Even some corporate media have turned on Ed Sheeran over his hand-wringing cowardice in dropping Macklemore. “Ed Sheeran’s blandness has finally come back to bite him“, writes Emily Bootle in the i-Paper. Not to be outdone, the Guardian’s deputy music editor penned a decent piece saying, well, this …
… its kicker adding that:
By standing behind support act Macklemore, who was removed from the tour for his vocal support of Palestine, these artists are demonstrating the self-sacrifice necessary to stand against those crushing free speech.
The Guardian is itself no stranger, for reasons enshrined in its business model as set out here, to hand-wringing cowardice. But it ran the Laura Snapes piece yesterday, alongside a report on Macklemore donating his $1m tour salary to Palestine …
Of course, there are more accurate and withering critics out there, while souls less generous than mine might take issue with Laura Snapes. They might for instance seize on her use of a freshly coined meme, “corporate overreach”, with its implication that Zionist billionaire Robert Kraft’s orchestration of Macklemore’s axing is egregiously new – when, truth be told, Western ‘democracy’ was captured long ago by corporate oligarchy, and the few celebrities with form – think Sarandon, Waters, Eno 1 – on opposing a terrorist, expansionist, apartheid state that ‘our’ governments arm, fund and furnish gaslighting alibis for have paid the price.
The words of Chris Hedges, directed four years ago at his own USA, are scarcely less applicable to the West at large:
Those who wrote trade deals to profit from underemployment of U.S. workers and sweatshop labor overseas are omnipotent. The insurance and pharmaceutical industries that run healthcare for profit are omnipotent. The intelligence agencies that spy on the public are omnipotent. The courts that reinterpret laws to excuse corporate crimes are omnipotent.
Politics is a tawdry carnival act where a constant jockeying by the ruling class dominates the news. The real business of ruling is hidden, carried out by corporate lobbyists who write the legislation, banks that loot the Treasury, the war industry and an oligarchy that determines who gets elected and who does not. It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, no matter which party is in office.
Chris Hedges (abridged) – Let’s stop pretending America is a meaningful democracy
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Should Reverend Hedges’ remarks strike you as out of place here, let me join the dots. Israel is backed by the USA and West at large not because this tiny settler colony has captured those states but because it serves as a beachhead in the geostrategically vital Middle East for a US empire to which the British state is a junior but eager partner. See my dedicated posts on this, here and here.
Those less generous souls I referred to might tartly remind us that only after the heartlifting solidarity shown by Macklemore’s fellow support acts on the Sheeran tour did the Guardian dip a cautious toe in the waters of protesting Kraft’s meddling as an erosion of free speech – one of the many ways, another being the proscription of Palestine Action, in which Zionism’s long reach is curtailing Western freedoms. They may even suspect Guardian Media Group of having noted a turning of the tide, and sensing brand advantage in said toe immersion. 2
All the same, I welcome it regardless both of GMG motives and of Laura Snapes’ naivity (that’s me being generous again) just as I welcome the pushback on Elm Street America which these days is beginning to make AIPAC funding more of an electoral liability than asset. On this front at least, the times they may be a-changing for the better. 3
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- These artists are sufficiently advanced in their careers to enjoy a degree of immunity from Zionist blacklisting but that shouldn’t blind us to their principled stance and the example it sets when artists equally successful – think Bob Dylan and Nick Cave – hide behind the self same canard of ‘artistic freedom’ invoked by Ed Sheeran.
- Six years ago Jonathan Cook noted, in the context of its betrayal of Julian Assange, the calibrated game a paper so ad-dependent and rich-sponsor-reliant as the Guardian has to play:
On the one hand, Assange needed the manpower and expertise provided by big-hitting newspapers like the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel to help Wikileaks sift through vast trove to find important, hidden disclosures. He also needed the mass audiences those papers could secure for the revelations, as well as those outlets’ ability to set the news agenda in other media.
Liberal media, on the other hand, needed to court Assange and Wikileaks to avoid being left behind in the media war for big, Pulitzer Prize-winning stories, for audience share and for revenues. Each worried that, were it not to do a deal with Wikileaks, a rival would publish those world-shattering exclusives instead and erode its market share.
