It is by now clear that, if the finalists were Trump and
Fiorina, the voters have to choose between two confabulating narcissists.
Trump supporters are basically aware of these traits in
their candidate, but excuse them, for reasons both well- and ill-advised. Fiorina is less widely known (she
didn’t even make the Grownups Table of the first debate), but is starkly limned
here, fresh this morning:
The candor of that piece is noteworthy, given the
source: one might have expected
the Post to offer qualified support for Fiorina, both as a woman
and as the anti-Trump.
One footnote.
The article well details the fiasco of her Hewlett-Packard
tenure, on which (paradoxically) she is principally running: her ace- is more like a
deuce-in-the-hole. She had only
one notable role as a business executive prior to that, which the article
barely touches on; here, in full:
Fiorina had become one of [AT&T]'s
most visible rock stars, spearheading the $3 billion spinoff of Lucent
Technologies, then the biggest stock-market debut in U.S. history. The
hyper-growth firm would crumple after her departure, but not before bolstering
Fiorina’s reputation as an aggressive dealmaker with a golden touch. In 1998,
Fortune trumpeted her tireless work ethic and sales tactics, and crowned her,
at 44, “the most powerful woman in American business.”
Now, thus decontextualized, that “crumple after her
departure” might be unfair:
perhaps that was just bad luck, or whatever. So we checked the history in Wikipedia, and found
something really sobering:
On the surface, Fiorina seemed to add 22,000 jobs & revenues grew
from US$19 billion to US$38 billion. However, the real cause of Lucent spurring
sales under Fiorina was by lending money to their own customers. According
to Fortune magazine, "In a neat bit
of accounting magic, money from the loans began to appear on Lucent’s income
statement as new revenue while the dicey debt got stashed on its balance sheet
as an allegedly solid asset". Lucent's stock price grew 10-fold.
At the start of 2000, Lucent's
"private bubble burst", while other competitors like Nortel Networks
and Alcatel were still going strong as it would be many months before the rest
of the telecom industry bubble collapsed.
In other words, she wasn’t merely an inept business-leader,
but a distinctly sketchy one. That is the sort of scam that should
interest the Securities and Exchange Commission, if not indeed the DoJ.
[Note: The
proverb that titles this post
means “Not a dime’s worth of difference between them”, as someone-or-other once said.]
[Update] And now, a severe WaPo editorial re Fiorina's fact-challenged strategy of fuite en avant:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fiorinas-falsehoods/2015/09/26/b6e4f424-63bf-11e5-9757-e49273f05f65_story.html
[Update] And now, a severe WaPo editorial re Fiorina's fact-challenged strategy of fuite en avant:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fiorinas-falsehoods/2015/09/26/b6e4f424-63bf-11e5-9757-e49273f05f65_story.html
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