Index

10: Lorde’s Grammy Speech

According to Snoopman News, the 17-year-old Lorde, who won two Grammys this year for her song Royals, made an acceptance speech which stunned the celebrity audience. She gave a blistering critique of global corporate hegemony and the militarisation of the world. It would appear her full speech was censored owing to a one minute delay in transmission but the transcript below is from The New Zealand Herald.

Reproduced from [email protected]

Lorde’s Suppressed Grammy Award acceptance speech (Full Transcript) 26 January 2014

Lorde:
Thankyou soo much everyone for making this song explode because this world is mental. (Laughter). Planet Earth is run by psychopaths that hide behind slick marketing, ‘freedom’ propaganda and ‘economic growth’ rhetoric,[1] while they construct a global system of corporatized totalitarianism.

As American journalist Chris Hedges has identified, a corporate totalitarian core thrives inside a fictitious democratic shell.[2] This core yields an ‘inverted’ totalitarian state that few recognize because it does not look like the Orwellian world of Nineteen Eighty-four.[3]

This corporate totalitarian core is spreading outward from America. Planet Earth is being rapidly militarized by the world’s major and significant states, including their police forces.[4] Meanwhile, state surveillance is becoming universal[5] and torture is outsourced to gulags.[6]

Can we not imagine that in past times, simple folk found it hard to work out exactly how they were being manipulated by the Royal monarchies, and the Papal monarchy, who claimed a ‘divine right to rule’? Ordinary people from classical times through to the demise of the Ancien Regime could not see how the rivalrous network of elites and oligarchs were linked, not least because the illiterate masses were indoctrinated to believe in their humble lot, to obey divinely-endorsed authority and to live in fear of damnation.

So, in today’s mental world, it should become clearer now that Planet Earth is ruled by super-wealthy people, who use their outrageous fortunes to steer the trajectories of whole societies for their own material and political gain.[7] These oligarchs are, in fact, colluding for economic gain and conspiring to augment more political power.[8] Armies of professional, political, religious and military elites serve them.[9] Together, they comprise a highly-networked trans-national capitalist class that has been traced in studies by: Peter Phillips and Brady Osborne;[10] William K. Carroll;[11] David Rothkopf;[12] Daniel Estulin;[13] and Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter.[14]

As Canadian journalist Naomi Klein has argued in her book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, ‘free markets’ were slickly marketed in the 1980s and 1990s with the idea that they would deliver individual freedom and prosperity for all.[15] Klein also wrote that the use of military violence to facilitate the spread of ‘free markets’ in the field-testing stage from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s has continued into the 2000s. Her view is supported in Eugene Jarecki’s documentary Why We Fight, which compellingly showed that America fights wars to make the world secure for its corporations.[16] So, get reading and viewing! (Lorde giggles and half the audience rises to their feet applauding. The other half remain fixed in their chairs. Some reluctantly clap).

Thankyou soo much everyone for giving a shit about our song, ‘Royals’. May you all find the balls to help construct a world based on resilient community, bona-fide freedom, and peace. To do that, we will need to redeploy the psychopaths that currently run the world to the planet’s prisons.[17] Peace cannot happen with reconciliation. That was Nelson Mandela’s mistake.[18] The first step to peace is justice firmly served.

Speech Source References

[1] Snoopman. (2013, August 31). A Poorly Understood ‘Bargain’: How Democracy and the 60s Movements became Orphans in the ‘Free Market’ Era. Snoopman News. Retrieved from http://snoopman.net.nz/2013/08/31/a-poor- ly-understood-bargain-or-how-democracy-and-the-60s-movements-became- orphans-in-the-free-market-era/

[2] Hedges, Chris. (2014, January 6). The Last Gasp of American Democracy. Truthout. http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21052-chris-hedges-the-last- gasp-of-american-democracy

[3] Orwell, George. (1993). Nineteen Eighty-Four (5th ed.). London, England: Compact Books. (Original work published 1949).

