “evil” being irrelevant and not useful.)

Poole goes on to write that I call “all foreign-aid workers” “dupes” who believe “myths” when in fact in that sentence I was explicitly talking about the individuals “staffing the racket”. I never mention the term “foreign-aid workers” let alone “all” of them – and upstanding organisations like Oxfam or ActionAid make no appearance.

Then in an effort to paint me as “saying nice things” about the brutal US-backed Duvalier dictators in Haiti because “they aren’t Americans”, Poole quotes me saying that the Haiti economy grew in the period 1960-1980 during the dictatorship because they had a development strategy. The next two sentences, which were cut, show the contrast I was trying to make to Haiti’s growth when it came under World Bank/IMF control. It was not even close to showing support for these tyrants, which the reviewer must of known having read the rest of the chapter.

Finally, I have never denied Srebrenica or the atrocities carried out by Serb forces in the 1990s. But it is not “risible” to state that “Nato bombed Kosovo in 1999 to ensure the breakup of Yugoslavia”. In the Turkey chapter, I write about the massive terrorist war launched by the Turkish state against the Kurds in the southeast of the country in the 1990s (same period as Kosovo). We should ask ourselves why NATO wasn’t bombing Istanbul instead of Belgrade during that period. Many more people were killed in the terrorist war in Turkey, but not only did the US not bomb Istanbul, it was in fact selling the Turks the weaponry to embark on this program of ethnic cleansing.

Matt Kennard, London

[mattkennard]

The Election is Irrelevant. The Racket Always Wins

When you go to vote on Thursday, do it knowing that it won’t make any difference. The Racket always wins. If voting mattered, be sure they’d outlaw it immediately. The United Kingdom is what is known as a low-intensity democracy: we put a cross in a box every five years but the social relations of the country, the protection of our rich elite, remains solid, untouched. We go out to vote for the puppets, and can’t see the puppeteers.

Former US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said: “We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.” In the UK, we’ve chosen the latter, and our democracy has become like Father Christmas to a toddler: most want to believe it exists, but have nagging doubts based on the evidence. Can you have democracy in a country where 0.6 per cent of the population own 50 per cent of the land? Doesn’t that sound like feudalism? Isn’t a country where the richest 1% own as much as the poorest 55% of the population a plutocracy?

The people who really run our country, the racket, are a small collection of financiers, bankers and businessman. They don’t do losing. They back all the horses. And if they don’t back you – well, good luck. They own our media, our economy, our housing, increasingly our schools and hospitals, and, most important, you owe them money. That’s your credit card and mortgage. Our politicians owe them, too. For their generous no-strings-attached donations. They have the three main parties – the only ones that can conceivably lead a government in the next parliament – bought and sold, stitched up.

Perhaps the best indication of people’s sense that the main parties should have a big R after their name for the “Racket Party”, instead of Labour/ Conservative/ Liberal Democrat, is the turnouts at general elections in recent decades. The last four elections have seen the lowest percentage of Britons since 1945 turning out to vote. People know that it’s futile – the system is rigged, the horses have different stripes but all have the same owner. In the UK, we now have a sort of bastardised version of Argentina’s Peronism, where everyone is a member of the Peronist Party, but you can choose your "wing". Here all our mainstream candidates are standing for The Racket, but you can choose whether to be on the “left” (Racket-Labour) or “right” (Racket-Conservatives) tendency.

If anyone tried to combat the structures that ensure this inequality, the racket will crush them. But no viable candidate will ever try it because they know they will be ruined – largely by the racket-owned media. Ed Miliband put forward the tepid idea of capping energy prices and the corporate media went apoplectic, casting him as the Second Coming of Lenin. That’s how extreme the “centre” is now in the UK – you cannot touch the racket’s bottom line. That’s de facto unconstitutional now.

Of course there’s a whole ideological industry constructed to legitimate theft from the poorest to the richest. They tell you that we need a “business-friendly” economy that of course means they pay less tax. They tell you we need to “cut the deficit” because it gives them an excuse to destroy any sense of solidarity with the less well off. They say we our NHS is “inefficient” and “insolvent” so they can get their hands on what has already become endless lucrative money-generating contracts. They also have the ultimate blackmail tactic. Since Margaret Thatcher destroyed industry in the UK, and switched our development model to being the “financial capital of the world”, growing fat on unregulated Wild West money, the tax receipts from the financial sector have become vital to our country. Tax from just the financial services industry in the year ending 2013 totalled £65bn or nearly 12 per cent of all tax receipts. You have to keep these guys happy or they’ll tank you.

