The Presidential Candidates: Joseph Felix Leonaitis

A resident of Mississippi with two college degrees, Leonaitis is the author of New Genesis and the Technoid Movement, and the candidate of the American Independent New Genesis party, apparently his own creation. Since he has no website of his own, I have to depend on his responses to Project VoteSmart and whatever I can find out about his book.

The most I've found out about the book is that it was published in 1977, is 40 pages long, and is listed under the subject headings Forecasts and World War III. Beyond that, the internet is silent and the book is out of print.

Fortunately, Leonaitis (or Leonaites) gave some detailed answers to Project VoteSmart's "Political Courage Test." He lists his top priorities as 1) resolving the Iraq situation, 2) rationalizing healthcare and Social Security and 3)restoring the nation's manufacturing sector. On the first point, he claims to emulate Field Marshall Rommel from World War II by redeploying U.S. troops along Iraq's borders to prevent foreign infiltration. On the second, he'll fund both Social Security and universal healthcare with private sector-based Health Security accounts. On the third, he'll offer incentives to construction by reducing corporate tax rates while "Instituting an incremental 5% tax, from 5% to 50% over 10 years to most or all corporation outside the U.S. to finance a rebuilding of American factories, with legal American citizens." I leave that in his words so you can figure out what he means. He can't mean that he'll tax foreign corporations -- can he? -- unless he means to tax their transactions in this country, but that's not what he says.

On other points of interest, Leonaitis will "eliminate NAFTA," "re-evaluate" the Patriot Act, and greatly increase military spending while preparing for a draft to make up for expected troop shortages.

Overall, he wants to: "1) Restore America to Americans. 2) Prepare for the future. 3) Restore our forefathers government to it original specifications. 4) Reverse and correct our imploding government." These are nice thoughts, but I can't help noticing that Leonaitis has no good reason to run for President, nothing that really distinguishes him by way of personality or program from the horde of independents -- except, perhaps, a plan to vindicate his 30-odd year old forecast, if such it was, for World War III. I feel obliged to admit that I'm starting to lose my patience with a lot of these self-selected candidates, and Leonaitis has the hard luck, due to his alphabetical standing, to get my attention now instead of a month ago. While someone like Gloria La Riva clearly deserves our attention, as does someone as far to the right like Chuck Baldwin, candidates like Leonaitis who've made hardly any effort to actually campaign look increasingly like wastes of space.