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February 25, 2016

New Mexico State Senator Jerry Ortiz y Pino Endorses Bernie Sanders

By Stephen Fox

We can win the Primary for Bernie by a massive effort to win the voters by a very strong presence on the editorial pages of America. This endorsement is by the most progressive member of the New Mexico Legislature. Your friends and legislators can write and publish them also, particularly if you ask them to do so right away!

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I am honored to give OpEdNews an exclusive on this endorsement from the most progressive and most intelligent member of the New Mexico Senate. Jerry is Chairman of the Senate Public Affairs Committee, and has served since 2005. I ask only that the readers ask their State Senators and Representatives, and other politically important friends to write their own endorsement for Bernie and put it on the editorial pages of your area newspapers. Thousands read them; it coalesces our momentum; it gets fence sitters off the fence, and finally, the person reading them is usually the person who writes that paper's endorsements. Let's WIN THE BATTLE OF THE EDITORIAL PAGES! Here is Senator Ortiz y Pino's endorsement, verbatim:

The national electoral handicappers long ago decided that Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee for President in 2016. Bernie Sanders, in their view, was a dogged challenger, a long -shot; at best someone to sharpen Clinton's debate skills while we all waited for one of the Republicans to survive the free-for-all taking place on that side of the ballot.

While the results from the four early-voting states have surprised those pundits by showing Sanders to have far more appeal to voters than they had predicted, most continue to dismiss Sanders' prospects by noting his age, his small state origins, his long-held socialist economic views and his lack of big-bucks donors. The coronation of Hillary as the nominee is inevitable, in their view.

I look at those same results, though and I see another very real possibility. Sanders has spent a long time listening to Americans' views and he knows what the answer to their concerns is, not because a team of consultants has framed one for him, but because he has honestly been listening and understanding. Bernie is for real"and I can't wait to cast a vote for him.

I have seen the polling results nationally: Sanders defeats each of the three Republican possible nominees handily--and he polls much better than Clinton does. Where she is neck and neck with Trump, Bernie knocks him off by six points. Where she is edged-out by both Cruz and Rubio, Bernie ties Rubio and beats Cruz by almost 5 points (Real Clear Politics poll taken on February 21). He would be the strongest Democrat in the general election by far. So the Establishment may have united behind Hillary, but the voters seem more excited by Sanders.

I admit I am an unrepentant optimist when it comes to outsider challengers of the Democratic power elite. I am always a push-over for the contender who seems able to ignite the passions of the grassroots against the mainstream party hierarchy, a party apparatus which grows increasingly indistinguishable from the Republicans' own structure and soul, dependent on the same founts of corporate money, unquestioning of the military-industrial complex, paralyzed in parallel with the GOP over global warming, terrorism and income inequality.
Every four years I feel the old juices flowing and hope pushes skyward, undaunted by the lack of encouragement from the left side of my brain where reason rules. Hence the Bernie Sanders sticker affixed to my car. And I mean it. I will vote for him in the primary--though our New Mexico Primary is in June and long before that the Democrats nationally may have already decided the issue.
I also know it is high time we elected a woman to the Presidency.

Practically alone among the nations which select leaders by the people's decision, the U.S. has not had a female head of state. Hillary Clinton is certainly qualified to be President and is a determined and articulate campaigner. If she is the Democratic nominee I will have no problem supporting her in November.

But Bernie Sanders offers something else. I know why he is drawing standing-room only crowds to his appearances: he speaks the truth and he doesn't mince his words. He puts the emphasis of his campaign precisely where it needs to be placed"and where his audience knows it should be placed: our country has deserted the middle class and it has ignored poverty. He says it clearly: power has been used to produce great wealth for a very few while the momentum has gone out of the American Promise.

We need a President who would challenge Wall Street. We need a President who would close the off-shore tax havens of the 1%. We need a President who would unflinchingly confront the fossil fuel industry, Big Pharma, corporate medicine and all the other contributors to the destruction of the middle class and its dream of opportunity. But most of all, we need a President who would re-ignite this nation's flickering sense of itself as a country where the people count more than money does. Without that, we don't have democracy, we have oligarchy.




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



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