Businesspeople From The United States

"Blackwater founder Erik Prince is pushing a plan to deploy thousands of privately-hired mercenaries to topple the Venezuelan Maduro regime- and many veterans are saying, “Put me in, coach.” In an extreme case of capitalism in action, the monarch of mercenary companies has been soliciting investment and support from Venezuelan exiles and influential conservatives. Prince has offered to send over 5,000 mercenaries to help Juan Guaido, the leader of the Venezuelan opposition forces."

"In 2006, Erik Prince, founder of the private military company Blackwater, learned the United Arab Emirates was shopping for inexpensive light attack airplanes to support its special forces. Prince, then director of Presidential Airways, a Blackwater subsidiary, offered to develop a weaponized version of a cropduster. Presidential bought an Air Tractor AT-802A, yanked out the cropdusting equipment, added six hardpoints, and attached gun pods and dummy bombs. The prototype, displayed at the 2009 Paris Air Show, was to be transformed into the first of 24 production aircraft for the UAE, but the deal fell apart... Even Erik Prince still wants light attack airplanes: His new company Frontier Services Group, according to the website The Intercept, hired an Austrian company to arm Thrush cropdusters and send them to Africa. The deal fell through because it violated weapons export regulations."

"After the invasion of Iraq, however, Blackwater grew far faster than Prince’s ability to manage it. The firm became, in Prince’s words, “something resembling its own branch of the military”... “They just ran out of people of the quality they needed,” a former senior U.S. military commander in Iraq tells Rolling Stone... Prince’s rising stock in post-9/11 America was also driven by his work with the CIA. According to Prince, he became an official asset, putting himself and his company’s resources at the spy agency’s disposal. Rolling Stone obtained an unpublished chapter of Prince’s book, which the CIA has blocked from release... Prince describes how, in addition to training CIA operatives and maintaining the agency’s drone fleet, he helped set up a program to train a terrorist hit squad at the behest of the spy agency. Prince writes that... he spent a “few million” recruiting and organizing a team of about a dozen foreign mercenaries... Prince says the off-the-books program had support...with then-Vice President Dick Cheney...Blackwater, but it soon fell apart — with deadly consequences. On September 16th, 2007, Blackwater personnel shot and killed 14 unarmed civilians in Nisour Square... The next day, the Iraqi government announced that it would revoke Blackwater’s license to operate and demanded to prosecute the Blackwater guards. The New York Times reported that Blackwater continued to operate in Iraq after Blackwater’s president authorized bribes of about $1 million to Iraqi officials, a charge Prince later dismissed as “false.”"

"United Nations investigators have found that Erik Prince — a Trump ally who founded the mercenary company Blackwater — broke a U.N. arms embargo on Libya by supporting a militia commander who was seeking to overthrow Libya’s internationally recognized government. The New York Times reports a confidential U.N. investigation reveals how Erik Prince deployed mercenaries, armed with attack aircraft, gunboats and cyberwarfare capabilities, to eastern Libya at the height of a major battle in 2019, in support of renegade former General Khalifa Haftar. Prince faces possible U.N. sanctions, including a travel ban and a freeze on his bank accounts and other assets."

"When a real coup is attempted, we won’t have to wonder what it is. We will know, because it will not be conducted by bare-chested Rambo wannabes strutting about in Viking helmets and goofily mugging for selfies. It will be executed by serious, unsmiling, highly trained ex-Special-Ops professionals — the kind recruited by Erik Prince for his private mercenary armies, and likely funded by the quiet-but-deadly confraternity of nearly 100 ultra-conservative right-wing billionaires like David Koch, John Menard, Robert Mercer, Rebekah Mercer, and others... If and when a cabal does decide it is time to act and seize control of both the real and symbolic power centers needed to ensure the success of a coup...they will be able to rely on experts in overthrowing governments such as Erik Prince, who enjoys privileged access to the highest levels of the Pentagon and CIA, and where he has been working with top officials for years on covert action projects that, coincidentally, look very much like dress-rehearsals for a coup, except that, unlike the events of January 6, they were conducted in absolute secrecy."

