PART I: PRESS STATEMENT: REPLACING CAPITALISM WITH THE CONSERVATIONIST ECONOMIC SYSTEM Date of republication: 20 December 2014 Place of republication: El Paso, Texas Attention: To All Editorial And Reportorial Staff From: Mr. Chikeluba Kenechukwu The 21st Century Christian Enlightenment Movement, The United States 16420 Redwood Drive, Cerritos, Ca 90703 USA Phone: 915.241.1570 ----------------------------------- Explanatory Note This press statement is a follow-up to previous press statements and books that I authored and sent to media houses across the world a few years ago regarding comprehensive constitutional reforms in the United States and other nations that will restore the collapsed moral and social order in the world. It may be necessary to recall the short titles of some of the books which contain details of these religious, constitutional, social, moral and economic reforms. They include: * Patriarchy Restored * Armageddon Prefigured * The Distinctives of Evangelical Patriarchal Christianity * The 21st Century Reformation of The Christian Church * Nuclear Armageddon It may also be necessary to bring to recollection a few relevant details about myself that I provided in the press statements I sent to the American and world media a couple of years ago. My name is Chikeluba Kenechukwu, and my official birth date is 25 December, 1968. I am a journalist, writer, Christian Activist and Political Activist, based in the United States. I have worked as a reporter for the following media organizations: * Reporter: The Daily Observer, The Gambia (approximately from 1994-1996) * Reporter: African Service, The Voice of America, Gambia and Senegal (approximately from 1996-2001). My editors at VOA, Washington included: Mr. Barry Maugham, Mr. William Eagle * Reporter: African Service, The British Broadcasting Corporation, Dakar-Senegal (approximately from 1996-2001). My editors at BBC, London included: Mr. Robin White, Mr. Joseph Warungu, Mr. Ben Dotsei Malor. I worked under the pseudonym of Ogo Okpara for BBC during my stint with them as their Dakar correspondent. * Reporter: Radio Netherlands, Dakar-Senegal * Reporter: The Associated Press, Dakar-Senegal (approximately from 1998-2001). Some of the AP staff I worked with include Ms. Ellen Knickmeyer, and Mr. Tim Sullivan who was then chief editor of the West African regional headquarters of the AP -----=97------------------------------- FOR IMMEDIATE PUBLICATION PRESS STATEMENT: REPLACING WASTEFUL CAPITALISM WITH THE CONSERVATIONIST ECONOMIC SYSTEM Subject: The coordinated and phased dismantling of capitalism and its phased and coordinated replacement with a new global economic system that may be termed CONSERVATIONIST economic system The brief outline of the phase-out and phase-in programme: INTRODUCING THE NET WEALTH TAX TO MINIMIZE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC INEQUITY AND THE DANGER POSED TO THE MORAL, SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ORDER AS WELL AS TO THE SOVEREIGNTY OF NATIONS BY THE SUPER RICH 1. First, the world may be divided into two broad economic groups: (i) the developed group (ii) the developing group * Within the global conservationist economic system, the developed group will have a maximum ceiling of 0.5%-1.0% economic growth rate per year * On its part, the developing group will have a top threshold of say 3.5% growth rate per annum but with a caveat, which is that once they reach a certain designated point of growth based on a measuring index such as gdp per capita or gnp per capita or other suitable alternative index, which now transfers them from the developing group to the developed group, their growth rate will automatically be brought down to the maximum 0.5%-1.0% for the developed group 2. Or the division may go thus: (i) the most developed group (ii) the medium developed group (3) the developing group * For the most developed group, the maximum rate of economic growth may be pegged at 0.5%. These will include: the united states, japan, south korea, european union countries such as Germany, France, Britain, Sweden and so forth. * For the medium developed group, the ceiling may be put at 0.5%-1.0%. These will include: Russia, China, Brazil, Chile, Turkey and so forth. * As for the developing group, the maximum rate of growth may be fixed at 2.5%-3.5%. These countries will include: most sub-saharan African countries, the least developed countries of Asia, Europe, the middle east, etc. The nations of the world will then use some sort of agency for developing the mechanism for the progressive phasing out of capitalism and phasing in of the CONSERVATIONIST system over a number of years. OTHER IMPERATIVE ELEMENTS OF THE COMING CONSERVATIONIST SYSTEM TO ENSURE ITS MAXIMUM EFFICIENCY AND EFFECTIVENESS IN PROTECTING THE ENVIRONMENT AND MINIMIZING WASTEFUL USE OF EARTHS RESOURCES AND CONSERVING THEM FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS 1. Use comprehensive constitutional reforms to dismantle feminism because of its massive fragmentation of household units through