Well, now that the global elite have been given complete control over our elections, perhaps it's time to get to know them and where they stand on the issues. I for one, welcome our new multinational corporate overlords.
Helpfully, Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, the grandson of the King of Saudi Arabia, head of the Kingdom Holding Company, and, according to Forbes, the 22nd richest person in the world, has embarked on a publicity tour of sorts lately, appearing on the Charlie Rose show and on his own network Fox News, to lay out his policy prescriptions for America.
Short version: NO to health care reform, Obama's bank tax, and financial regulatory reform, YES to fiscal austerity, and cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and other entitlement programs. He didn't stake out a position on a cap and trade bill but I'll go out on a limb and assume he's against it.
Al-Waleed is, as has been noted recently, the second biggest shareholder in News Corp outside of the Murdoch family, and, in a bold move, has publicly backed Rupert's son James Murdoch to take over the company in recent days, calling him "Rubert Murdoch in the making." The Prince is also the largest individual shareholder in troubled financial services conglomerate Citigroup, which was battered by the crisis and is still struggling to emerge from the government bailout enacted last fall under Bush. His Kingdom Holdings also has major investments in Amazon, AOL/Time Warner, Coca Cola, Compaq, eBay, Four Seasons, Ford, Hewlett-Packard, McDonald's, Motorola, Pepsi, Priceline.com Inc, Procter & Gamble, and The Walt Disney Company.
In a recent interview with Neil Cavuto on Fox Business Network, Al-Waleed announced his firm opposition to Obama's plan for a tax on big banks, embarking on a somewhat torturous comparison between bankers and a patient just emerging from emergency treatment in a hospital.
I'm very much a close friend of the United States...I believe taxing the banks is not the right thing right now. It's like you have a patient, coming out of ICU, Intensive Care Unit, and then all of a sudden bang him with another tax.
In a separate interview with Charlie Rose, Prince Al-Waleed repeated almost verbatim the same line about the bank tax, seemed to suggest that Obama was focusing too much on health care reform, and that he should return to a focus on foreign policy in 2010 now that the banking crisis has been stablised.
Sidenote: somewhat hilariously, the Prince couldn't quite bring himself to say he liked James Cameron's 3D movie Avatar, even though it will net News Corp millions:
Charlie Rose: Have you seen [Avatar]?
The Prince: Unfortunately I had to see it before I met with Mr. Murdoch or he would be very upset. So I saw it, yes.
CR: Did you like the movie?
TP: Well, it was the first time I’ve seen a science fiction movie. What I like is the fact that people like it and it will gross more than $2 billion and could possibly add $400 million to the bottom line of News Corp. Imagine that. Whether I like it or not I will keep between me and Mr. Murdoch.
The Prince also called the United States "down but not out," saying "you have to look inside and see what you can do." He specifically mentioned government spending and called Medicaire and Medicaid "timebombs."
Ironically, Al-Waleed, grandson of the original Saudi King, lives a life in Saudi Arabia so lavish it's almost impossible to comprehend:
Touring Al-Waleed's home had Forbes business reporter Kelly Dolan gushing:
...observing wealth on this scale, even for a seasoned billionaires reporter, was staggering.
I arrived in Riyadh in early October. After two days, my head was spinning. There was his impossibly large 420-room palace, decked out in marble and decorated with large portraits and photographs of Alwaleed, with two indoor pools and an indoor tennis court. It took an hour and a half to tour the whole place.
Then there was the 120-acre "farm and resort" at the edge of the city with its mini-Grand Canyon, mini-zoo, horse stables, five artificial lakes and multiple residences. It was a refreshing bit of green in an otherwise brown landscape. The prince evidently does not worry about water bills; one afternoon the sprinklers at the resort were going full tilt in the 90-degree weather.
Also on display: a fleet of 60 buff-and-green-colored cars and motor homes designed just for use at the prince's desert retreat. Another garage beneath the palace holds several dozen black cars--Range Rovers, Suburbans, Volvo SUVs and other vehicles used just for city driving.
Of course, anytime that gets old, he can get away from it all on his yacht, which apparently is so over so the top it was actually used as the set piece for one of those cat-stroking villians in Sean Connery's final James Bond film:
Al-Waleed now owns the yacht Kingdom 5KR, which has a helicopter on board. She is an 85.9-meter (282-foot) yacht, originally built as the "Nabila" for Saudi billionaire, Adnan Khashoggi. She subsequently posed as the Flying Saucer, the yacht of James Bond villain Largo in the film Never Say Never Again.
It's not all roses in the press for Al-Waleed, however. The Economist, not exactly prone to wild conspiracy theories, wrote a story questioning whether the financial picture painted by Al-Waleed really added up back in 1999 (the story is supposedly behind a pay wall but can be viewed for free if you sign up).
The story details his initial investment in Citigroup in the early 90s, when it was reeling from another financial crisis, noting that "for a novice, Prince Al-Waleed’s timing was astonishing."
The mystery goes back to that first stake in Citicorp. The prince has declared that this money came entirely from his personal funds. He says he started out in 1979 with a loan of just $30,000 from his father. He also mortgaged a house that his father had given him, raising something like $400,000. And each month, as a grandson of Ibn Saud, he receives $15,000. You could barely clothe a Saudi prince for such sums, let alone furnish him with a multi-billion-dollar empire. Nevertheless, by 1991 Prince Alwaleed had felt able to risk an investment of $797m in Citicorp.
The article concludes that:
Middle Eastern investors commonly use front men. Members of the Saudi royal family do not like publicity and their owning large stakes in foreign firms could have political implications....
The inescapable conclusion is that estimates the prince has given to The Economist and several other publications are wrong. Either the prince has a valuable and unrevealed source of income, or his income is much less than $500m.
Whatever the true story, Kingdom Holdings is obviously a force to be reckoned with not just in the Middle East but here in America, made more powerful by his control of one of America's top financial institutions as well as its most successful cable news network. So can his views be taken as more or less the political policy views of the notoriously secretive Saudi Royal Family? It's hard to say for sure, although whoever is backing him, they don't seem to like the current administration much.