The Racket by Jonathan M. Katz

With Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele very much in the news, thanks to his collaboration with Donald Trump's mass deportation campaign, I'm re-upping my 2023 interview on the self-described "world's coolest dictator" with Michael Paarlberg. We talked about whether Bukele's supposed “Salvadoran miracle” was real, whether the country's gang problem had been solved (and...

Find all episodes and newsletters at TheRacket.news Atlanta: Home of Coca-Cola, Jermaine Dupri, and the country’s most open-ended racketeering law. Two very different cases of national importance are headed to trial under Georgia’s version of the RICO Act. One of course involves Donald Trump and eighteen allies for their attempt to steal the 2020 election. The other targets more than sixty activis...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit katz.substack.com Last week, in its story on the latest African coup the New York Times included precisely one line of context about the United States: National Security Council spokesman John F. Kirby saying the “attempted takeover”was “deeply concerning.” What Times readers didn’t learn was that the U.S. has a direct interest in that...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit katz.substack.com Subscribe and read the full transcript at TheRacket.news In his non-apology apology for his just-revealed years of genocidal racism, Richard Hanania made a brief allusion to a foreign leader few Americans have heard of, but who has become hugely popular on the far right. Nayib Bukele has been president of El Salvador s...

A break from the war to go back in time, and beyond the grave. That’s right, it’s time for another Gangsters Movie Night — our irregular series where I and a guest talk about a movie about a place or theme I explore in Gangsters of Capitalism . This week we go to a place that’s very close to my heart — Haiti — through the 1932 horror cult classic White Zombie. Starring Bela Lugosi as the mysteriou...

“Spheres of influence” are hot again these days. Here’s what Secretary of State Anthony Blinken had to say about the controversial geopolitical concept, as it regards the showdown with Russia over Ukraine: But look, the President’s been extremely clear for many, many years about some basic principles that no one is moving back on: the principle that one country does not have the right to change by...

This morning, Russia and China announced a “no limits” strategic partnership against what Reuters summarized as the “ malign global influence ” of the United States. The reactions of the rest of the world remain to be seen. But if their current public positions are any guide, U.S. policymakers and wonks are likely to be caught flatfooted. How could anyone genuinely think we have historically been...

Folks, the day has arrived: Gangsters of Capitalism is in the world. You can find it at your local bookstore . If you order it online , it will be shipped or appear in your e-reader or audiobook app immediately. Hallelujah. Oorah. Elsewhere, things are rougher. Russia looks poised to invade Ukraine. Voting rights are in deep peril. The pandemic is … well, you know. At moments like this, it can be...

Happy belated new year! We are dangerously close to the Jan. 18 release of Gangsters of Capitalism , my book about Smedley Butler and the making and breaking of America’s empire . (Thanks to everyone who has pre-ordered so far—if you haven’t, here’s a link .) Since I’m doing a bunch of interviews around the debut, I wanted to do something a little different with the book here. Gangsters of Capital...

Are the unvaccinated entitled, deprived, or just misunderstood? What would be a more effective way of controlling the COVID pandemic—shame or providing healthcare for all? (Or both?) I talked with Eula Biss, author of On Immunity: An Inoculation , for this week’s Racket podcast . We went deep into the long history of debates over inoculation (debates that started even before the first vaccine was...

Audio editing by Evan Roberts For the Biden administration, the arrival of thousands of Haitian immigrants on the southern border has been a telling moment. Instead of rushing relief to and expediting the admission of asylum seekers, the White House focused on the domestic political fallout: trying to appease the nativist right through a massive deportation wave , while defusing criticism from the...

Trump has described COVID-19 as a problem that “came out of nowhere.” “Nobody would have ever thought a thing like this could have happened,” he said on March 26, as he steered his country to the worst nightmare of the pandemic so far. That’s a lie. In this audio edition of The Long Version , I talked with Dr. Jonna Mazet, the former global director of the U.S. government project to identify and p...

With Trump again threatening war with Iran, last week’s best-known scandal—the president doctoring a hurricane map with a marker—might already seem quaint. But #Sharpiegate was revealing. It showed the depths to which the federal bureaucracy, including Trump’s deeply corrupt Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross , were willing cover for the president’s insanity and crimes. And it showed the ways in wh...

Happy Friday. Hope everyone had a good — and dry — Independence Day. This week I was on the U.S.-Mexico border, getting as close as I could to America’s concentration camps. I was following a congressional delegation led by Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas. It featured most prominently Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the freshman Democrat from New York who has done as much as anyone in the country to b...