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They truly do view themselves as humanity's demigod, savior, gladiator, philanthropists :
Erik Prince—ex-Navy SEAL, ex-CIA spy, ex-CEO of private-security firm Blackwater—calls himself an “accidental tourist” whose modest business boomed after 9/11, expanded into Iraq and Afghanistan, and then was “blowtorched by politics.” To critics and conspiracy theorists, he is a mercenary war-profiteer. To admirers, he’s a patriot who has repeatedly answered America’s call with bravery and creativity.
Now, sitting in a boardroom above Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, he explains his newest title, acquired this month: chairman of Frontier Services Group, an Africa-focused security and logistics company with intimate ties to China’s largest state-owned conglomerate, Citic Group. Beijing has titanic ambitions to tap Africa’s resources—including $1 trillion in planned spending on roads, railways and airports by 2025—and Mr. Prince wants in.
With a public listing in Hong Kong, and with Citic as its second-largest shareholder (a 15% stake) and Citic executives sitting on its board, Frontier Services Group is a long way from Blackwater’s CIA ties and $2 billion in U.S. government contracts. For that, Mr. Prince is relieved.
“I would rather deal with the vagaries of investing in Africa than in figuring out what the hell else Washington is going to do to the entrepreneur next,” says the crew-cut 44-year-old.http://m.us.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303465004579324650302912522?mobile=y
Only in the deluded and twisted mind of your modern-day conservative industrialist class could one construe the act of hooking up with a security firm that is controlled by China's communist government in preparation for Chinese state ambitions to "tap Africa's resources," as being a business "investment."
The Gadfly does not know who Erik Prince believes he is bullshitting, but when the Chinese government says it needs security firms to help them "invest" in Africa, it does not, by any stretch of the imagination, mean that they need unarmed rent-a-cops to stand guard over their supplies and shipments of Stinky Tofu and Peking Duck.
It means they need the exact same type of service that Prince's former company, Blackwater, provided during the disastrous, albeit profitable, Iraq clusterfuck -- namely a private, unaccountable mercenary army that can, and will be, employed by the Chinese to "assist" whatever poor bastard Africans who happen to be squatting on whatever natural resources the Chinese are after, to meekly relinquish those lands and resources -- for a "fair" price of course.
And the fact that Erik Prince made the transformation from patriotic American security company honcho to hired thug for the Chinese communists in a manner as unassuming and smooth as a K Street lobbyist bouncing between the highest bidding, majority political party, truly tells the tale of a man who would just as soon sell his best friend down the river providing the stack of cash to do so was just the right height.
And it's no surprise as well that Prince is a darling of the right wing industrialists (his family is of Amway wealth), as well as the crayon scribblers who ply their trade on the pages of Rupert Murdoch's dead tree rag the Wall Street Journal. To these people, America is nothing more than an abstract vehicle for generating profit, and as long as they can continue to make profit from that vehicle, they'll hang around, but the minute that profit margin begins to shrink, they are shopping around for a new sugar daddy nation state to suckle off the teat from -- and being that China is the world's fastest growing economy -- voila! -- "hello new sugar daddy!"
And that is why The Gadfly maintains a healthy and vigilant distrust of American industrialists. For the reality is that if they had absolutely no compunction to considering the instigating of a coup to overthrow Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidency (bet you didn't know about that huh kids?) in the early 1930's, then what makes you think their loyalty to America today is any the more stalwart?
Just something to think about dear readers, as unpleasant as it may be.
----TFG
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