Monday, September 27, 2010

You're no good, baby, you're no good


CNBC will never be considered as anything but wildly supportive of the investor class and anti-labor/common people.

Yet even by their Gordon Gecko standards, Carly Fiorina was too greedy:
A consummate self-promoter, Fiorina was busy pontificating on the lecture circuit and posing for magazine covers while her company floundered. She paid herself handsome bonuses and perks while laying off thousands of employees to cut costs. The merger Fiorina orchestrated with Compaq in 2002 was widely seen as a failure. She was ousted in 2005.

THE STAT: HP stock lost half its value during Fiorina’s tenure.


And then there's her little Iran problem:
Fiorina's having a rough time of it. Her latest problem: defending herself against charges that HP made loads of money during her tenure by selling its products in Iran despite a U.S. trade embargo. "To her knowledge, during her tenure, HP never did business in Iran," Fiorina's campaign told the San Jose Mercury News.

Really? Fiorina had no idea? That's odd, since...

  • Fiorina in 2003 noted Middle East sales were defying global trends, and, as theMerc notes, HP's partner there issued a press release saying sales topped $100 million and that "the seeds of the Redington-Hewlett-Packard relationship were sowed six years ago for one market - Iran."
  • Three of the three HP partners in the Middle East contacted by Christopher Stewart for a story in Portfolio magazine's August 2008 issue readily agreed to ship printers to Iran. Portfolio notified HP of the incidents, but the company didn't condemn them, instead refusing comment. Fiorina was gone as CEO at this point, but Portfolio noted that diversion of American products to Iran trough Dubai had been going strong for many years.
  • HP had an office in the Dubai free-trade zones notorious for funneling American goods to Iran, Portfolio reported — so it had ample means to be aware of how its products were being shipped.
  • After the SEC noticed the prevalance of HP products in Iran, it asked the company about the matter, and got back a letter from the company saying its Dutch subsidiary sold $120 million to Iran in 2008.
  • Finally, in January 2009, HP severed ties with Redington Gulf, the distributor that had publicly bragged about its Iran trade six years earlier.
Yep, Carly was selling to embargoed/Demonic Iran while most people, especially conservatives, thought we should be invading/bombing Iran back to the Stone Age.

Making a profit from blood and tears and American lives. A good conservative, Carly is.

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