Matt Kennard

Matt Kennard graduated from the Journalism School at Columbia University as a Toni Stabile Investigative scholar in 2008. He now works for the Financial Times in London. He has written for the Guardian, Salon, The Comment Factory and the Chicago Tribune, amongst others. In 2006 he won the Guardian Student Feature Writer of the Year Award

Articles by this author

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  Chavez, Morales and Correa must speak out on Iran
  As I said some months ago, when I get depressed about the state of the world I’m always cheered to think of the movements in Latin America that are genuinely empowering the hitherto marginalised sections of those societies. This movement has the power to make itself felt throughout the world – but it needs to apply itself consistently. That can even take the approach of Lula who stopped short of denunciation and just put forward an offer of sanctuary in an effort to shame the Iranian regime
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  The Observer's Chomsky fetish
  Chomsky is big enough to put up with this kind of rubbish, but can the Guardian or Observer, the most influential left-wing journal in the English-speaking world, really not find one journalist who doesn’t have a visceral dislike of Noam Chomsky? Sadly, but maybe predictably, for a newspaper made up of liberals pickled in the self-righteous playfields of Oxbridge liberalism, I guess they don’t
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  The fight to preserve Latin America's democratic revolution
  For Prof Anderson the template of Spain after Franco’s destruction of civil society “has become the general formula of freedom: no longer making the world safe for democracy, but democracy safe for this world.” Through a confluence of historical factors, Latin America is the crucible where the last chance to make a world safe for democracy is being fought. The importance of this battle shouldn’t be underestimated: if it fails, we might not get another chance
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  Jan Nederveen Pieterse on Globalization and Empire
  The fundamentals of American weakness are its shrinking share of world manufacturing, its gargantuan consumption, low savings rate, faulty policies (massive military spending, massive war spending, deep tax cuts) and gigantic financial deficits. Some problems are structural (high American health care costs are a function of lack of restraint on pharmaceutical industries and reflect the large influence of business interests); this prompts outsourcing, which further weakens the American economy. The military interventions are destabilizing (increase risks for others) and costly (adding to American economic problems) and erode American legitimacy. So the problems are not merely overstretch
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  Massive Attack on influences, war and the cult of fame
  I think a lot of it is damaging and I feel there has to be at some point a change in the way we deal with different peoples situations and development. I hate double standards more than anything – I hate the current row over Iran’s nuclear ambitions and whether they should be allowed to have nuclear technology or even nuclear energy. It seems to me that our history is littered with hypocrisy and I find that quite hard to live with being a British citizen
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  Matt Kennard on Russia Today extended: 'US Army sent 'hardcore' neo-Nazi troops to Iraq and Afghanistan'
  Under the Bush administration, the U.S. military allegedly started to recruit neo-Nazis and gang members to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq. Investigative journalist Matt Kennard talks to RT about his researh into these allegations and other problems in the US military.
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  Tony Benn on the EU, Cuba and Islam
  Well I don’t think it helps to go around saying, “Try Blair for war crimes,” if you’re trying to persuade Labour MPs to vote against the war and they are told they’ve got to arrest and see Blair and Cherie locked up. It’s ridiculous. I said this to all the people… I mean it’s mad… I can understand peoples anger, but it is crazy
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  Hilary Benn on aid, the US, Iraq, and Tony Blair
  The truth is: The real answer to the question why did we take the decision that we did, is because on the 18th March 2003 a majority of the House of Commons voted to do it
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  Johann Hari on Chomsky, Hitchens, Iraq, and anarchism
  But I think Hitchens arguments are so well put and one should engage with them and take them at face value. He says Saddam was intermeshed increasingly with Islam. Zarquawi, for example, was already in Iraq before the war. I don’t agree with his argument on that. Ba’athism and Islamism are different things, and should be opposed for different reasons
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  Polly Toynbee on Iraq and New Labour
  No I think it’s very difficult to navigate because for one thing even if you more want to bring democracy to the Middle East more than you want to take the oil – which I think probably is the case now – but such is the fear of fundamentalism that you wonder if you knock over the Saudi’s who takes over? Is it even stronger Wahhabist, and is that even more dangerous, and even less democratic? It’s very difficult
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  Noam Chomsky on the US Empire and hopes and prospects
  They hope that China will organize a coalition of peace loving states to stop the militarism and aggressiveness headed by the US and its British ally. Well it's interesting that they have such contempt for American democracy and British democracy: they don't even dream of it coming from within. I don't agree with it - I don't think we have to wait for China to save us from all doom - I think we can do it ourselves
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  Professor Michael Mann on America's incoherent empire
  The most you can have is a kind of informal imperialism where the state remains sovereign - you don’t try to interfere in it but you limit its options. This is what, typically, the US has done in Latin America when it is not intervening. The US is formidable. People contrast so-called multilateralism to unilateralist and they think of the United Nations. The US runs the UN and had run the UN for most of the 1990s and that’s what the US can do because the US provides certain resources that no-one else can provide. Nothing much is going to happen in the way of international activity unless the US is part of it and leading it and that’s what the US can return to again. What I think it cannot do is to reconstruct foreign countries on its own without having considerable local support
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