Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning
After months of electoral politics conducted exclusively by way of dueling, 30 second propaganda slots (aka paid-for political ads), incumbent Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and her Republican challenger, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina conducted what excluded Green Party candidate Duane Roberts derided as “a sham debate between two multi-millionaires backed by big business interests.”
While there is some merit in Roberts’ complaint, the debate proved of vital importance, especially since it exposed the extreme views of the lesser known Fiorina on a variety of issues ranging from her opposition to environmental protection, opposition to marital equality for same sex couples, and her outright call to reverse Roe v. Wade. But the most telling aspect was that the debate exposed Fiorina to be an unapologetic proponent of outsourcing and corporate globalization, which, since the passage of NAFTA, has proved to be the bane of the American middle-class.
That made this a debate of manifest importance to the people of California. Yet the corporate media, whose financial interest is served by failing to provide meaningful news coverage, thereby forcing candidates into the paid-for propaganda slots, proved true to form. Live coverage was limited to Cox Communications’ Oakland, CA, affiliate, KTVU…
Boxer pounces on Fiorina’s opening “jobs creation” gaffe
During her opening statement, Fiorina went beyond touting her credentials as the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard. She said, “I have created jobs.” That opened the door not only to Boxer but to both moderator and viewer questions which suggested that it would have been more accurate for Fiorina to say, “I have transferred domestic jobs elsewhere.”
Republican viewer Tom Watson, a retired Hewlett Packard employee asked:
Fiorina’s Global Jobs Scam
In The Great American Job Scam, Greg LeRoy documents how, over the past fifty years, corporations have obtained massive subsidies, outright gifts of land and property, and enormous tax breaks from city, county, state, and regional governmental entities by enticing bidding wars between them through empty promises of job creation that are most often never fulfilled and which, from a national perspective, do not create jobs but instead merely shift them from one region to another.
Fiorina’s response to Watson revealed that she is typical of the millionaire/billionaire class of sociopaths who do not believe they bear any allegiance whatsoever to this nation or to working-class Americans.
While she took care not to mention the principle reason why the billionaire class, starting with NAFTA, have outsourced America’s manufacturing base, the reasons she did list — deregulation, tax credits, “special economic zones” — typify the demands long made by corporations upon state and local governments in order for those regions to enjoy the “privilege” of private sector jobs.
Perhaps the most telling example Leroy provides entails the instance in which former FL Gov. Jeb Bush provided the Scripps Research Institute with $369 million in state subsidies atop the $667 million given by Palm Beach County to create a new biomedical research facility and 545 new jobs — “a subsidy of more than $1.9 million” per job.
Another was Sykes Enterprises, Inc., a Tampa-based operator of call centers, which, like a roving band of gypsies, entered small town America, promising jobs if the country bumpkins would just fork over land and incentives, only to run off with the loot. A Sykes vice president was even so bold as to declare: “If a community is inviting Sykes to build a call center, they are expected to deed the land for two call centers to us, and give incentives worth at least $2.5 million.”
LeRoy sets forth no less than thirteen small towns which had fallen victim to Sykes’s hit-and-run tactics. Here is one classic example:
Sykes did go on to create workstations, some 10,000 of them in low-wage overseas countries, at the same time it closed and abandoned its facilities and workers in small town U.S.A.
That brings us to the real reason why the titans at the top of the corporate food chain outsource — the availability of sweatshop labor in China, India, and elsewhere at the slave wage of $2/day, which permits unscrupulous corporations like Wal*Mart to maintain their “always low prices.” Those low prices translate into “always huge profits — $7 billion per year, profits that have placed five members of the Walton family amongst the world’s top ten richest people, with a combined personal worth in excess of $100 billion.
So when Carly Fiorina says that Americans must compete for jobs, she is saying that we should join a race to the bottom in order to secure the “privilege” of private sector employment — typical of the short-term greed of the billionaire class which ignores that, as they destroyed middle-class jobs and wages, these sociopaths eliminated the ability of the American people to buy their products.
To understand just how twisted this is, one has to go back to the words of the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln:
Fiorina is a poster child for the 21st CEO sense of entitlement
A debate question posed by Randy Shandobill of KTVU triggered an interesting colloquy:
Fiorina: Absolutely they should, and in fact, during my time at Hewlett-Packard I ripped up my employment contract and put my pay up for shareholder vote. Every dollar I earned at Hewlett Packard was voted on by shareholders and every dollar was tied very specifically to performance….In the six years that I managed Hewlett Packard…we doubled the size of the company to $88 billion, we tripled the rate of innovation to eleven patents a day, we quintupled the cash flow, we improved the profitability in every product line…
Boxer: I think we are entitled to our opinion but we’re not entitled to our own facts. The facts are there was a $21 million severance check, and my understanding is that it was taken after my opponent was fired. The stock went down more than 50%…
A description provided by Wikipedia bolsters Senator Boxer’s account.
Caught with her hand in the cookie jar, Fiorina dissembled:
Outsourcing Hewlett Packard’s high tech manufacturing was no more an “agonizing choice” than Fiorina’s decision to accept a $21 million severance package in the wake of her utter failure. It was always about the bottom line — hers!
Earlier in the “debate” Fiorina linked increases in California unemployment statistics to an increase in federal government employment. This seems bizarre, especially coming from the lips of someone who laid off tens of thousands of Hewlett Packard employees while she outsourced their jobs in search of cheap foreign labor. Does Fiorina not realize that when Californians accept federal employment, that reduces the number of Californians who are unemployed?
Extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy will not create new jobs
The “debate” included the following exchange:
Fiorina: I think we need first to start by describing what the 2001/2003 tax cuts really were….The vast majority of that relief went to middle class Americans, and in fact if those tax cuts are not extended the average California family will pay up to $1,600 more in taxes….The death tax will skyrocket to 55% on January first. We have 88,000 farms in this great state. Most of them family owned…I think in the middle of a terrible recession…with twelve metropolitan areas with unemployment up to 15%…and meanwhile in the last 20 months the federal government spending has increased 10% each year and federal government employees have increased 14 1/2% over the last two years.
Boxer:…We had 16,500 teachers plus get pink slips…What’s more important than our children?…My opponent actually called that bill where we saved these teacher’s jobs…a disgrace…I’ll tell you why I don’t think she likes it…because we paid for it by stopping some tax breaks for companies who ship jobs overseas. So every time you really get past the surface, you see my opponent fighting for the billionaires, for the millionaires, for the companies who ship jobs overseas.
The exchange typifies Republican dissembling on the issue of taxes. As noted by Paul Krugman:
According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, making all of the Bush tax cuts permanent, as opposed to following the Obama proposal, would cost the federal government $680 billion in revenue over the next 10 years…
[W]here would this $680 billion go? Nearly all of it would go to the richest 1 percent of Americans…, people with incomes of more than $500,000 a year. But that’s the least of it: the policy center’s estimates say that the majority of the tax cuts would go to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent. [T]he average tax break for those lucky few — the poorest members of the group have annual incomes of more than $2 million, and the average member makes more than $7 million a year — would be $3 million over the course of the next decade.During the debate, Sen. Boxer reminded the audience that the Clinton years produced 23 million new jobs and a surplus. “Then I served for eight years with George W. Bush. I did not support his priorities and his budget. We wound up with a $1.3 trillion deficit after those 8 years and the worst job creation record since Herbert Hoover, one million new jobs compared to 23 million.”
Of course, Boxer failed to mention that it was President Clinton who rammed NAFTA through on the fast-track, opening the door to the hemorrhaging of jobs via outsourcing during the Bush years. That said, there is no empirical evidence that tax cuts for the wealthy create jobs. To the contrary, reputable economists like Prof. Alan Blinder, a co-director of Princeton University’s Center for Economic Policy Studies, make it clear that they do not.
Fiorini’s reference to a so-called “death tax” (right-wing slang for the “inheritance tax”) is also quite revealing. The inheritance tax does not kick in for any estate valued at less than $3.5 million. It’s purpose is to prevent the rise of the very thing the Founding Fathers fought a revolution to destroy — a landed aristocracy. As explained by Warren Buffet:
Correction: It appears I erred in stating that KTVU was a CBS affiliate; that it is owned by Cox Communications. Mea Culpa!
That error doesn’t change the fact that none of the commercial TV stations offered live coverage to the nearly 10 million people who reside in Los Angeles County. As we previously reported, citing a March 11, 2010, study performed by the Norman Lear Center of the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, commercial advertising makes up 29% of a typical 30-minute Los Angeles TV “news” broadcast.
The study revealed:
Ernest A. Canning has been an active member of the California state bar since 1977. Mr. Canning has received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science as well as a juris doctor. He is also a Vietnam vet (4th Infantry, Central Highlands 1968).
Comment deleted as commercial spam–EAC
Interesting take, but KTVU is actually NOT the CBS affiliate. The actual owner is Cox communications, which does business with the likes of all those crazy radio commentators that have found an outlet on the tv more recently. The station is an affiliate of f__. They have a shrewd interest in broadcasting this debate in the Bay Area and nowhere else.
i enjoyed the article and the peops of cali would be insane to “elect” fiornia but when u said that clinton opened the doors with nafta…while that is true…it was china entering the wto in bush’s first term (the same week as 9-11)that really killed the manufacturing base in the US
Pick a Plute! What’s the point?
Assuming, that is, that your vote is even counted.
I’m thinking the Venus Project is the way to go.
Dear Senator Boxer,
Keep it simple. “My opponent has a track record she can’t run from and that is as a job killer. She is wholly unqualified to serve the interests of ALL Californians.”
Say this at every stop and in every interview. You must paint an easy on the eyes and ears picture of her accomplishments, over and over again!
Barbara Boxer — promoter of the global carbon tax — the world’s first global tax — which will go directly into the coffers of — yes, you guessed it — say it with me now — global multi-national CAPITALIST corporations. In fact the left make much better foot soldiers than the tea baggers. At least the tea baggers are protesting. “Progressives” are marching in lock step towards global tyranny, cheering all the way.
And your evidence, Brook @6, that a “global carbon tax” (or any true “tax”) would be paid to “global multi-national CAPITALIST corporations” is?
Brook lied @ 6:
Nope. Sorry. The Carbon Tax has (unfortunately) been rejected by Dems, though there are a number of Republicans who have been calling for one. I wouldn’t put much stock in that though, since Republicans also used to be in favor of what Boxer *has* called for, Cap and Trade, like when the Bushes signed two such C&T measures into law and when Palin and McCain were in favor it, before they were against it.
Please mind our commenting rules against posting knowing disinformation here. Now you know. Thanks.
Ernest, follow the rat hole down which much of the EU carbon tax money goes, and you will have your answer.
BF is fully aware that Dems (and Boxer) have been completely thwarted in their attempts to push us towards a global carbon tax, but they are going to get another chance in Mexico this December. It’s up to true patriotic Americans who see through this ruse to kill it — once again. We’re not going to have a tyrannical EU, where they keep coming back again and again, until they get the answer they want.