"Erik Prince can be a difficult man to wrap your mind around—an amalgam of contradictory caricatures. He has been branded a “Christian supremacist” who sanctions the murder of Iraqi civilians, yet he has built mosques at his overseas bases and supports a Muslim orphanage in Afghanistan. He and his family have long backed conservative causes, funded right-wing political candidates, and befriended evangelicals, but he calls himself a libertarian and is a practicing Roman Catholic. Sometimes considered arrogant and reclusive—Howard Hughes without the O.C.D.—he nonetheless enters competitions that combine mountain-biking, beach running, ocean kayaking, and rappelling... The common denominator is a relentless intensity that seems to have no Off switch. Seated in the back of a Boeing 777 en route to Afghanistan, Prince leafs through Defense News while the film Taken beams from the in-flight entertainment system.... Stepping off the plane at Kabul’s international airport, Prince is treated as if he, too, were Al Jazeera–worthy. He is immediately shuffled into a waiting car and driven 50 yards to a second vehicle, a beat-up minivan that is native to the core: animal pelts on the dashboard, prayer card dangling from the rearview mirror. Blackwater’s special-projects team is responsible for Prince’s security in-country, and except for their language its men appear indistinguishable from Afghans. They have full beards, headscarves, and traditional knee-length shirts over baggy trousers. They remove Prince’s sunglasses, fit him out with body armor, and have him change into Afghan garb..."

"After Panetta briefed members of Congress on Prince’s activities, Prince’s role in the CIA program leaked to the media. Prince felt badly burned, and he took his frustrations out by telling Vanity Fair about his CIA work, which burned his bridges at the spy agency. “The last thing [the CIA] wants, Panetta tells Rolling Stone, “is a yahoo who’s trying to play up what he’s doing as a lone-wolf approach to doing justice for the country.”... In January of 2017, Prince flew to the Seychelles... to meet with a Russian government official who was looking to make contacts with the incoming administration. The Russian official was Kirill Dmitriev, a former Goldman Sachs banker who headed Russia’s $10 billion sovereign wealth fund, which was subject to U.S. sanctions. Dmitriev reported directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he referred to as his “boss.” Prince told Mueller’s office that he and Dmitriev spent most of their time discussing oil prices.... Prince told Congress under oath that he and Dmitriev met once in the Seychelles. He later conceded they met twice... Prince still hasn’t gotten the military contract he had been lobbying for, but his other adventures in Trumpworld have recently come back to bite him. Prince was a member of the advisory board of a charity Bannon was promoting to raise private funds to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border...."

"We have a legislative branch that creates the law and the executive carries it out. When it works in that fashion, America works."

"I put myself and my company at the C.I.A.’s disposal for some very risky missions...But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus... He is incredulous that U.S. officials seem willing, in effect, to cut off their nose to spite their face. “I’ve been overtly and covertly serving America since I started in the armed services...I’m through... Every time an American goes through security, I want them to pause for a moment and think, What is my government doing to inconvenience the terrorists? Rendition teams, Predator drones, assassination squads. That’s all part of it... I’m going to teach high school... History and economics. I may even coach wrestling. Hey, Indiana Jones taught school, too."

"It seems the ballistics analysis was done to prove the guilt of the Americans, not to just try to identify what happened there.... I wasn't there. I'm not going to second-guess them..."

"We spent three trillion dollars in the Middle East, right now, where that money could have been used to take care of our veterans, first and foremost, who've been over there fighting, but also take care of the people that need help here in the United States instead of wasting it overseas."

"Families of seven more people who were killed, and 19 who were wounded in Blackwater's infamous Sept. 17, 2006 shootout in Baghdad's Nisoor Square have sued Blackwater, now known as Xe, its founder Erik Prince, and a Prince's network of mercenary companies, in Federal Court. These dead people left 19 children. Many of the surviving plaintiffs saw their loved ones killed and also were shot. As in two other cases filed this week, the plaintiffs demand punitive damages for war crimes, wrongful death, spoliation of evidence, and other charges."

"The program was so secret, I was told that Cheney instructed the agency not to even brief Congress about it... Did Julian Assange chicken out?... If I saw something unsavory, I would have done something about it."