divorce and the massive waste of earths resources in providing resources and utilities (new dwellings such as separate houses and apartments, cars, refrigerators, furniture, heating, air-conditioning, etc for the tens of millions of divorced couples worldwide) for these tens of millions of divorcees many of whom do not remarry for years or never. The destructively wasteful impact of divorce on earths resources is seen in the following figures produced from an academic study: *In the United States alone in 2005, divorced households used 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water that could have been had household size remained the same as that of married households. Thirty-eight million extra rooms were needed with associated costs for heating and lighting. *In the United States and 11 other countries such as Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Greece, Mexico and South Africa between 1998 and 2002, if divorced households had combined to have the same average household size as married households, there could have been 7.4 million fewer households in these countries. The numbers of divorced households in these countries ranged from 40,000 in Costa Rica to almost 16 million in the United States around 2000. *The number of rooms per person in divorced households was 33 percent to 95 percent greater than in married households. 2. A new special tax, the net wealth tax, on the so-called super rich. It will be a graduated tax system and may roughly work this way: (i) a one-time tax of say 10% on the net wealth of those possessing up to $100 million-$500 million (ii) a one-time tax of about 20% on the net wealth of those having $500 million-$999 million (iii) net wealth tax of 25% on $1 billion-$5 billion (iv) net wealth tax of 30% on $5 billion-$10 billion (v) net wealth tax of 35% on $10 billion-$15 billion....() net wealth tax of 60% on $50 billion to $70 billion, etc. * That is to say, when someone has net wealth of between $100 million-$500 million he will be assessed 10% one-time tax on that net wealth. But if his net wealth subsequently increases to between $500 million-$1 billion, he will again be assessed a one-time net wealth tax of 20%, and if still his net wealth afterwards rises to $1 billion-$5 billion he will pay a one-time net wealth tax of 25%, and so on. * Governments will use the tax revenue realized from the net wealth tax for social programs that benefit the general society such as strengthening law enforcement, creating employment programs, building green-belt zones and nature parks in and around towns and cities, especially in the poorest urban areas to soften their characteristic environmental harshness, which could also help in humanizing their inhabitants and reducing delinquencies and anti-social behaviors in these crime-magnets, funding job skills training for the least educated, prisoners, etc. * Apart from the already stated significant social benefits, the net wealth tax will also have a tremendous psychological impact in diminishing the huge chasm between the richest members of society and those below them which reached historically unprecedented levels during the late era of capitalism; it will also have the power to suppress the propensity for greed in society, particularly among the richest classes. And of course the suppression of greed will have many benefits for society, including diminishing exploitation, decreasing amorality, strengthening humans attachment to humans and decreasing humans attachment to things, making personal individual wealth less potently dangerous to society and the moral order that sustains it, strengthening the power and authority of the state as against that of the richest individuals in society, etc. 3. Use the power of the constitution and laws to legislate out of existence planned, engineered and marketed obsolescence in manufacturing and sale of goods and services. This would result in the manufacture of industrial and household products that will last far longer. The practical result will be that people will in the post-planned obsolescence period use cell phones, computers, tablets, printer for say five years and more instead of the habit under capitalism of replacing them within two years or less, and cars will be used for 10 years or more instead of the wasteful habit of replacing them every few years because of the psychological pressure of marketed obsolescence. True, because of the dismantling of planned obsolescence companies may no longer realize the kind of huge profits they did through planned obsolescence, but the efficient ones among them will still continue to make reasonable and sufficient profit and society will gain tremendously in multifarious ways, including a greatly diminished pressure on resource use by the economic and productive system of countries, and dramatically reduced rate of consumption by national populations. 