May 10, 2015

Meet The Press continues its coverage of irrelevant GOP clown car occupants with today's interview with Carly Fiorina. Right off the bat, Chuck Todd brought up the CarlyFiorina.org fiasco, and the fact she laid off 30,000 during her tenure at Hewlett-Packard. Todd asked if she had any regrets over those layoffs. Obviously prepared to defend her record of failure, she replied.

Well you know, what's interesting to me is that website as well as your line of questioning, just leaves out a whole bunch of other facts. That's the thing about business, facts and numbers and results actually count, it's not about words as it is in politics.

Todd attempts to get her to answer why she was fired and she brags about her record at HP, especially patent growth and job growth overseas.

'We went from lagging behind in every product category to leading in every product category...yes I had to make tough calls in tough times. Tough times that many technology companies didn't survive at all."

Again, Chuck asks,

"Why did HP's board fire you and why one the day that they did, the stock went up nearly seven percent?"

Well they did fire me, I've been very open about that. I was fired in a boardroom brawl. We had board members leaking information out of the board room... It is a leader's job to challenge the status quo and when you do, you make enemies, I understand that well...a CEO's job is to build sustainable value over the long term for as many employees, for as many customers and for as many communities as possible.

So did she actually accomplish something so majestic at HP? The business world sees her career as a spectacular failure. She changed the culture at HP,

Fiorina is also known internally as straying from the HP Way, according to long-term employees. The HP Way is "an egalitarian, decentralized system," that became the company's core culture in its early years, according to the HP Alumni Assocation

But the biggest problem during her tenure, HP's stock lost more than half its value.

To be fair, her tenure overlapped with the end of the dot-com bubble, and a lot of tech companies had similar stock price drops during that period as well. But HP's stock performance was worse than other big tech companies, such as Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, and Oracle, during her tenure.

When she darkened the halls at Hewlett-Packard, it was obvious that she has a big ego, which offended many workers—things like hanging her portrait in the lobby.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of Yale University told USA Today, at the time, said she earned a place among "the worst because of her ruthless attack on the essence of this great company. ... She destroyed half the wealth of her investors and yet still earned almost $100 million in total payments for this destructive reign of terror."

Carly is as bad at business as Republicans are at governing. Like the GOP, Fiorina has nothing to brag about, yet will shamelessly promote her accomplishments, much like the Bush/Cheney reign of terror.

The Republican Clown Car is a field of plutocratic puppets who can't kiss the rings of billionaires fast enough. None of them has ever given a damn about anyone but the filthy rich. Carly has it all: a record of failure, a huge ego, callous disregard for working Americans, a love for wealth and Jesus and the mean disposition of a two-time political loser (2008 McCain-Palin and her own loss to Barbara Boxer in 2010). Even though she's polling pretty low (12th among candidates), she'll ride aboard the clown car as long as possible, or until she attains her highest speaking fee potential.

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