Here’s a fun headline from yesterday’s Associated Press offering: “Fiorina says California climate law is killing jobs.” First, let’s put aside the fact that California’s premier climate law, AB 32, has yet to be implemented and couldn’t yet be responsible for killing anything. We should also put off considering that Fiorina equates concerns about the biggest environmental challenge facing the planet, climate change, with “worrying about the weather.”
Let’s focus first on Fiorina’s performance in her last paying job as CEO of Hewlett Packard (HP).
When she arrived, HP was trading at $52 a share. She was fired after driving the stock price down by 80% through ill considered acquisitions and general mismanagement. For her problematic performance at HP Portfolio magazine named her one of the “20 Worst CEOs of All Time”.
Carly Fiorina is just as serious about dealing with climate change as she is about creating jobs.
Now let’s see what Fiorina thinks about our jobs. During her tenure at HP, she fired nearly 28,000 HP workers. She lobbied the federal government to ensure that corporations could keep outsourcing American jobs overseas. She calls “outsourcing” “right shoring”. Just yesterday Fiorina said that she would vote against extending unemployment benefits for people who have exhausted their benefits and are still out of work.
I guess Carly Fiorina thinks everybody who loses their job is handed a check for $21 million like she was. Someone really ought to tell her about the recent news of the near collapse of the US economy due to unregulated Wall Street greed.
Fiorina’s grasp of the risks and opportunities presented by dealing with climate change seems to be based on a deliberate attempt at playing dumb:
An unintentionally revealing new ad by former Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard chief who is favored to win next Tuesday’s GOP primary, quotes Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer saying in 2007, “One of the very important national security issues we face, frankly, is climate change.” Carly then leaps in with this: “Terrorism kills, and Barbara Boxer is worried about the weather. I’m Carly Fiorina. I ran Hewlett-Packard. I chaired the external advisory board for the CIA. We’ve had enough of her politics. I’ll work to keep you safe.” Fiorina’s first sentence — willfully pretending that being concerned about the threat of global warming is the same as being worried about whether it’s going to rain today — should disqualify anyone for higher office, especially in California.
Certainly, there is a lot of dumb out there in the political arena. I am here to tell you that dumb is not a good thing.
