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Wednesday April 1 2020 |
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You’ve been framed...
Curing the cancer in journalism, one hit at a time
Raoul DjukanovicAnalysisPage 7
All the latest, very early
News so new it hasn’t happened yet:how a film helped change the world
Lunch with the FT 2020Page 10
Winner of the Guardian Award for NuanceAll the fun of the future, without the pain of living there
WMDs found
Rogue stockpiles of chemicaland biological weapons wereuncovered in three mass gravesaround Detroit.
Proliferation of supplements
Shameless Britain
The UK is finally Americanenough to embrace failure anddeclare itself bankrupt, a publicinquiry heard.
Britishness supplement
Healthy pessimism
Optimism shortens life expect-ancy and “could be contagious”,the Office for Notional Statistics warned idealists.
Damned lies supplement
Off-peak oil
The world oil barrel might still be half full, BP reported, as itsfirst temperate Arctic fieldscame onstream.
Crude supplement
Drugs overdose
India is flooding the world withgeneric drugs, underminingresearch and development andcuring disease, a trio of Westernscientists warned.
Chemical supplement
Alo Presidente!
Free Cuba’s new president,Junior Chavez, said the HavanaOlympics would showcasesocialism “from the grave”.
Bolivarian supplement
Tibet freed at last
China liberated Tibet from itsabundance of lithium, reincar-nating hopes for cheaper car batteries.
Spiritual supplement
Cash smash shocker
A BBC business guru said his year living without money hadtaught him the value of humility.
Pantomime supplement
Admen expire
Another marketing executivekilled himself, leaving a chainletter to clients which said thatsuicide was “the only way to saveour fucked souls”.
Euthanasia supplement
Cultist jailed
The author of “Be Free and HaveIt All” was imprisoned for life forrunning a white-collar cult.
Living Our Valuessupplement
Debtor pacified
Bailiffs beat a Barnsley man todeath over 450 pounds he owedto bailed-out billionaires.
Targeted killing supplement
Policy evolves
The War Secretary said thatBritain’s international reversals weren’t defeats, or even u-turns, because it was “sweet and rightto evolve for one’s country.”
Afterlife supplement
PM refutes critics
Addressing Parliament’s EthicsCommittee, the UK’s First Lordof the Treasury made a mockery of mockers with barnstorming barrages of bullshit.
Supplementary specialsupplement
Global carbon rationshit parity, party startsBack to the future forconverging humanity
By Hector Blowhard
Civilisation is “more or lessunlikely to collapse this century”, world leaders warn, despite theinconvenience to companiesfrom global carbon rationing.The findings, announced atan Arctic G5 summit, suggestthe Make Doomsaying History campaign could be working.Despite fears it might still sparkmeltdown, yesterday’s first EqualRights Day passed off peacefully.“For the first time ever, allhuman beings have the samerights, if only to meagre carbonquotas,” Verna Soylent, thePlanetary Pasha, told G5 leaders.“It’s instant Enlightenment foreveryone: no more are some of usmore equal than the rest.”Like the millennium bug thatdidn’t bite, party poopers weredrowned out with champagne.But the euphoria may not lastlong. Within 30 years, we have tocut greenhouse gas emissions tozero, demanding even more radi-cal action than in the Decade of Unprecedented Innovation. Although newspapers and business visionaries have already brought about a sea change inhuman habits, it doesn’t mean we’re home and dry yet. As dawn bathed the SouthPacific islands, moods were som- bre. Revellers on the retreatingshorelines of Kiribati are soon to be homeless, despite pleading forhelp before the Kyoto Protocolpostponed real solutions.Like Vanuatu’s grass-skirtedconch-blowers, they refused to
Capitalismisn’t really democracy – official
By Terence Hofmannin Westminster
‘There is such athing as society.’