"CBS reaped a publicity bonanza from La Cadena de las Americas (Network of the Americas). Fortune magazine devoted six pages to Paley's triumphant blow-by-blow account of his negotiations, filled with lofty pronouncements ("We are far too prone to think of Latin Americans as a mass of black-haired, backward people who owe what security they have, in the midst of their well-costumed revolutions, to the Monroe Doctrine and North American cash")."

"... My father sold newspapers, then worked in a tobacco factory, and then in a cigar factory, where as an apprentice he came upon his destiny. It was not long before my father got the idea of opening a cigar store with one cigar maker working in the front window, which was not uncommon in those days. The cigar maker, sitting at a table in the window, rolling cigars by hand, was not only functional but was an attraction and an advertisement. Passers-by would stop to watch and perhaps come in to buy. Between his factory job and his own store, my father learned all about tobacco and discovered that he had the gift of recognizing the various qualities of tobacco and of blending them in attractive combinations of flavor. It was his particular genius and became his lifelong vocation. ... His brand of cigars began selling so well that he decided to go out and sell them to other cigar stores. Eventually he gave up the factory job, put more cigar makers to work in the back room of the store, and found himself in the cigar business. It was a short step from there to opening a cigar factory of his own. He made a good product, built a business, and became successful at an early age. In 1896, the year he was naturalized at the age of twenty-one, he had probably become a millionaire."

"I had an early passion for reading, especially for Horatio Alger stories. I went to the public library almost every day, and when I found a Horatio Alger book I had not read before, it was like finding a gold mine."

"Most educators and students are familiar with Columbia's American School of the Air, which was established in 1930 and today has a weekly audience of millions throughout the school year. These broadcasts, prepared under the supervision of distinguished educators, typify in many ways Columbia's whole roster of educational and cultural programs. In themselves, however, they are a well-planned and cumultative course of education by radio, presented five days a week each autumn, winter, and spring."

"Ed Sullivan proved his talent as a showman who could attract the best and most timely performers from all four corners of the world of entertainment."

"We the People (6/1/48) began on CBS Television as the first regularly scheduled network program series simulcast."

"Television was dominated by one network — CBS in its early days. And Paley was a god. But he didn't like to hear what he didn't like to hear. And people soon learned that. So they told Paley only what he liked to hear. Therefore, he was soon living in a little cocoon of unreality and everything else was corrupt — although it was a great business. So the idiocy that crept into the system was carried along by this huge tide. It was a Mad Hatter's tea party the last ten years under Bill Paley."

"Paley, Mister Paley. "He is to American broadcasting as Carnegie was to steel, Ford to automobiles, Luce to publishing and Ruth to baseball," the New York Times had once written. The New York Daily News had called him an electronic Citizen Kane." His reign at CBS, wrote Washington Post television critic Tom Shales, could be summed up as more than five decades of "brilliant brinksmanship, salesmanship, statesmanship, and showmanship.""

"I had dinner with Don Graham last Friday night, and he's an example of someone who isn't reacting to new media with shock and horror, but rather with keen interest in trying to see what the trends will be and how to adapt."

"In 1924, Edgar Lawrence Smith, an obscure economist and financial advisor, wrote Common Stocks as Long Term Investments, a slim book that changed the investment world. Indeed, writing the book changed Smith himself, forcing him to reassess his own investment beliefs. Going in, he planned to argue that stocks would perform better than bonds during inflationary periods and that bonds would deliver superior returns during deflationary times. That seemed sensible enough. But Smith was in for a shock. His book began, therefore, with a confession: “These studies are the record of a failure – the failure of facts to sustain a preconceived theory.” Luckily for investors, that failure led Smith to think more deeply about how stocks should be evaluated. For the crux of Smith’s insight, I will quote an early reviewer of his book, none other than John Maynard Keynes: “I have kept until last what is perhaps Mr. Smith’s most important, and is certainly his most novel, point. Well-managed industrial companies do not, as a rule, distribute to the shareholders the whole of their earned profits. In good years, if not in all years, they retain a part of their profits and put them back into the business. Thus there is an element of compound interest (Keynes’ italics) operating in favour of a sound industrial investment. Over a period of years, the real value of the property of a sound industrial is increasing at compound interest, quite apart from the dividends paid out to the shareholders.” And with that sprinkling of holy water, Smith was no longer obscure."

