Gaming The System

Politico on Wednesday reported that Carly Fiorina told MSNBC

He has spent his life taking advantage of that system, and so has Hillary Clinton. So if you think that system isn't working for you, and it isn't working for the vast majority of Americans, as you point out, then don't vote for Donald Trump and don't vote for Hillary Clinton as well. And now you have a clear choice. You can vote Cruz/Fiorina or you can vote for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. And they are two sides of the same coin

There may be no one who knows more about making the system work for her than does Carly Fiorina.  In September, soon after the former business executive declared for President, the Daily Beast's Michael Daly explained that Fiorina's Hewlett-Packard took the lead in lobbying intensely for the Homeland Investment Act of 2004, part of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004. "The purported aim of the legislation," Daly added

was to generate economic growth and therefore jobs at home by according corporations a one year “tax holiday” on billions in overseas profits they had stashed offshore.

The result was a $265 billion corporate giveaway.

The windfall was supposed to go toward research and development, and other job-creating endeavors.

Instead, almost all of it was put into stock buybacks as a way of funneling cash to stockholders, these prominently including CEOs.

Never mind that the bill prohibited such buybacks.

And all that talk about putting more Americans to work did not stop the corporations from cutting as many as 100,000 American jobs in the name of even greater profits.

Hewlett-Packard saved more than $4.3 billion and put more than $4 billion into stock buybacks. It laid off 14,500 workers.

To make it all even uglier, Hewlett-Packard lobbied for the Homeland Investment Act as a member of something called the Homeland Investment Coalition—this at a time when the “war on terror” was intensifying and the word “Homeland” made everyone think of national security.

The Department of Homeland Security had been founded in 2002. We had invaded Iraq in March 2003. And there was Fiorina sixteen months later, party to using “Homeland” to hustle the government out of billions with false promises of new jobs.

And there she was the following year, following the disastrous merger with Compaq she engineered, being asked to step down as HP CEO, with the incentive of $21 million plus $19 million in pension benefits and stock, quite a severance package for someone who would never consider working the system.
A few years later, Firorina felt her business experience qualified her challenge an incumbent United States Senator.  However, we learn from Politico

after her 2010 loss to Barbara Boxer, the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive quickly dismantled her political machinery, moved across the country to Virginia and didn’t pay off all her debts to vendors and strategists for more than four years, even as she made sure to quickly reimburse herself $1.25 million she loaned the campaign.

Fiorina reportedly paid off her debts shortly before she announced for president in 2015. But "after she lost to Boxer, she moved to Virginia, notwithstanding approximately $500,000 in unpaid bills, including money owed to the widow of a consultant who died during the campaign."

She's a real sweetheart, not someone who would ever take advantage of the system like the scoundrels Trump and Clinton.

And have I mentioned how loathsome Carly Fiorina is?















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