4. Use the authority of the constitution and laws to end the era of pervasive, intrusive, invasive and trespassive advertising that was one of the generating and sustaining forces of the hyperconsumerist culture of capitalism. Laws will be made to limit advertising hours and space to the barest minimum on television and radio as well as the internet and in physical space. In the post-capitalism world television, radio and internet operators will be compelled by the power of law to depend mostly on financial support and donations from the public for their existence and maintenance. Under this regime of public financial support, those which are efficient and provide the public what they need will survive and thrive; those which do not will perish, deservedly. Few things have been as destructive to human society and human bonding as advertising and the parasitic consumer culture it helped to spawn. It created false needs and desires in people, exacerbating existential discontent and alienation, fuelling lust and envy and greed, ripping apart human bonds in marriage and family and the larger society, commodifying and commercializing and glamorizing vice and immorality, objectifying humans and rendering them into nothing more than utilitarian means to selfish ends--- and turning hundreds of millions of humans worldwide into addictive squandermaniacs who used the so-called shop-till-you-drop mentally fostered by the consumerist ethos of hypercapitalism to embark on a frenzy of addictive waste and consumption without parallel in history. So destructive was this unprecedented advertising-driven frenzy of waste and consumption in the richest capitalist societies such as the United States that although America had only about 5% of the total world population it consumed about a quarter of the global annual use of energy resources --- even as it seemed more and more likely that if prevailing trends in economic growth rates were maintained it would be overtaken in energy usage in time by a China whose insatiably voracious economic system was modelled on the same wasteful hypercapitalist and consumerist system of America. The extremely selfish, materialistic and wasteful lifestyle fostered in people in the most advanced capitalist societies such as America and western Europe is thrown into greater relief by the following comparative figures by the liberal World Watch Institute. The 12 percent of the world=92s population that lives in North America and Western Europe accounts for 60 percent of private consumption spending, while the one- third living in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa accounts for only 3.2 percent.--- (worldwatch.org/node/810) And the advertising-driven materialistic narcissism deeply inculcated in citizens of capitalist countries such as America and the extreme waste it generates is evidenced in yet another data from the World Watch Institute. New houses in the U.S. were 38 % bigger in 2002 than in 1975, despite having fewer people per household on average. As the data above intimates, people in capitalist nations consume so wastefully and addictively not because most of what they consume are true needs but because manipulative saturation advertising manufactures false and compulsive desires in them, accounting for why Americans, in accordance to the individualistic and materialistic ethos of their capitalist culture, increasingly buy houses and apartments far bigger than they really need. What then are the practical means of dismantling this madness of manipulative, invasive, trespassive and brainwashing advertising culture that is driving humans on a reckless course of destruction of their societies, earths resources and the environment? Very briefly, the solutions: * The supreme law of the nation, the constitution, will be used to lay down the principle that the nations economic system will be based on need and not lust, and the constitution will order that in order to avoid its more than proven ability to destroy society and the productive resources society needs to function with lust and false desires, advertising must be made to play as minimal a role as possible in the economic and social systems; and in this regard the constitution mandates the government with the responsibility of designing un collaboration with other nations if necessary an economic system in which advertising must be made to play as marginal and minimal a role as possible. * More specifically, national law will stipulate that no more than 5% of total air time or space will be given to advertising of any and every sort in all media (radio, television, the internet). * Advertising on all types of vehicles will be banned * The law will ban all commercial advertising in schools and universities * The law will ban all advertising on all television, radio or internet programs and websites for children and adolescents, that is for people aged up to 17 years. * Going further, the law will ban any kind of advertising targeted at people 17 and below. * The law will ban all forms of commercial advertising on clothing * Etc.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Dec 2014 18:26:04 +0000
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