Insightful and incisive analysis of the overall foreign policies and the disasters inherent in the present defense-contractor military-glutted Kleptocracy at the heart of the Bush Administration, by New Mexico State Senator Jerry Ortiz y Pino

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http://www.prlog.org/10073153-restoring-democracy-must-top-agenda-bush-must-be-denied-requested-11-billion-in-new-helicopters.html

I've been reading David Boren's Letter to America and this slender volume is taking me a week longer to get through than I ever thought it would because I'm scribbling notes on every page. The former US Senator from Oklahoma and current President of the University of Oklahoma never caught my attention during his tenure in the Congress, though I do remember his name mentioned when he served as Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee for many years.

His thoughts on the state of our nation and on what we must attempt if we are to survive as a society and a culture are certainly not "radical" by any definition. This is a gentle, thoughtful and wise man reflecting on his understanding of how we have arrived at our current state of affairs and offering his recipe for turning it around.

To me what makes Boren's insights so valuable is that his approach is not that of the policy wonk, full of technical solutions and specific recommendations sharpened through a committee process and honed by experts and consultants. Instead he takes a step back and speaks of us as a people; of trends, wrong turns, attitudes and values.

He thinks we have wandered far from the vision of the giants who wrote the Constitution. He argues that in Iraq we have missed the golden opportunity to renew the Marshall Plan which rebuilt Europe after World War II and which made the US the most admired nation in the world for our generosity and our altruism. Now he sees the US as a great empire but one in the final throes of decline.

Boren's solution is interesting: he would start to restore our Democratic values and rediscover what made this nation great in the first place by dismantling the imperial Presidency. We need to remember that the Founding Fathers were obsessive on this point: in the US we elect temporary leaders, not royalty. So, to restore balance to our governmental processes we begin by stripping away the aura which has been built around the Executive Branch. No more "executive privilege."

Much has been written of the dangers in selecting for President a "guy you'd feel comfortable having a beer with." This "likeability" factor has proven to be a disastrous criterion for electing someone to the White House. Ironically, the candidates we select for their "likeability" have been the quickest to assume the broadest of imperial powers upon being elected.

In a country where reading has become a darkly suspicious act; where "economics" means little more than "what's in it for me" and where "issue analysis" amounts to which talking head speaks faster and shouts louder than the others on the television panel, I fear that this year we are once more in danger of picking our President on the most superficial of bases.

This makes me weep for Democracy, much as David Boren does. At the same time, though, I am encouraged that Barack Obama, the likely Democratic candidate this year, does seem to understand the importance of returning to a balanced Democracy. He conveys a calm, reflective and humorous attitude, frequently self-deprecating. He comes across as the antithesis of an Imperial President. He seems capable of listening to others...and of understanding what they are saying.

Last week I heard an incredible example of what we have allowed "POTUS" to self-inflate into. ("POTUS" is the acronym for President of the United States by which the Secret Service refers to whoever is running the country at a given moment.) Well, the office of POTUS has just ordered a new helicopter to replace the one which we see on C-SPAN or the networks, whisking our President off from the White House lawn to Camp David or Air Force One or wherever he needs to go. Fair enough. A new helicopter doesn't seem outlandish...it makes sense to have a vehicle with all the best safety equipment possible and to replace the old one regularly to avoid mechanical problems.

Even when we are told that one of these flying gizmos will cost the taxpayers $400 million, I could argue that's probably a reasonable expenditure. But it turns out we aren't being asked to buy one new helicopter for POTUS...and we're not talking about one plus a couple of spares to insure an always working chopper is available, day or night. No, the full order that our imperial office of the President is making is for (hold on to your hat) twenty eight of these little gems. That's a cool $11 billion worth of spares (and not for the entire Pentagon; just for the White House!)

But when you are Leader of the Free World, who's to quibble with a teensy weensy extravagance? Nothing's too good for POTUS; no expense should be spared.

It turns out that $11 billion is what it is estimated it would cost to educate 100 million Third World students in their home countries for one year, the full number of school age children in the entire world who currently go without schooling.

Inestimable good would result from that simple gesture; good for the US and good for the whole world, with beneficial consequences rippling for years to come. $11 billion is about what we are spending on the bottomless pit that is Iraq...every month.

We face many and enormous problems as the Bush Administration finally ends.

The agenda for putting our National house in order is a lengthy one. The place to start, I think, is where David Boren suggests: lets strip away the Presidential trappings and honorifics. Let's start restoring Democracy by making our President answerable to the people. He doesn't really need twenty eight new helicopters, so don't give them to him. Make him beg for one. That'll do all of us a world of good.

Submitter: Stephen Fox

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

Submitters 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