AT&T | Working Stiffed

Carly Fiorina: From HP Board Meetings to Iowa Bored Meetings

Carly Fiorina’s hapless bid for the presidency should serve as a warning to all self-important corporate executives: Your hubris may not play in Peoria…or Des Moines, Iowa. The exception, of course, is Donald Trump…but then again, Trump didn’t need to slide on his belly, kneecapping smarter coworkers out of his way on his climb to the top; his daddy handed him a successful real estate empire.

After making her mark at AT&T by plowing through a (probably small) crowd of female wannabe executives (from secretary to CEO!!!), Carly Fiorina was tapped to lead Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 1999. Her bipolar self-importance, coupled with her intense, ferret-like gaze, allowed her to become an extremely well-compensated poster girl for diversity in the tech industry. How cool was she to head a company in an industry dominated by men?

Six short years and many bad (often heartless) decisions later (the Compaq acquisition and her penchant for outsourcing everyone and everything top the list), she flushed away 50 percent of the company’s value and 30,000 jobs. In the end, Carly’s greatest achievement at HP was her resignation; the stock shot up 7 percent when she announced she was leaving the company.

This former tech “mogul” didn’t even have the common sense to purchase her own domain name. Instead, one of the many former HP workers that she displaced snatched up carlyfiorina.org and used the site to mock Carly and expose the extent of her relentless need to destroy jobs…in her own words. For example, after being asked how she would handle the layoffs at HP if she had to do it again, she replied: “I would have done them all faster.” O-kay.

Carly has been running for office (and losing) ever since, trying to regain a large canvas on which to paint her human carnage. Such pluck is admired by corporate board members who love putting tenacious, self-centered people in charge of companies…people who don’t mind getting a little (or a lot of) blood on their hands to achieve “economies of scale,” but in the real world, people like Carly are rightly shunned for being the psychopaths that they are.

After a career of failure, scandal, and a complete lack of empathy for the people whose lives she carelessly destroyed as HP’s CEO, politics beckoned. As a former corporate CEO, she didn’t feel the need to start at the bottom, so she ran for senator of California against the Yoda of female politicians, Barbara Boxer (who quickly schooled the “secretary-to-CEO” upstart). And now she wants to fail up to president and become the Republican Party’s Hillary Clinton. Such hubris. The Onion humorously captured her delusional aspirations, as only they can.

I suppose it’s easy to think you’re the cat’s pajamas when you spend years addressing a captive audience of employees who applaud and laugh at your bad jokes at town hall meetings. Still, there’s a big difference between addressing an audience of employees who depend on your approval to keep their jobs and addressing American voters, such as those at the Iowa caucuses this week, who you have to depend on to get the job.

Like all bipolar CEOs, when she does face rejection, she folds like a cheap suit. After a poor showing at the Iowa caucuses, she skipped town and her own party. No need to thank the few people who worked on her behalf; it was time to move on and be a world leader pretend at the next stop on the campaign trail…the New Hampshire primary.

Carly, like Hillary Clinton, are examples of what is wrong with too many women who achieve power. As a woman myself, I have to admit that I preferred working for men. Many of the women I worked for who had high aspirations viewed me as a threat (even though I never shared their C-suite aspirations) and felt it necessary to neutralize my contributions or even to take credit for my occasional good ideas. I can honestly say that I have inadvertently helped a lot of these women move up that coveted ladder without so much as a thank you from them.

I wish I could say that all women leaders are wise, gentle souls who have an innate desire to better the world and nurture the growth and development of other women, but that hasn’t been my experience. I can’t imagine what Carly did to her female coworkers during her meteoric rise up the corporate ladder at AT&T.

On some level, you have to blame the environment…with so few opportunities for women to break through the glass ceiling, I can see how an ambitious woman can turn into a psychopath trying to squeeze through the eye of the needle of achievement. Still, until we can level the corporate and political playing fields and the Lady Macbeth syndrome becomes the exception and not the rule, voters (and employees) need to proceed with caution.

This is the problem I have with identity politics. I’d love to see a woman become president (I wish Elizabeth Warren had decided to run), but I don’t support voting for a powerful woman just because she’s a woman. Hillary Clinton and Carly Fiorina are flawed, power-hungry, mentally ill women. And the reality is that after a life time of stepping on other women to get ahead, well…they don’t like other women, so why give them your vote, ladies? Neither would make a suitable first female president and it troubles me that so many women are blinded by ovaries wrapped in a power suit.

While it’s easy to single out Fiorina as a narcissistic, psychotic product of corporate dysfunction, the reality is that C-suites at companies nationwide are filled with Carly Fiorinas and even more bipolar or psychologically damaged men.

I wonder how different the corporate landscape would be if leaders were selected by employees, instead of by corporate board members who see personnel as “human resources.” A little more humility and a lot less hubris in leadership would be appreciated.

This Thanksgiving, Obama and the mainstream media outlets that promote his agenda, were working overtime to convince Americans that we should accept thousands, and eventually hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees, because it is “who we are” as a nation.

I have to ask: who are we as a nation? And does it even matter, now that Obama and Congress are working to dissolve the U.S. into a North American Union through the Trans-Pacific “Partnership” (TPP)?

Forgive me; I know this post is a little long, but I feel compelled to make a few points in support of the working stiffed in this country. And it seems that whenever I express the opinions that follow on Huffington Post or Facebook, they get scrubbed, even though I don’t use profane language or indulge in troll-like behavior. Censorship. Is that “who we are” as a nation? It would seem so.

There’s no question that the refugee crisis is a terrible human tragedy. And there’s also no question that the crisis was created by the criminal neocons in our government who insist on invading and overthrowing governments in the Middle East and Africa on behalf of their transnational bankster benefactors and Saudi Arabia.

