A sharp look at Obama's campaign in the Foreign Policy and Economic Policies realms: what might come next in his strategies

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I am truly reluctant to be so presumptuous as to tell Obama some ideas on how to improve his campaign. This is a guy who only 4 years ago gave a rousing speech at the Democratic Convention, starting at that point to turn the Democratic party on its ear, kind of reminiscent to a student of history like me of the way Gandhi turned the British Empire on it is ear, and back in touch with the real people, its traditional base.

Money raising is far from my interests in Presidential Politics, but hey, this is still America, so therefore, I must note that Obama has raised more money than any candidate in American History. So it might seem like arm chair politics or Monday morning football for anyone to offer any advice or to suggest changing the course or changing the tack might be in order, so that above all he doesn't lose the idealistic and ideological base of his appeal and his power.

[The AP reports that Barack Obama reversed a two-month downward trend by raising more and spending less. He took in $52 million in June, more than twice the nearly $21.5 million raised by John McCain. Obama had $72 million cash on hand to McCain's $27 million.
 
The Politico points out that Obama raised $25 million on the last day of June alone; his one-day haul represents nearly half of his monthly total and more than Republican rival John McCain generated for the entire month. During the month, McCain did not have a single day in which he raised a million dollars.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/21/june-campaign-finance-
num_n_113991.html]

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Having said all of that, let me offer some strong advice, and I hope the 300 foreign affairs policy advisors, the pundits, and the professional political arm chairs and Monday morning quarterbarcks don't leap to any conclusions beyond the obvious, which is that I want Obama to win, and then I want to see him overhaul the USA's Foreign Policy and its entire image at the core of 7 billion peoples' thinking. This is decades over due, and really a dire situation internationally. I try to make this major point as humbly as possible:

OBAMA REALLY NEEDS TO HAMMER WHAT BUSH AND CHENEY HAVE DONE TO THE U.S. ECONOMY FOR THE PAST 8 YEARS, BY DUMPING SO MANY BILLIONS IN WAR. ONE LEVEL OF GOOD GOVERNMENT IS HOW YOU CHANNEL THE MONEY, AND THEY HAVE FAILLED REALLY BADLY. WE MAY BE TOO LATE AND TOO FAR INTO THE LAST STAGES OF IMPERIALISM.

If that sounds too Marxist, too bad. Marxian economic analysis is at the very core of the most successful historians and politicians, as a historical tool in determining what we are doing wrong, the downward spiral we are on in terms of the collapse of most of post World War II society. In Hegel and Marx's theories, this is simply called DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM.

And our brave military firing US missiles into not one, but a series of Afghanistan wedding parties,   and within two more weeks, breaking into a home in Iraq a few days ago, and WHILE HE SLEPT: this is a disaster, not just "collateral damage."

These kinds of things are happening repeatedly, and they make all Americans very ugly indeed, as Ugly as we have actually become, or as ugly as Halliburton, Brown and Root, and Blackwater have made us in the eyes of billions of people, for their ghastly excesses in Iraq and for the many mistakes by the military in Afghanistan.

The support for Obama's Timetable in Iraq from the Iraqi President Maliki, even if he is kind of US Puppet, rather than for Bush's vagueness: that is real progress, make no mistake.

Seeing Obama walking with Afghani President Karzai: he proved one obvious point: he has Presidential carriage, demeanor, and style.

This is urgent. This is long overdue. This is mandatory, not only for Americans, but for the rest of the entire world to further realize that Obama is a straightshooter, honest, and solutionary. To not do so is to miss both the greatest opportunity and the most serious challenge any USA President has ever had.

The speech in Berlin might be the best place to start doing this, but even after: it will never be too late to take this course of action I am here proscribing!

Stephen Fox, Managing Editor, Santa Fe Sun News

stephen@santafefineart.com

from http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/stephenfox/gGx4dN
and http://www.transworldnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?id=54043&ret=AccountDtl.aspx

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