McCain's New Economic Advisor - Carly Fiorina

This post is essentially a summary of an article by Sam Pizzigati who edits the online weekly Too Much, and is an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. The article can be read in its entirety here.

McCain's new economic advisor is Carly Fiorina. Fiorina was once the CEO of the computer manufacturer, Hewlett-Packard, and "the first woman ever to run one of the nation's 20 biggest publicly traded companies.

Fiorina is quite pleased to be working for McCain and thinks that McCain is up on things economic. "He understands innovation," says Fiorina.

Whether that is true or not, one must wonder if he understands Fiorina. Upon her arrival at HP, she received a four-year contract of some $90 million. "Less than six years later, in 2005, that CEO stint would end with a kick out the door and $42.5 million in severance."

Hewlett-Packard thought Fiorina was the real deal. HP thought she would take the company to new heights of technologic achievement and financial success. She began this corporate revival by asking all of HP's 93,000 employees to "accept voluntary cutbacks." (Remember she had just been given $66 million worth of shares, "the biggest no-strings stock grant up to then in U.S. corporate history, and assorted other pay goodies worth another $24 million.)

HP employees could choose: take a 10 percent pay cut; a 5 percent pay cut along with losing four vacation days; or just toss eight vacation days.

Before a month had gone by "Fiorina rewarded" the sacrifices of those employees by announcing a layoff of 6,000 more workers.

Unfortunately, this didn't work, nor did a huge merger deal, nor did her rearranging HP's corporate bureacracy, and by 2005, Fiorina was gone!

Now McCain's got her. If McCain, god forbid, should get elected prezident, the rest of us will be stuck with her!

Arrrrgh!