But bring these people here? I don’t think so. I think it makes more sense to have the wealthy Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia (the true architects of chaos in the region) resettle these poor people, as Ben Carson says. I don’t care for Carson, but his recommendation in this case makes the most sense.

Even if we can all agree that the majority of those seeking asylum are not ISIS terrorists, allowing hundreds of thousands of them to come here would be an act of economic terrorism against the millions of U.S. laborers and citizens who are struggling to survive in 21st century America.

Let me explain:

There are more than 94 million U.S. citizens out of the workforce; most don’t work because they can’t get jobs (people over 50 have it particularly rough)

A shocking number of our veterans (a number of whom were forced to do close to a dozen tours of duty), are homeless and/or have no access to health care

Our college students are saddled with an astounding amount of college loan debt that they can’t get rid of through bankruptcy—and to make matters worse, they have little hope of finding work to pay off their loans if or when they graduate

We are told that we “don’t have the money” to give Social Security recipients a cost of living increase next year (while commodity and food prices continue to soar)

We are facing the inevitability of more of our jobs being shipped overseas once our corrupt Congress passes the treasonous, sovereignty-destroying TPP

Obamacare penalizes poor people who can’t afford the program’s “affordable” health insurance by levying an unconstitutional tax/fine (taxation by citation)

No money is allocated to fix our crumbling infrastructure or to insulate our unprotected power grid (which means we will be knocked back into the Stone Age when, not if, we are hit by an EMP or solar flare)

I can go on. All things considered, should the refugees be our top priority? I don’t think so. Where is the public outrage over the issues I just outlined?

John Oliver recently went on a clever rant on his show about our “irrational fear” of allowing Syrian migrants into our country; he pointed out that they are thoroughly vetted. All I could think of while listening to him go on about the six or seven layers of scrutiny these people face is, why are we spending our money on this? When I think of the needs I list above, it’s downright criminal.

Not too long ago, Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst at the (globalist-sponsored) Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, published a piece in the Washington Post that argued for allowing the migration; he said it would even help our country.

He sought to ease the concerns of U.S. taxpayers who don’t support bankrolling the welfare and government programs these migrants will undoubtedly require if they are allowed to come. Nowrasteh proposes that Americans and charities (like the Cato Institute?) sponsor them, and in return, the U.S. government should lift all quotas and restrictions on work permits “without complicating regulations.” Really? Can you guess whose jobs they’ll need to take once their sponsors get them situated?

Even our most socialist-leaning president to date, Franklyn Roosevelt, closed our country’s borders during the Depression. He was focused on restoring the economic health of the country and helping to create jobs for U.S. citizens. It would be nice if Obama dedicated his rhetoric and actions in support of the Americans he was elected to represent, like Roosevelt did. Instead, he lobbies for job-destroying initiatives like the TPP and cheap labor through migration.

We are also repeatedly told the lie that migrants only take manual labor jobs that Americans don’t want. When I was growing up, I could easily get one of “those jobs that Americans don’t want.” They helped me save money for college and taught me how to be a responsible young adult; the crappy work and low pay of these jobs also served as an incentive for me to pursue higher education, so I could get “better” jobs.

These days, kids can’t get so-called “crappy jobs” easily, so they continue to depend on their already financially stressed parents for spending money, or they turn to crime. And now that our government has privatized prisons, kids who get caught committing crimes often find that their lives are essentially over before they’ve even begun.

The lie about the “jobs that Americans don’t want” has a counterpart in “the jobs that Americans can’t do.” Silicon Valley ushered in the era of the H-1B visa under the pretense that there aren’t enough trained U.S. workers to handle the volume of tech jobs they create. This has become an egregious tool of domestic economic cannibalism.

Fortune 500 companies like Disney and AT&T took that loophole and drove a truck through it, by importing low wage foreign workers by the thousands to replace qualified U.S. workers. As I write this, 1,200 displaced U.S. Disney workers are in New York training their foreign replacements.

A bipartisan Senate bill banning the replacement of U.S. workers with H-1B visa holders was just introduced. Hopefully, it will pass.

Lastly, there is the “we are all children of immigrants” argument. While that’s true, let’s take a closer look at that. When my grandparents legally migrated to this country after World War II, it was long before the banksters took over our republic and made it a plutocracy; the U.S. was truly a land of growth and opportunity. They wanted to come here sooner, but Roosevelt had closed the doors during the Depression, as I mentioned earlier; too many Americans were out of work….like now.

My grandparents came here to assimilate: they learned English, they pledged allegiance to the American flag and they built their businesses without imposing on American taxpayers. Now, in these times of PC psychosis, we must accommodate every culture to the point that we have become the national equivalent of the tower of babble.

As for those who support leaving our borders wide open by using the example of the Pilgrims coming to America, has anyone asked the Native Americans how that migration worked out for them? I didn’t think so.

Opposition to Syrian refugee migration is not about racism or hatred; it’s about economic feasibility. And, yes, there is some fear involved. After all, we just witnessed a handful of ISIS terrorists kill or injure close to 500 Parisians in less than an hour. It doesn’t take an army of people to take a country hostage.

Our focus needs to be on fixing our country and restoring our middle class. We can no longer afford to turn our backs on struggling U.S. citizens or to overlook the fact that we no longer manufacture anything. We also can’t continue to allow transnational companies incorporated here to ship U.S. jobs overseas at will or to import “migrants” who will work for much less.

Trying to distract us from our very real problems by promoting cost-prohibitive, altruistic global outreach doesn’t help anyone. We are not the prosperous country we were 50 years ago; we are a nation in rapid decline. That, Mr. Obama, is unfortunately “who we are” now as a nation. Charity begins at home, Chief, so do us all a favor and re-prioritize and get busy before it’s too late.