Another Unengaged, Female Ex-CEO Enters California Politics
Carly Fiorina. Photo by the Associated Press
Carly Fiorina, formerly the CEO for Hewlett-Packard, announced in Orange County this morning that she would be vying for the Senate seat currently held by Democrat Barbara Boxer, who will be seeking her fourth term.
Fiorina becomes the second female, ex-CEO Republican to launch a bid for a high-profile spot in California politics. Meg Whitman, the former head of eBay, is already running for governor.
Both women have taken to op-ed pages to clarify their intentions. Whitman, writing in the San Jose Mercury News, made the nonsensical claim that the state’s pioneering greenhouse gas-reduction laws “discourage job creation and could kill any recovery.” Or, as I put it at the time, “The way to create jobs? Pollute more!”
Writing in the Orange County Register, Fiorina takes the same route: ”40,000 California farmers and farm workers in our Central Valley are out of work because we can’t find a balance between protecting our environment and protecting the economy.”
Meg Whitman
But the women have something else in common: Both admit that they never really cared about politics. After Whitman launched her bid, it was revealed that she never even registered to vote until 2002, despite being eligible since the 1970s. Whitman even tried to justify her Sarah Palin-esque distaste for engagement with a characteristically Palin-esque explanation. She was “focused on raising a family, on my husband’s career, and we moved many, many times,” she told a group of Republican women.
Fiorina admits in her op-ed that she too has “not always been engaged in the electoral process, and I should have been.” She says that she never saw enough of a “direct” link between her vote and the results. This ridiculous notion of one person’s vote swaying an election is a lot like saying you don’t feel compelled to buy a ticket to your team’s big game because you’re unlikely to be chosen to kick the million-dollar field goal at half time.
So now California, a state whose government is in desperate disrepair, has two wealthy female contenders who have zero political experience, share a distaste for the environment, and don’t even feel like voting most of the time. Sounds like the last thing we need.
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Carly made radical changes at HP, turning it from a big, high-margin innovator to a gigantic low-margin reseller of goods made in Asia. This was not a good trade-off for America which had already exported millions of innovation and manufacturing jobs.
While Meg Whitman deserves credit for growing E-bay, that growth was partly the result of exporting tens of thousands of software jobs to Asia. She also “standardized” the 70 hour work-week for many salaried employees at E-bay.
During these periods, both companies had effective tax rates in the low single digits (which they still enjoy). They are re-investing much of their profits in high growth economies like China, Brazil… . These companies got great ROI from America but it did not get good ROI from them. In contrast, look at Warren Buffet who just spent billions on an American rail company! HE deserves to be President or at least an advisor to one.
The myth of big corporations being engines of national growth and prosperity needs to end before it hollows out our country.
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Anyone but old useless Boxer