PM’s statement
Today’s propaganda release ismore forthright, describing post-ideology as “a framework-basedmarket, not the market-basedframework” of times past.“If you gave more than yougot you were always a loser,” thestatement concludes. “But we were only winning by claimingour economies were ‘growing’,and to do that we had to takemuch more than we gave.”Measured in debt and destruc-tion, the costs were clear, and theplanet’s resources were obviously finite. Yet it was only when richcountries agreed to steep emis-sions cuts that these sorts of imbalances could be discussed.The result was the world’s first“planned retrenchment”, reduc-ing annual energy use by 10 percent across the member states of the Organisation for EcologicalCooperation and Deescalation.“Exceptional times call forexceptional clichés,” the PrimeMinister told a newscast from hispotato plot. “A decade of reverse‘growth’ has been a nurturing ex-perience for all of us. We’re givingmore than we get, we’re restoringnature and we’re helping thoseless fortunate than ourselves.”The shift to localisation hasrevived democracy, he stressed,from the smallest chain of Rhizo-matic Councils to the GlobalisedUmbrellas protecting everyone.“If there’s one thing no one candispute,” the Prime Minister said,“it’s that no matter how weak wemade it, there
is
such a thing associety.” All we have to do now ismake it work again.
Editorial, Page 8
U.S. way more negotiable than life
accept the rich world’s terms atclimate talks, which amounted tosigning their atolls underwater.Until Australia agreed to wel-come immigrants, the process valued Western lives more highly than everyone else’s.“It was the economics of geno-cide,” recalled Nigel Feasting-Piranha, the British entrepre-neur, who today won the NobelPeace Prize for riding rising tidesto a clean-tech future. “No glove was velvet enough to cushion theiron fist of business as usual.” As Brazil’s president once warned the G5: “the greatest ob-stacle to transforming the worldis that we lack the clarity andimagination to conceive that itcould be different.”Our pursuit of endless growthmeant more emissions, hotter weather and the prospect of an uninhabitable Earth. Evennuclear power couldn’t save us intime. And if we’d found a magictechnofix, the energy needed tomake it would have forced us tocut consumption quicker still.“There was no way of avoid-ing a crash diet,” said DonaldMcRonald, the post-AmericanLocalisation Tsar. “Everything we consumed was full of carbon.”It was only once our systemscrumbled that modern answersmade sense: everyone had touse less, and we all had to get afairer share. For years, this wasshunned as simplistic, but fearsof further chaos made it viable.“The people who called itUtopian weren’t seriously look-ing at the alternatives,” said MaoMin Max, the Chinese Americanlife coach who dreamed up the blueprint. “Fetishising growth was clearly a death wish.” As late as 2009, journalists stillasked if Depression made theenvironment yesterday’s news.That was the start of the end of A generation ago, when the heat was already on to stop runaway climate change, no one blewmore cold than the United States. Whether barked by the firstPresident Bush, regurgitatedunder his son, or mangled fromthe rhetoric of Lincoln, these words became an axiom of policy: America’s way of life isnon-negotiable.From the Earth Summit inRio to the final round of talks on binding emissions targets, Amer-ican officials banged their fists,sowed obstruction and helped agaggle of corporate front groupsrubbish science. Then the secondRevolution swept them aside.Its mantra was stolen fromabove, but the impetus camefrom below.So far below, in fact, that itstarted south of the border, deepin the jungle, and under theradar of neoliberal exploitation.Or so it was said in Chiapas, where the movement that wasn’ta movement first found voice.“Everything for everyone andnothing for ourselves,” declaredthis oddball Zapatista Army.That might have been the end of it, had their No not been trans-lated into so many Yeses. Yes toautonomy, yes to inclusion, yes tothe needs of people over profits. As if all that weren’t confusingenough, an American got electedpresident disguised as an activist.“Yes we can!” he preached. Itsounded like a masterstroke of U.S. rebranding. But some peo-ple took Barack Obama literally.If he could talk in tapestries, thenso would they. Hell, they’d even weave old Uncle Sam a new one.Ten years after the Battleof Seattle, when protestersdisrupted a trade summit, thisdisparate political network cameof age, just as we needed it most.In 2009, at the Colloquy of Copenhagen, its cadres took overthe talks, dissolved the UnitedStates, and ushered in the end of addiction to oil.
