What do we want in the next United States Food and Drug Commissioner? Consumer Protection or the same old Big Junk Food/Big Pharma Corporate Lackies?

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Some recent articles in the alternative Health world have chastised Governor Bill Richardson for supposedly accepting $10,000 in contributions from Ajinomoto, the world's largest Aspartame and Monosodium Glutamate manufacturer,  several years ago.

This is not at all correct. They have been given some misinformation or perhaps misinterpreted some. Richardson did accept a $10,000 contribution to his 2006 gubernatorial campaign from Altria Corporate Services, the parent name for Kraft/Philip Morris, not Ajinomoto.

Dr. Betty Martini, Founder of Mission Possible International (bless her heart and brave soul), called on him several times, as did I, to redonate the $10,000 to New Mexico victims of aspartame poisoning. These requests were ignored; his campaign staff even joked about how Betty would send a new email every three minutes (not true at all)! Certainly, those were their actions and not those of Governor Richardson.

In fact, Altria and Ajinomoto hired several close friends of his as lobbyists to influence legislation and to try to kill the Nutrition Council bill; before this he had cautiously encouraged the state conducting hearings in the Environmental Improvement Board on Aspartame, and after those lobbyists "went to work," his support became unclear and the EIB caved in, canceled the hearings, after Ajinomoto threatened them with a lawsuit! i don't see this as Richardson's fault at all; I believe strongly that he would make the best possible United States Secretary of State.

I only pray that whoever it is, President Obama et. al., will appoint a very strong consumer protection FDA Commissioner in November; not much chance of Hillary-and-Bill doing such an appointment, given their massive and ongoing support and ties to MONSANTO, that most evil and insidious of American food producing corporations. They were behind the scenes in the demise of both the House and Senate Bills in Honolulu. Ajinomoto is certainly on a par with Monsanto, maker of Agent Orange, DDT, Aspartame, Terminator Genetics, etc.

We would certainly like to find some more legislative friends and allies who might help bring about bills to ban aspartame in 10 states, laying the groundwork, long before 2009! Then even Mr. Corporate Power himself, FDA Director Andrew Von Eschenbach, would comprehend how he should have rescinded FDA approval for Aspartame 2 years ago when he was first explicitly asked to do so by 21 New Mexico Legislators who signed a letter to that effect.

After November, he will be out the door, and we must now lean on Obama and that guy from Arizona  to at least recognize how important Consumer Protection overhaul really is!!!! Maybe even Senator Mc Cain might come around to comprehend the deep need for a consumer protection oriented FDA Commissioner if enough people wrote to him at his Senate office and at his campaign headquarters. Mc Cain would be very likely to keep Von Eschenbach on as FDA Commissioner; Senator Mc Cain should clarify this on the campaign trail; if he would do so, this might become a really good reason to vote for his opponent!

The next FDA Commissioner may become the #1, most important Presidential Appointment in November 2008.

I welcome direct personal replies from readers.

Stephen Fox Managing Editor, Santa Fe News SunFounder, New Millennium Fine Art

[email protected]

Authors Website: https://www.facebook.com/groups/592985284186083/

Authors Bio:

Early in the 2016 Primary campaign, I started a Facebook group: Bernie Sanders: Advice and Strategies to Help Him Win! As the primary season advanced, we shifted the focus to advancing Bernie's legislation in the Senate, particularly the most critical one, to protect Oak Flat, sacred to the San Carlos Apaches, in the Tonto National Forest, from John McCain's efforts to privatize this national forest and turn it over to Rio Tinto Mining, an Australian mining company whose record by comparison makes Monsanto look like altar boys, to be developed as North America's largest copper mine. This is monstrous and despicable, and yet only Bernie's Save Oak Flat Act (S2242) stands in the way of this diabolical plan.

We added "2020" to the title.


I am an art gallery owner in Santa Fe since 1980 selling Native American painting and NM landscapes, specializing in modern Native Ledger Art.


I have always been intensely involved in politics, going back to the mid's 1970's, being a volunteer lobbyist in the US Senate for the Secretary General of the United Nations, then a "snowball-in-hell" campaign for US Senate in NM in the late 70's, and for the past 20 years have worked extensively to pressure the FDA to rescind its approval for aspartame, the neurotoxic artificial sweetener metabolized as formaldehyde. This may be becoming a reality to an extent in California, which, under Proposition 65, is considering requiring a mandatory Carcinogen label on all aspartame products, although all bureaucracies seem to stall under any kind of corporate pressure.


Bills to ban aspartame were in the State Senates of New Mexico and Hawaii, but were shut down by corporate lobbyists (particularly Monsanto lobbyists in Hawaii and Coca Cola lobbyists in New Mexico).


For several years, I was the editor of New Mexico Sun News, and my letters to the editor and op/eds in 2016 have appeared in NM, California, Wisconsin, New York, Maryland, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, and many international papers, on the subject of consumer protection. Our best issue was 10 days before Obama won in 2008, when we published a special early edition of the paper declaring that Obama Wins! This was the top story on CNN for many hours, way back then....


My highest accomplishments thus far are

1. a plan to create a UN Secretary General's Pandemic Board of Inquiry, a plan that is in the works and might be achieved even before the 75th UN General Assembly in September 2020.


2. Now history until the needs becomes clear to the powers who run the United Nations: a UN Resolution to create a new Undersecretary General for Nutrition and Consumer Protection, strongly supported ten years ago by India and 53 cosponsoring nations, but shut down by the US Mission to the UN in 2008. To read it, google UNITED NATIONS UNDERSECRETARY GENERAL FOR NUTRITION, please.


These are not easy battles, any of them, and they require a great deal of political and journalistic focus. OpEdNews is the perfect place for those who have a lot to say, so much that they exceed the limiting capacities of their local and regional newspapers. Trying to go beyond the regional papers seems to require some kind of "inside" credentials, as if you had to be in a club of corporate-accepted writers, and if not, you are "from somewhere else," a sad state of corporate induced xenophobia that should have no place in America in 2020!

This should be a goal for every author with something current to say: breaking through yet another glass ceiling, and get your say said in editorial pages all over America. Certainly, this was a tool that was essentially ignored in 2016, and cannot be ignored in the big elections of 2020.


In my capacity as Editor of the Santa Fe Sun News, Fox interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev: http://www.prlog.org/10064349-mikhail-gorbachev