"All lenders of money, particularly bondholders, favor an appreciating currency. No other class is always actively in favor of an appreciating currency. In theory they all believe in sound or stable currency, but each, in his effort to widen the margin of profit that he makes in relation to profits in other lines, at times subscribes to activities which tend toward depreciation. Fortunately business men are both buyers and sellers. In buying they work for appreciating dollars, in selling they endeavor to depreciate the currency."

"We have found that there is a force at work in our common stock holdings which tends ever toward increasing their principal value in terms of dollars, a force resulting from the profitable reinvestment, by the companies involved, of their undistributed earnings. We have found that unless we have had the extreme misfortune to invest at the very peak of a noteworthy rise, those periods in which the average market value of our holdings remain less than the amount we paid for them are of comparatively short duration, and that even if we have bought at the very peak, there is definitely to be expected a period in which we may recover as many dollars as we have received. Our hazard even in such extreme cases appears to be that of time alone."

"The economists would say that it is the upward "Secular Trend" that favors common stocks as opposed to bonds, so long as the population and the business of the country are increasing. There is something more than growth of population that contributes to the rise in the "Secular Trend" and the increase in business from decade to decade. It is the constantly accelerating speed of modern life. All of our activities are on a much more rapid basis to-day than they were twenty years ago, due in part to the constant increase in the speed of communication and transportation and the countless major and minor time-saving devices that have been introduced into our business and private life."

"It is assumed that the reader is familiar with some, at least, of the various conceptions of the business cycle currently discussed by economists. These are summarized, in greater detail than is necessary for our present purposes, in Mitchell's "Business Cycles, The Problem and the Setting" (1927), and King's "The Cause of Economic Fluctuations" (1938); the latter being noteworthy for its sympathetic reference to those who have found it necessary to push their search for the underlying causes of business cycles beyond the limits customarily regarded as the boundaries of the economic field."

"Labor seeking higher wages is, in part, attacking the value of the dollar; farmers seeking higher prices for their products and eager to pay off the mortgage on the farm are, in part, assailing the value of the dollar; tariff protected industries join in reducing the purchasing power of the dollar. All debtors favor a depreciating dollar."

"The Dollar to-day is a different measure from the Dollar of yesterday."

""Safety of principal," yes—that is the first essential. But what is "principal"—is it merely the obligation of some sound organization to repay a certain number of fluctuating measures of value at a future date? What if, at the date of repayment, the measure has shrunk to one-half of its present size? Has the principal been safeguarded?"

"In periods of high interest rates, such as were current in 1866, long term bonds are not freely offered, as the managements of issuing companies endeavor to protect themselves against the permanent payment of such rates."

"Since the early 1980s, the Berkshire annual reports have informed shareholders of the performance of the holdings of the company and new investments, updated the status of the insurance and the reinsurance industry, and (since 1982) have listed acquisition criteria about business Berkshire would like to purchase. The report is generously laced with examples, analogies, stories, and metaphors containing the do's and dont's of proper investing in stocks."

"If you don't understand a company, if you can't explain it to a ten-year-old in 2 minutes or less, don't own it."

"When somebody says, "Any idiot could run this joint," that's a plus as far as I'm concerned, because sooner or later any idiot probably is going to be running it."

"Corporate profits will be a lot higher 10 years from now. They'll be a lot higher 20 years from now. That's what you can rely on. Microsoft didn't exist 20 years ago. Staples didn't exist 20 years ago—Federal Express didn't exist 20 years ago. New companies will come along. That's what makes stocks go up."

"There's no point paying Yo-Yo Ma to play a radio."

"Above all, dividend policy should always be clear, consistent and rational. A capricious policy will confuse owners and drive away would-be investors. Phil Fisher put it wonderfully 54 years ago in Chapter 7 of his Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, a book that ranks behind only The Intelligent Investor and the 1940 edition of Security Analysis in the all-time-best list for the serious investor. Phil explained that you can successfully run a restaurant that serves hamburgers or, alternatively, one that features Chinese food. But you can’t switch capriciously between the two and retain the fans of either."