What is amazing to me is how humane and decent the British people remain even though they live under maybe the most disgusting and reactionary press in the Western world (which spouts this guff endlessly). The indoctrination only goes so far. In the leaders debate, Nicola Sturgeon became an overnight star because she argued for not selling off the NHS, defending migrants as like us, and generally acting like a human being. She was attacked because the racket knows they are at massive odds with the population. There is a lie that Britain is a genetically “conservative” nation. But despite endless brainwashing from the racket’s media organs about the benefits of privatization and against tax hikes on the wealthy, 48% of people polled in 2014 believed that tax increases to support the NHS were favorable, while just 21% supported introducing fees instead. It’s quite incredible that the mountain of lies and dissembling hasn’t worked. And it scares the racket.

When Sturgeon hit that chord with the people, away from the mediation by the racket’s media infrastructure, they went after her. The FCO memo which purported to have her favoring David Cameron to stay on as Prime Minister was a typical dirty trick by the racket when it sees it’s power, and the delusions that sustain it, seeping away. But the pollution they pump into society may be starting to dissipate.

*

Many governments in the world have a program called COG, or Continuity of Government, which is enacted should the country undergo a serious emergency like nuclear war and allow government to continue operating. Well, the world of finance and business has a COG program in the UK that means they can continue to make their money whoever gets into power. They are often even the same people. Our politico-financial overlords pass through the revolving door between the world of finance and government – making a killing on the way out, and making the climate right for that killing whilst in the parliament. Alan Milburn, the former Labour health secretary who started the privatization of the NHS, left government and became a consultant for Bridgepoint Capital, a venture capital firm involved in financing private health care companies moving into the NHS. He was later appointed social mobility “tsar” in the coalition. These people don’t have political principles – all they see is pound signs, everywhere.

Things like the letter from 103 businessmen in the Daily Telegraph warning that Labour “threatens the recovery” (what recovery?) is to be expected. A full half of Britain’s richest hedge funders have given money to David Cameron in this election cycle - £19m in total.  That’s to be expected, too. But the moralizing from Labour is a sick joke. Just last month it was revealed that the largest donor to Labour in recent years (£600,000) is a London-born hedge fund manager Martin Taylor. People like Taylor aren’t giving to Labour because they thinks the party is opposed to the racket running our country. Taylor is giving the money because he knows Labour support it.

It is true that if the racket get the Tories it will probably be fractionally easier to continue the redistribution of money from the British people into their pockets. But many programs that are making this easier – from the privatization of the NHS to private sector funding in schools – were started under the previous Labour government. Labour have always been a sell-out party – you can gauge that by looking at the state of Britain today. They have been in power collectively for more than 25 years since the Second World War, and we still have five families who own more wealth than 12.6 million people put together. Labour has never been an anti-racket party, but in their current incarnation the extremity of their lust for privatization and selling off Britain is particularly ugly.

Not all is lost. It is true that a vote for the Greens in the UK, is an anti-racket vote – but that’s exactly why it’s also a futile vote. If the Greens started being proper players in the electoral system, they would come under concerted attack, and/or coopted by the world of big business, as Labour has been. So vote for the Greens now, but know it won’t make a difference. When they are a threat, you’’ll know about it. If we mock the election rather than revere it we’re halfway to making progress. Now is the time to work outside the system, to push from the sidelines and change the frame of debate. We can enter on our own terms. That’s what has happened recently in Greece and particularly Spain. In Spain, the indignados and Occupy movement have led to Podemos – now the most popular political party in Spain. And it’s anti-austerity, anti-racket, and popular. They waited until the time was right and pounced. Reforming Labour, if it ever was an option, must surely be a dead proposal now.

Despite constant harping on the success of the “recovery” the UK is on the cusp of something big. There has been no recovery for a majority of people under the Coalition – hundreds of thousands of our most vulnerable and destitute people have had their lives torn apart. That much pain and anger will not stay subdued. The corporate take over of everything in our society, too, is pulling the elastic-band even more taught. When it snaps, it might look worse than the riots. Or better – we could have our own Syriza.

I’ve just written a book which looks at the mechanics of how the racket runs the global economy, and the UK is a microcosm of a global trend: the ideological convergence of mainstream political parties in societies increasingly dominated by corporations and private capital. Democracy is now a shell – we don’t have political parties, we have a racket. And we must see it – and bring it down. But that won’t happen at the ballot box.