Boxer's Friends at Cisco - Outsourcing and political double standards

The Wall Street Journal ^ | 10/27/10

[MissesBush]

California Senator Barbara Boxer has been bludgeoning her Republican challenger, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, for outsourcing tens of thousands of jobs. We wonder if Ms. Boxer is equally outraged by her own big business backers.

In a TV ad that has been running around California, Ms. Boxer blasts Ms. Fiorina for having "laid off 30,000 workers" and having "shipped jobs to China" during her time at H-P.

Yesterday, the networking equipment giant Cisco nonetheless hosted the three-term Democrat for a townhall meeting with employees at its office in San Jose. Cisco CEO John Chambers, a former adviser to John McCain's Presidential campaign, is one of Ms. Boxer's most prominent Silicon Valley supporters. Cisco employees and its political action committee have donated $41,350 to her re-election campaign and rank as her sixth largest contributor, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

This wouldn't count as notable, except for the fact that roughly half of Cisco's 70,700 work force and half of the jobs the company has added in recent years are located overseas. A Cisco spokesman rejects the notion that any of these jobs were "outsourced," though we'd enjoy hearing Andy Stern and other union leaders parse that distinction.

From scouring news clips, we were able to learn that in 2006 the company announced plans to invest more than $1 billion in India, triple its Indian work force and launch expansions in other South Asian countries. Cisco has since sent several of its top managers to Bangalore from San Jose.

Meanwhile, the company also parks about $30 billion of its $40 billion in cash overseas, in part because of the high U.S. corporate tax rate on repatriated earnings. Ms. Boxer and President Obama have both spent much of the midterm campaign denouncing this practice as unpatriotic tax avoidance that harms...

[MissesBush]

At least Fiorina's record at HP is a net job creation number of 10s of thousands of jobs. Boxer on the other hand presided over 12.6% unemployment.

Boxer supports the EPA shutting off Central Valley irrigation to protect a 3 inch fish, the delta smelt, which turned vast swaths of fertile farmland into dust bowl. This bureaucrat-begotten drought created 15% unemployment in the region including 40% unemployment in Mendota. Rather than representing California to mitigate this disaster Boxer chose to represent her extreme ideology instead.

[dila813]

Carly Fiorina should have embraced this and pointed out that she wasn’t the one that created the economic reality that forces companies to outsource work overseas, Babes did....

[Wolfie]

Nobody who supports Boxer will care if she takes the money. Nobody who doesn’t support her will care if she doesn’t. Minds are made up, and since nobody really cares, taking the money is the smart move. Money is the lifeblood of a government for sale.

[muleskinner]

If I don't hear a Fiorina commercial pointing out that Cisco, which has contributed over $40K to Boxer, has exported thousands of jobs and is investing over a billion dollars overseas, etc., I will lose hope for Carly's campaign.

Or, here is a list of other companies that also shifted work overseas - Apple, etc, etc.