Continued, Page 13
People power madeanother world possible
By Rafael Marcos
Blair pilgrimage continues
Tony Blair, the former primeminister, received a ritualscourging outside Notre DameCathedral yesterday as he contin-ued on his expiatory pilgrimageto Rome.Dressed in bright orangesackcloth, and wearing the ashesof British parliamentary democ-racy on his head, the penitent was beaten about the face and body by personal envoys of PopeJeanne I, costumed as apes andeating Camembert.Notre Dame, one of the first buildings in Europe to utilise theflying buttress, marks the firstquarter of Mr Blair’s barefootpilgrimage from Westminster toSt Peter’s in the Vatican.Since converting to Catholi-cism in 2007, Mr Blair has shownincreasing signs of being morally disturbed by many aspects of his
By Jackson Streicherin Paris
government, particularly its role
in the US-led invasion of Iraq in2003.Shortly after the election of thenew Pope, an apologetic Mr Blair voluntarily renounced his title,Lord Belmarsh of Ecclestoneand Basra, on the grounds thatthe Iraqi people, and not he, hadpaid for it. At the Pope’s urging,he made a full public confessionof his crimes at Tyburn, then em- barked on the nearly 1,000-mile journey to Rome, where he hopesto receive a public absolution be-fore surrendering to the seculararm at The Hague. As Mr Blair’s odyssey unfolds,however, reporters have foundhim ever more speechless.In her first encyclical,
Deimitatione Christi
(ChristianImpressions), Pope Jeanne notedthat the Church could no longerafford to tolerate the derelictionsof powerful men and women if it was to retain its moral authority.The Pope also issued a formalapology for the “regrettable as-pects” of Christianity’s past, andsaid she hoped a line could now be drawn under the “unfortunateepisode” of Church history whichhad been going on since the time
of Constantine the Great.
Destination Den Haagfor former dear leader
NOT THE FINANCIAL TIMES 2020, ALL WRONGS RESERVED
***
The United Nations of Westmin-ster, Whitehall and Washingtonhave signed an accord stating Anglo-Saxon democracy is “notnecessarily capitalist in nature.”The communiqué, released tomark Equal Rights Day, signifiesthe final deconstruction of neo-postmodernist economics. It alsodeclares the rule of law’s victory over corporate interests.“Capitalism doesn’t work in afree market,” the document says,quoting the Seventh Circularof the Post-American Church’sInfernal Screed. “To function, itneeds regulating, and to thrive itrequires manipulation.”Britain’s break with dominatorculture started at the 2009climate talks, though the Copen-hagen Consensus deleted allreference to it. Instead, that deal was framed as “sustaining ethical business, going forward.”
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News Briefing
New era dawns
Minds blown
The communitarian order is re-engineering culture as a set ofvalues not products. That may sound banal but it’s liberating,psychologists say, and its concrescence helps human tribestranscend chaostrophe.
Timewave 2.0, Page 13
After Rene Magritte
On ft2020.comWorld Markets
No sermons offered to travelling press pack Consensus shaped by Copenhagen colloquy
NOT THE
World survivesEqual Rights Day
the Age of Stupid. Unless wereined in climate change, there wouldn’t be a future to reporton. And if billions died, who’dget richer? Those left would bestruggling to survive.Eventually, a middle way prevailed. At last-ditch talks inDenmark, there was nothing leftto try but facing facts. FearingMao was a crypto-Communist, world leaders barricaded them-selves into a conference hall withactivists. They emerged withthe Copenhagen Consensus, arewrite of Mao’s
Contraction &Convergence
plan, but with onekey difference: they’d go faster.Nothing like it had ever beentried except in wartime. Detroitretooled in weeks, scrapping gas-guzzlers to supply wind and solarfarms. Direct current triumphed,and power was quickly decen-tralised, like everything else. When markets finally failed,trillions of pre-Crash credits weresimply leveraged into charity.It was our altered expectations what swung it, and all we needed was a bit of plain speaking. Withmedia making the case for mean-ingful action, millions of peopledemanded it, and leaders feltempowered to use their power.“By far the biggest shift was inpeople’s heads,” Dr Soylent said.“Most of the old dualities wereillusions: there was no choice tomake between ancient and mod-ern, us and them, or people andplanet. We all just had to adapt.”Since Gross Domestic Productgave way to Net InternationalContentment, global standardsof living have begun to improve.For centuries, human wrongsmocked human rights. But onthe brink of wiping out the lot of us we, the people, thought again.
Feasting-Piranha, Page 5Lex, Page 12
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