Imagine if America was a Dictatorship

In Sasha Baron Cohen’s recent political satire movie, The Dictator, he plays a dictator of a fictional North African country who maintains his power through measures that would have warmed the hearts of Saddam Hussein, Omar Qaddaffi, and Kim Il-Jong.

He comes to the U.S., and at the end of the film he gives a speech to a gathering of political dignitaries extolling the virtues of dictatorship, telling the gathered if America was a dictatorship, “You could let 1 percent of the people have all the nation’s wealth. You could help your rich friends get richer by cutting their taxes and bailing them out when they gamble and lose.”

It’s a beautiful piece of political satire, because although the U.S. is not a dictatorship, it is an oligarchy, and everything that Sasha Baron Cohen says in his speech is true.

And that is why we need a Quantum Revolution in this country, because we cannot continue to live this way, as it is no longer sustainable.

Above you can see the video from the film of this speech, and below is the transcript:

“Why are you guys so anti-dictators? Imagine if America was a dictatorship. You could let 1 percent of the people have all the nation’s wealth. You could help your rich friends get richer by cutting their taxes and bailing them out when they gamble and lose. You could ignore the needs of the poor for health care and education. Your media would appear free, but would secretly be controlled by one person and his family. You could wiretap phones. You could torture foreign prisoners. You could have rigged elections. You could lie about why you go to war. You could fill your prisons with one particular racial group and no one would complain. You could use the media to scare the people into supporting policies that are against their interests.”