Obituary: Ross Perot

Billionaire and eccentric H. Ross Perot, 89, who parlayed a modest investment into a billion-dollar corporation called ETS, being one of the few billionaires in the world at the time he made his first billion, has died.  He was also known as having run for president on the Reform Party ticket.  In 1992, he got 19 percent of the vote, which, contrary to myth, took more votes away from Bill Clinton than Bush because the vote for Perot was a vote against the incumbent Bush.

Perot might be best remembered as having made the statement of the "giant sucking sound," referring to NAFTA, in the 1992 presidential debate with fellow left-handers Bill Clinton and then-president George H.W. Bush:



He was right about NAFTA, but the die had been cast.  The neolibs carried the day, and they damaged the country with their idiotic trade policies.

New York Times:

He was born Henry Ray Perot on June 27, 1930, in the East Texas border city of Texarkana to Gabriel and Lulu May Ray Perot. His father was a cotton broker and a horse trader. The boy did well in local schools, but teachers said his good grades had more to do with persistence than with superior intelligence.

He began working at 7, selling garden seeds door to door and later breaking horses (and his nose) for his father at a dollar a head. When he was 12, he began delivering The Texarkana Gazette on horseback in poor neighborhoods, soliciting subscriptions and building his route from scratch for extra commissions. He did so well his boss tried to cut his commissions, but he backed off when the boy went to the publisher.

He changed his name to Henry Ross Perot in honor of a brother, Gabriel Ross Perot Jr., who died, just a toddler, in 1927. The family pronounced the surname PEE-roe, but in his 20s he changed that, too, making it puh-ROE, because, he said, he got tired of correcting people. He called himself Ross; years later, the news media added the initial “H” at the beginning of his name, but he never liked it.

He joined the Boy Scouts at 12 and in little more than a year was an Eagle Scout, an extraordinary achievement that became part of his striver’s legend. After two years at Texarkana Junior College, he won appointment to the United States Naval Academy, where, despite academic mediocrity, he was elected class president and graduated in 1953.

Perot might not have been book smart, but he was street smart.

He made another attempt at running for president in 1996, but he was shut out of the debates and garnered only 8 percent of the vote.

I Don't Think Ross Perot is Paranoid

about a possible foreign takeover because our economy is so weak.

This is the neolibs' vision for this country and the world. There are no countries, no boundaries, just companies doing whatever the fuck they want when they want to do it. If they are companies or investors from dictatorships like China, well, that's all the better.

Perot:

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.

It doesn't have to be an armed takeover, either:

Investment money is pouring into Florida from wealthy Chinese who find that Florida has exactly what they are looking for — and what they need to secure US green cards.

Chinese investors are taking advantage of the EB-5 investment visa program, the so-called "green card via red carpet," by putting millions into Florida's charter schools and an aquaculture farm in Central Florida.

Under the EB-5 program, through investments of at least $1 million — or $500,000 for "targeted employment areas" — foreign nationals are able to obtain legal residency in the US so long as the money they invest will help secure or create at least 10 full-time jobs.

A group of Chinese investors have put $30 million into the state's charter school program to date and are looking to invest three times that amount in the next year, Ilona Vega Jaramillo, director of international business development for Enterprise Florida, the state's economic development arm, said in a US-China roundtable discussion last week.

Yet another reason these scams need to be shut down.

We Need to Repeal the Last Thirty Years

of economic policies beginning when the Reagan administration was so in love with the crackpot economic theories of Milton Friedman. People are slowly waking up that they have been had by our elected officials, who are in bed with the elites who really and truly want a hereditary aristocracy in this country with everybody else being slaves to this aristocracy.

Well, we were warned where those policies were headed:



Perot wouldn't have been the right person to lead the country, but look at where the hell we are at now.

Campaign Dirty Laundry.

If he is elected president, which is all but a sure thing if Obama is the opponent, John McCain will be the second divorced president in American history. Ronald Reagan, of course, was the first one.

So what about that first marriage? Well, it IS old news McCain cheated on his first wife; he admits it. And the two of them are still on good terms. That's old news.



But the U.S. media won't write about it because they will claim it is ancient history and McCain has fessed up, at least with regard to her. But what is her story in case anybody cares?

She fell sucker to his charm even though he was carousing around in his youth, let alone after he returned from the Hanoi Hilton.

Carol fell into his fast-living world by accident. She escaped a poor upbringing in Philadelphia to become a successful model, married an Annapolis classmate of McCain’s and had two children – Douglas and Andrew – before renewing what one acquaintance calls ‘an old flirtation’ with McCain.

It seems clear she was bowled over by McCain’s attention at a time when he was becoming bored with his playboy lifestyle.

‘He was 28 and ready to settle down and he loved Carol’s children,’ recalled another Annapolis graduate, Robert Timberg, who wrote The Nightingale’s Song, a bestselling biography of McCain and four other graduates of the academy.

The couple married and McCain adopted Carol’s sons. Their daughter, Sidney, was born a year later, but domesticity was clearly beginning

to bore McCain – the couple were regarded as ‘fixtures on the party circuit’ before McCain requested combat duty in Vietnam at the end of 1966.

After sustaining serious injuries in an automobile accident, Ross Perot helped pay her medical bills. Of course her husband couldn't possibly help her out.

After returning to the states, he was glad to see her, but obviously she wasn't going to do in the looks department. Once again he reverted to his bad habits.

Moreover, he was starting to make some political connections. Enter Cindy Hensley:

In 1979 – while still married to Carol – he met Cindy at a cocktail party in Hawaii. Over the next six months he pursued her, flying around the country to see her. Then he began to push to end his marriage.

Carol and her children were devastated. ‘It was a complete surprise,’ says Nancy Reynolds, a former Reagan aide.

‘They never displayed any difficulties between themselves. I know the Reagans were quite shocked because they loved and respected both Carol and John.’

Perhaps the saddest thing of all is Carol McCain is still crazy about him. But not everybody who knew the two of them are crazy about John, including Ross Perot.

More is here, here, here, and don't forget this article about McCain and Perot.