The Capitalist Free Market Corrections Act (CaFMaC )*

This Correction:  ABOLISH ADVERTISING

 Section 60.  Plain English for the Voting Citizen:  1) In-your-face advertising is dead in the USA and good riddance praise God hallelujah.

The Legislative version:  Advertising is hereby abolished in the United States. Ads of every type and description whatsoever, including but not limited to visual, audible, electronic and subliminally manifested ads, are hereby declared illegal and shall be eliminated within ninety (90) days after enactment of this legislation. Any co-op or other enterprise commanding less than five percent (5%) of its primary market segment(s) shall retain the privilege to list, at its option, its goods and/or services in yellow pages and/or to post its products and their prices in detail on its web site and in its front window if it has one. The proactive behavior known as “marketing,” being a subordinate component of the broader overall function known as advertising, thus expressly designed and intended to persuade citizens to spend their living income on objects and activities they might not have otherwise considered as personal priorities in the absence of such insidious, pressured, persuasion to sell you something without care for your wishes or best interests, thereby moving the fortuitously persuaded buyer’s money to the seller’s pocket, is coincidentally also abolished and hereby declared a felony. No organization engaged in advertising or marketing may be converted to a co-op and shall therefore cease to exist. The Department of Labor shall assist those persons whose advertising- and marketing-related jobs are eliminated to develop honest skills and find useful employment.

The Pope, I believe, is correct when he argues that a new way of thinking is needed to change the status quo: “If we want to bring about deep change, we need to realize that certain mind-sets really do influence our behavior. Our efforts at education will be inadequate and ineffectual unless we strive to promote a new way of thinking about human beings, life, society and our relationship with nature. Otherwise, the paradigm of consumerism will continue to advance, with the help of the media and the highly effective workings of the market.” Indeed, if we want to transform the world, we need first to transform ourselves.

Hector F. Sierra in Free Inquiry (December 2015)

Section 62.  Plain English for the Voting Citizen:  Local governments may levy fines as big as they please on any advertising that hasn’t disappeared after ninety days.

The Legislative version:  Local municipal and county jurisdictions are hereby encouraged to levy substantial fines, in whatever amounts they deem suitable, on any and all entities which have not removed and/or ceased all visible, subliminal, audible and/or electronic advertising of every sort as of ninety (90) days after enactment of this legislation.

Section 63.  Plain English for the Voting Citizen:  The CBA will help newspapers and other news media get past the crisis of learning to live without income from endless annoying ads, because making sure our citizens are well informed is necessary if we are to continue having democracy in the USA. The first thing tyrants do is take over the news media, beginning with tweets and twits that escalate to armed occupations.

The Legislative version:  Congress hereby recognizes free, truthful and unbiased news reporting is an absolute prerequisite for maintaining democracy and is therefore inconsistent with for-profit models which necessarily must place survival above public service. Until the nation’s news media renormalize after their conversion from for-profit news corporations to non-profit employee-owned co-ops, and after abolition of advertising terminates their addiction to and competition for it, and subsequently improve their financial stability by ending the custom of constantly removing profits from their cash flow, all as mandated by this Act, and given that a well informed electorate is essential to democratic government, the Cooperatives Bank of America (CBA) shall assist the said transition with loans and financial incentives to newspapers and broadcast media that have come to depend on and represent advertisers more than they represent real factual news that truthfully informs the voting citizenry. Such CBA assistance to newspapers shall be contingent on their restoring at least the level, variety and quality of news coverage they were offering their readers on January 1, 2000. While encouraging radio and television enterprises to emulate the informative and educational models of National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service, and recognizing that many such enterprises will be unable to adapt themselves to these high standards, Congress acknowledges there is way too much silliness and bigmouthing out there anyway and a good shaking out will unclutter the airwaves to the cultural betterment of All The People especially the children.

SUMMARY of Sections 60-63

Plain English for the Voting Citizen:  1) Congress intends to halt the great United States’ degrading descent into a cacophonous quagmire of advertising in, on and around every last American from birth to death. The good life does not require and in fact abhors the incessant din of advertising, which has been totally out of civilized bounds for decades now and keeps getting worse.

The Legislative version:  With these four measures it is the intent of Congress to restore a measure of dignity and civility to U.S. life and commerce, and to the appearance of ad-cluttered buildings, roadsides and all other commons in the United States, on behalf of individual citizens unceasingly distracted by ubiquitous persuasions to spend their money on things they had not planned to spend it on, and of impressionable children who from birth are bombarded by thousands of advertising and marketing persuasions every day of their lives.

While preserving consumer ability to use modern internet technology to easily and quickly compare competitive prices for similar products, to the benefit of the common good of the nation and a grateful populace, Congress specifically intends that roadside billboards, tobacco signs on barns and beverage signs on windows, constant irritating digital pop-ups on computer screens, radio and TV commercials including Super Bowl insanity, brand-name blimps above fairgrounds, brands printed on shoes, belts, clothing, hats and tattoos on skin, unwelcome telephone solicitations from unknown, unwanted and deceptive solicitors at suppertime, neon-lighted cacophonies surrounding Times Square and the Las Vegas strip at great cost and waste of otherwise useful electrical energy, and ads personally targeting individuals based on intrusive analysis of their private purchase records, among the multitudinous other forms of advertising and marketing everywhere on U.S. soil and in the very ether surrounding us, shall be hereafter consigned permanently and comprehensively back to that hell from which they sprang.

*The Capitalist Free Market Corrections Act (CaFMaC ) and its dozens (over 100) of other delightful fixes to what’s gone wrong in the USA can be read in its entirety in my book POPULIST CORRECTIONS, 2021, available for only $20 from Fixy Populist Publications, PO Box 1367, Frankfort KY 40602.