Guest Blog: What Kind of US Secretary of State would NM Governor Richardson Make?

This is a guest blog by Stephen Fox, founder of New Millennium Fine Art in Santa Fe and Managing Editor of the weekly Santa Fe Sun News. He is working towards the establishment of a New Mexico Nutrition Council.

Just about everyone is perhaps beginning to recognize the increasingly endangered perception of the USA in every international context and by every standard, and that we are enduring ongoing serious trouble by allowing the most powerful USA corporations to entirely manipulate many branches of government, even if you don’t ascribe to a Hegelian or a Marxian view of history, particularly economic and political history.

I often, perhaps too often, write about the massively malfunctioning and manipulated FDA, and pray that the next President will appoint a real consumer protection advocate as FDA Commissioner, instead of the tools of Big Pharma who have occupied that position for most of the past twenty years, during both Republican and Democratic presidencies.

What could be of graver concern for health than the fact that powerful corporations, both food manufacturers and drug manufacturers, are adding to the destruction of health in hundreds of nations? Perhaps it is that also these corporations and several others like Kellogg, Brown and Root, Halliburton, and Blackwater have manipulated to their satisfaction the day to day functioning of the United States Department of State, to do their bidding in contracts, programs, and throughout the modus operandi of the State Department and the Pentagon. (Some might say it is the other way around with the Pentagon, which seems to always get what it wants from the corporations and from the US Congress).

This has had the cumulative effect of alienating almost all of the Islamic nations with almost 1.2 billion inhabitants, and further besmirches the USA entrepreneurially in South America and in Africa. I am so often reminded of the policies of Manifest Destiny as the USA expanded in the second half of the 19th Century by destroying millions of Native Americans, with a genocidal intent inherent in that policy of “Manifest Destiny.”

I see massive similarities between that and the way LBJ floundered in Vietnam and of course most of the dealings of the Bush administration in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. As a nation, we err terribly by tolerating and continuing such destructive nonsense and folderol.

Healing the Damage
The next President must immediately and surely move to repair this obviously dangerous malaise by appointing an international healer and diplomatist as US Secretary of State. I see no better person by temperament and intellect than New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson for this job from 2008 to 2012.

After the bravado and maneuvering by the so-called “top tier” of  candidates has dispensed with the series of votes between now and January 2009, none could imagine any one more qualified, and I don’t mean in the usual resume sense of the word, than our own William Blaine Richardson III.

More important as qualifications were Richardson’s elevation of the international political dialogue amongst the candidates, his early strident support for unequivocally ending the Iraq War, on top of his history as a Cabinet Member (Secretary of Energy) and as United Nations Ambassador (to me, the last is the most important qualification).

Personally, I am sure that he would be a better Secretary of State than Condi, Colin, Madeleine, and Warren Christopher all rolled together. Even the corporations may recognize in time by the decline of their profits, in a strictly Hegelian sense, that they need a Secretary of State who might sow the seeds of international dialogue and conflict resolution, close Guantanamo, reduce the US military presence and its ancillary costs by 40%, reshape a 21st Century Peace Corps, and rapidly return America to a new level of international sanity.

After 8 years of Halliburton running the State Department, military contractors running the Pentagon, Energy Corporations running the Department of industry and writing the Legislation, and Big Pharma running the Food and Drug Administration, maybe intelligent, internationally-minded people in the world have something great to look forward to, after all, eh?

If Richardson still has Presidential aspirations, which I am sure he does, he might take some small comfort in this fact: the first one, Thomas Jefferson, later was elected President. Jefferson was appointed September 26, 1789 by Washington when he was still serving as Ambassador to France.

In fact, James Buchanan, Martin Van Buren, John Quincy Adams, James Madison, and James Monroe all served terms as Secretary of State and as President!

This is a guest blog by Stephen Fox of Santa Fe. Guest blogs provide readers an opportunity to express their views on issues relevant to DFNM, and may or many not reflect our views. If you'd like to submit a piece for consideration as a guest blog, contact me by clicking on the Email Me link on the upper left-hand corner of the page.