"... Throughout my career, people have asked me why I don't do things more like my father did or why I don't do things more like Mr. Buffett. The answer is simple. I am I, not them. I have to use my own comparative advantages. I'm not as shrewd a judge of people as my father and I'm not the genius Buffett is. ... I guarantee that you cannot be Warren Buffett no matter what you read or how hard you try. You have to be yourself. That is the greatest lesson I got from my father, a truly great teacher at many levels—not to be him or anyone else, but to be the best I could evolve into, never quitting the evolution."

"In its letter of December 1956, the First National City Bank of New York furnished a table showing the worldwide nature of the depreciation in the purchasing power of money that occurred in the ten years from 1946 to 1956. ... Of course, these figures are only conclusive for this one ten-year period. They do indicate, however, that these conditions are worldwide and therefore not too likely to be reversed by political trends in one country. What is really important concerning the attractiveness of bonds as long-term investments is whether a similar trend can be expected in the period ahead. It seems to me that if this whole inflation mechanism is studied carefully it becomes clear that major inflationary spurts arise out of wholesale expansions of credit, which in turn result from large government deficits greatly enlarging the monetary base of the credit system. The huge deficit incurred in winning World War II laid such a base. The result was that prewar bondholders who have maintained their positions in fixed-income securities have lost over half the real value of their investments."

"What are these matters about which the investor should learn if he is to obtain the type of investment which in a few years might show him a gain of several hundred per cent, or over a longer period of time might show a correspondingly greater increase? In other words, what attributes should a company have to give it the greatest likelihood of attaining this kind of results for its shareholders?"

"Look at the analysts around you. Although few of them are living in downright squalor, most do not seem quite so financially well off as should be warranted by taking full advantage of the unusual field in which they are working. Therefore should we conclude (1) analysts are a bunch of dumbbells, or (2) it is impossible to do what most of them are attempting, which is possibly a polite way of saying they are a bunch of charlatans, or (3) there are fundamental errors in the methods of approach used by sizable numbers of them, which errors of method prevent them from accomplishing the results that their basic intelligence would otherwise attain?"

"I do not have the name recognition that some of the candidates have out there, so every day that goes by before that occurs is a day that is a missed opportunity to work on that."

"From time to time, fundamental changes of great investment significance affect large groups of common stocks. Usually for some time after these new influences are felt, the great majority of the investment community have little appreciation of their true importance. Then as the real significance of what has happened dawns, a spectacular change occurs in the market price of the affected securities. Fortunes are sometimes made by those who appreciated the significance of what was happening early—before it was importantly reflected in changed quotations for individual stocks."

"The first and probably the most important thing for the investor to recognize about inflation is this: As long as the overwhelming majority of Americans maintain firmly held existing opinions concerning the duties and obligations of their government, more and more inflation is inevitable. ... Why is more inflation so sure to come? Because under the economic system we have established the seeds of inflation sprout not in times of prosperity but in times of depression About eighty per cent of our federal revenue is derived from corporate and individual income taxes. The base source of federal funds is notoriously sensitive to the level of general business. It shrinks sharply on even moderate downturns in the general economy. However, this is not all that happens when general business gets bad. We have enacted laws, including unemployment insurance and farm relief, which make make mandatory a sharp increase of government payments in just these same periods of bad business when federal income is lowest. Furthermore, these laws already on the statute books are almost certainly but the smallest part of the special outpouring of government money that would occur when a truly severe depression might develop."

"The tests which are the subject of this discussion were devised to disclose how much reliance could be replaced upon an Index of the Price Level for Industrial Common Stocks compiled from the point of view of investment values rather than of price changes."

"I've had over 40 pizzas in the last 30 days, and it's not the same pizza, it's not the same product. It just doesn't taste as good."

"There's no reason to be in the car when the car crashes even if you love the car."

"What bothers me is Colonel Sanders called blacks niggers. I'm like, "I have never used that word." They get away with it."

"Stay tuned. The day of reckoning will come."

"The For the People Act would help more Americans retain their voting rights, while the companion John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore and strengthen the federal oversight provisions stripped out of the 1965 Voting Rights Act by the 2013 Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder. The Brennan Center has advocated the passage of both bills... Both bills have passed in the U.S. House of Representatives, only to have been stalled in the Senate by U.S. Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, both Democrats."