For a brief while, this mutual dependency just about worked. But only for a short time. In truth, the liberal corporate media is far from committed to a model of unmediated, whole-truth journalism. The Wikileaks model undermined the corporate media’s relationship to the power establishment and threatened its access. It introduced a tension and division between the functions of the political elite and the media elite.
The US is using the Guardian to justify jailing Julian Assange. Why is the paper so silent?
- Minutes after I finished – for now – my usual OCD-driven tweaks to this post, my inbox alerted me to a new Jonathan Cook piece with the self explanatory header, Ed Sheeran just learnt: Being pimped by the billionaires for genocide is a bad look. It begins:
We must keep prising the fingers of the billionaire class off our throats until it is only the discredited, and morally bankrupt, who refuse to speak loudly in opposition to genocide.
It is hard not to be excited at the very public shaming of a major celebrity, pop star Ed Sheeran, over his agreement to remove a friend and support act, Macklemore, from his current US tour.
Not for the first time, Jonathan, you took the words right out of my mouth.
One small step for a man, but one big step for ‘man’kind – but poor Ed couldn’t make it. More credit to the ones who did, at financial cost, too. Let’s hope this is part of the beginning of the end for that pathological, greedy and genocidal colonial state.
Yes, let’s. But I’ll be posting soon on the dangers of assuming empire’s plans for the region have been stopped in their tracks by Iran and Ansar Allah. Yes, the criminals who launched Gulf War 3 wanted Iran’s downfall but that was always secondary to sowing energy chaos whose primary target was and remains China.
Do you think that China’s strategy in its conflict with the West, has been influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx?
I do: and of Confucius, and the early classical economists – David Ricardo in particular – before that discipline degenerated into apologetics and a switch from the descriptive to the normative. Also, Beijing heeds Michael Hudson, and drew broadly accurate conclusions from the implosion of the USSR.
WDYT?
And “think Bob Dylan” – yes, the man who wrote ‘Neighbourhood Bully’ (which in case anyone is not familiar with it, denies the existence of a ‘neighbourhood bully’ in that well known location). Poor Bobby is just another tribally motivated stalwart – and after all that previous good work.
Dylan – a towering figure who in my view merited his Nobel Prize – continued to do inspired work after Neighbourhood Bully. (Of this later output I’m most familiar with three albums: Oh Mercy, Love and Theft, and Modern Times.) I agree that N. Bully was puerile and ignorant (if we’re being kind) but a figure so polarising as His Bobness, viewed through the lens of our celebrity obsessed culture, often induces cognitive dissonance. Those who fixate on his third rate politics and/or capacity to be unpleasant tend to manage any dissonance thereof by rubbishing his artistic status, while those who value his unmatched eloquent authenticity on the human experience in its American forms these past sixty-five years tend to endow godlike status on mere flesh and blood.
This phenomenon is not confined to The Bob. See George Orwell’s 1944 essay on Salvador Dali, Benefit of Clergy.
Well, don’t get me wrong – for a long time Bobby was my go-to choice for listening, and I still highly respect a good deal of his output, but he’s not the Messiah – just a sometimes naughty boy, like us all.
Tee hee
JC is great, always worth reading.
Yes
As Tucker Carlson has pointed out: these stadiums are far from 100% privately owned. They are funded with public money.
For a social conservative who advocated for a Trump vote, Tucker’s been in my good books for quite a while.
Off-topic I know (although I tend to believe in the interconnectedness of everything), but since you appreciated Nel Bonilla’s article ‘Elite-capture-and-european-self-destruction’ I think you will find this more recent analysis of hers at her substack very interesting: ‘NATO 3.0: The Transatlantic Cage and the Rise of the Bunkerstate The transformation of NATO and Europe’s new role as an attritional node’.
But it’s long and quite dense and you will need to time and energy to absorb it – in your current circumstances it might be hard to find enough of these. My sympathy goes out to you and your wife and family.