[4] Chossudovsky, Michel. (2014, January 29). Imperial Conquest: America’s “Long War” against Humanity. Global Research. Retrieved from http://www. globalresearch.ca/imperial-conquest-americas-long-war-against-humani- ty/5364215

[5] WashingtonsBlog. (2013, December 18). Former Top NSA Official: “We Are Now In A Police State”. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonsblog. com/2013/12/former-top-nsa-official-now-police-state.html; World Social- ist Web Site. (2013, December 18). “Almost Orwellian”: US Judge indicts NSA spying. Retrieved from http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/12/18/pers-d18. html; Burghardt, Tom. (2013, November 10). The U.S. Secret State and the In- ternet: “Dirty Secrets” and “Crypto Wars” from “Clipper Chip” and ECHELON to PRISM. Global Research. Retrieved from http://www.globalresearch.ca/the- u-s-secret-state-and-the-internet-dirty-secrets-and-crypto-wars-from-clipper- chip-to-prism/5357623

[6] Lendman, Stephen. (2013, November 12). America’s Global Gulag: Challenging Wrongful Convictions Global Research. Retrieved from http://www. globalresearch.ca/americas-global-gulag-challenging-wrongful-convic- tions/5357796?print=1; Lendman, Stephen. (2013, July 19). US Courts Approve Indefinite Detention and Torture. Global Research. Retrieved from http://www. globalresearch.ca/us-courts-approve-indefinite-detention-and-torture/5343269

[7] Engdahl, F. W. (2009). Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century.Wiesbaden, Germany: edition.engdahl; Rowbotham, M. (1998). The Grip of Death: A Study of Modern Money, Debt Slavery and De- structive Economics. Charlbury, England: Jon Carpenter; Winters, J. A. (2011a). Oligarchy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

[8 Edwards, Steve. (2012). It’s the financial oligarchy, stupid: A study of Anglo-American news coverage during the 2007-2008 financial crisis and bank bailouts Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10292/5536

[9] Winters, J. A.(2012, February 27). Oligarchy in the U.S.A.: The wealth de- fense industry protects the richest of the rich. In These Times. Retrieved from http://inthesetimes.com/article/12698/oligarchy_in_the_u.s.a/

[10] Phillips, Peter & Osborne, Brady (2013, September 13). Exposing the Financial Core of the Transnational Capitalist Class. Global Research. Retrieved from http://www.globalresearch.ca/exposing-the-financial-core-of-the-transnational-capitalist-class/5349617

[11] Carroll, W. K. (2010). The Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class: Corporate Power in the 21st Century. London: Zed Books.

[12] Rothkopf, D. (2008). Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They are Making. London, England: Little, Brown.

[13] Estulin, D. (2009). The True Story of the Bilderberg Group (North Ameri- can Union ed.). Walterville, OR: Trine Day LLC.

[14] Shoup, L. H. & Minter, W. (1977). Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy. New York, NY: Authors Choice Press.

[15] Klein, N. (2007). The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Camberwell, Australia: Penguin Books.

[16] Jarecki, Eugene (2006). Why We Fight. [Motion Picture]. Sony Pictures Classics.

[17] Snoopman. (2013, August 31). A Poorly Understood ‘Bargain’: How Democracy and the 60s Movements became Orphans in the ‘Free Market’ Era. Snoopman News. Retrieved from http://snoopman.net.nz/2013/08/31/a-poor- ly-understood-bargain-or-how-democracy-and-the-60s-movements-became- orphans-in-the-free-market-era/

[18] (2014, January 28). The Audacity of Obama: A Black Wolf in Cor- porate Clothing. Snoopman News. Retrieved from http://snoopman.net. nz/2014/01/28/the-audacity-of-obama-a-black-wolf-in-corporate-clothing/

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See the full story “Clipping Queen Bee’s Wings: Lorde’s real Grammy speech suppressed” at http://snoopman.wordpress.com/2014/02/06/clipping-queen-bees-wings-lordes-real-grammy-speech-suppressed/

And also:
The inside story behind Lorde’s meteoric rise: “Queen Bee Mentor: The professor who fed Lorde’s mental buzz

http://snoopman.wordpress.com/2014/02/06/queen-bee-mentor-the-professor- who-fed-lordes-mental-buzz/
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