Welcome to a community supported and guest-produced edition of the Best of the Left podcast, with clips today from NPR, Ring of Fire, The Young Turks, Real Time with Bill Mar, and Democracy Now.

Not another founder of Blackwater, Eric Prince is very politically connected. Let's talk about him starting with the fact that he's from a very wealthy family. How did his family make their fortune?

Eric Prince grew up in the Midwestern state of Michigan in a town called Holland, and his dad Edgar Prince was very much the king of Holland. He was a pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of guy who built up an empire, a company called the Prince Manufacturing Corps.

And Prince Manufacturing was best known for creating the now ubiquitous lighted sun visor in a car. So when you pull down your visor and you see it light up, that's from the Prince family.

And what Eric Prince's father taught him was to mix sort of strict adherence to a Calvinist religious doctrine with a strong embrace of the free market gospel.

And so Eric Prince as a young man watched as his father used the family business as a cash generating engine to fuel the rise of the religious right, as well as the Republican Revolution of 1994 that brought Newt Gingrich to power.

And so his father was a major contributor to many Republican campaigns, but also to Gary Bauer, for instance, the founder of the Family Research Council. He gave Gary Bauer the seed money to start the organization.

Young Eric Prince was among the first interns there. The Prince family also contributed heavily to James Dobson and focus on the family.

Eric Prince interestingly is very close to Chuck Colson, the former Watergate conspirator and one of Bush's advisors or spiritual advisors.

And this was a guy who was Nixon's hatchet man and he's now running faith-based prisons. So Eric Prince grew up in this atmosphere where his family was very close to the religious right, very close to conservative politics.

Prince himself interned in George H. W. Bush's White House, but he complained that it wasn't conservative enough on gay issues, the budget and the environment.

He also worked on Pat Buchanan's insurgent campaign for president in 1992 when he ran on a very xenophobic, anti-immigrant line.

Eric Prince himself has contributed upwards and as immediate family of a quarter of a million dollars in traceable money to federal Republican campaigns.

And interestingly, he's never given a penny to a Democrat, which is certainly his right, but he has given money to green party candidates to defeat Democrats.

And this is a very unusual pattern for the head of a powerful corporation to put all of his eggs in one basket, but this guy is a committed ideologue.

Now Eric Prince, the founder of Blackwater is a former Navy SEAL.

In fact, he's believed to be the wealthiest person ever to serve in the U.S. Navy SEALs. And he was deployed in Haiti, he was deployed in Bosnia, in the Mediterranean, and I don't think he actually wanted to leave the Navy SEALs.

But in 1995, his father died of a heart attack and his wife had been diagnosed with cancer and I think that being in the SEALs was no longer a reality for him.

And I think that's why he turned his sights on setting up a military company that would effectively operate itself like a privatized special forces unit.

Joseph Schmitz is the vice chairman of Blackwater and he had been the Pentagon's Inspector General.

So he's kind of connected to the private and the government world. Is he very politically connected?

Well, I mean, Joseph Schmitz was the Pentagon Inspector General at a time when the war contractor Bonanza was just exploding and his job effectively was to police the largest war contractor Bonanza in history.

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