Former presidential contender and
billionaire Ross Perot is worried that America is a sitting duck for an
unnamed foreign invader. In an interview for his new autobiography,
Perot said the nation's weak economy has left us open for a hostile
takeover—and neither presidential candidate is the man to save the
country.
Citing an impending fiscal
cliff, Perot warned of disaster. "If we are that weak, just think of
who wants to come here first and take us over," the former CEO of
info-tech company Perot Systems told USA Today on Monday.
"The last thing I ever want to
see is our country taken over because we're so financially weak, we
can't do anything," Perot says.
When asked for his take on the
presidential race, Perot added, "Nobody that's running really talks
about it, about what we have to do and why we have to do it. They would
prefer not to have it discussed."
However cryptic he may be, this
is the first political reckoning by Perot in years, ever since he
withdrew from the political landscape after the fall of his Reform Party
in the 2000 election. The man who ran the most successful third-party
campaigns in contemporary American politics also expressed optimism
about the current tea party activism and its efforts to "wake up" both
Washington and the electorate.
Still, he thinks that even the
fresh voices in the populist, small-government tea party movement aren't
focusing on the real doomsday issue: the deficit. Comparing the
Washington establishment to a bunch of fiscal drunks, Perot is still
waiting for America to undergo an intervention, before it finds itself
owned by a new global power. "It's like the guy who's drinking—sooner or
later, he's got to put a cork on the bottle, right?"
