Will the McPalin Campaign Ask Carly Fiorina to Give Her $42 Million Back?

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John McCain and Sarah Palin both came out today to condemn CEOs who get golden parachutes. Here’s McCain:

We will stop multimillion dollar payouts to CEO’s who have broken the public trust.

And here’s Palin:

We’re going to reform the way Wall Street does business and stop multimillion-dollar payouts and golden parachutes to CEOs who break the public trust.

Seems to me McCain could put that campaign promise into effect right away. One of his top advisors, Carly Fiorina, laid off 20,000 HP workers, oversaw huge losses, and engaged in corporate spying. Sure sounds like she "broke the public trust" to me. And for her troubles, HP gave her $21.4 million in severance pay, plus another $21.1 million in stock options and other benefits. 

Over $42 million for–as John McCain describes it–breaking the public trust.

Call John McCain’s campaign at (703) 418-2008 and demand that McCain stand by his promise to stop this practice. Ask him to demand this his campaign advisor, Carly Fiorina, give back her loot to HP’s stockholders. 

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  2. Mauimom says:

    Now just who is it who’s conducting the first presidential debate and the VP one? Send them a “suggested question.”

  5. Mauimom says:

    And please include Franklin Raines, the former head of Fannie Mae, on the Criminals Who Should Give Back Their Golden Parachute Money list.

    Raines managed to give a bunch of Fannie Mae money to his alma mater, Harvard, during his tenure. Yep, Harvard, provider of so many units of affordable housing.

  8. Drumman says:

    I tried to call and just got voice mail, that was full no live person on the phones at Mcsame. Unless you wanted to make donation.

  9. wavpeac says:

    Wow!! It just seems like years of watching bushco lie, just seem to reinforce the likihood that it will keep working. I mean we have watched them lie and lie and lie without any real consequence. What the hell do we expect is going to happen when lying is rewarded???? for 8 years!

    Made the call, left a message.

  10. plunger says:

    Ms Fiorina’s reputation as a lying shill has been secured.

    Hey Carly…what about this Republican-caused debacle?

    AIG and Lehman are going to be dumping all categories of assets on the market at once to raise capital. As they do, all holders of comparable assets will be forced to mark their assets to the new reality created by the downward price spiral. Rapid asset value deflation over the next month will cause a knock-on effect across the board.

    Look out below.

  11. plunger says:

    “Lehman Brothers Survived the Great Depression – but not the Bush Administration”

    This economic collapse is a millstone around the necks of the entire Republican party. Now you can clearly see why the Republican party was so intent of stealing the Social Security funds to feed the markets – to keep the plates spinning. They failed. If you actually think you have “money” in the “Market,” it’s time to put your hands on it. There is no “market.”

    “It’s the economy, stupid!”

  12. brendanx says:

    A propos prior thread, it’s strange to hear McCain say the “fundamentals are strong” when the narrators in some of his own campaign ads intone things like “an economy in shambles…”.

  15. Leen says:

    “put that campaign promise into effect right now” Now there’s a concept!

    I’ve been thinking that the only difference between Bush and McCain is that McSame actually served in the military.

  18. MadDog says:

    Another factoid that folks should understand about Ms. Carly “Who could’ve known they expected me to be able to manage?” Fiorina, is that she “made her name” as one of the zillions of ass-kissing, bureaucracy-worshiping, management-hamsters at the epitome of bureaucracy, namely AT&T.

    Having worked for years with folks at AT&T, you need to understand that no one in the technology field, absolutely no one with any minimum of intellect, would ever consider a person who held a management position at AT&T as anything but a total disqualification to a real management position anywhere else.

    If you wanted someone to ruin your business, hire a former AT&T management troll. They had no clue how the real world operated and could only depend on MBI (Management By Intimidation) theory and practice.

    That HP failed with Ms. Carly Forina’s line of AT&T “management” shuck is the proof the cognescenti of technology guffawed about the day she was hired.

  20. FormerFed says:

    Of course not. She EARNED her golden parachute!!!!!!

    Carly took a wonderful company and almost drove it into the ground. As I recall, it was only through one of the founders’ children/grandchildren and their allies on the board that saved the company after they canned Carly.

  21. masaccio says:

    Phred, you asked what the difference between Bear Stearns, Fannie and Freddie on one hand, and Lehman and AIG on the other. Here’s my take.

    All of the big brokers have huge exposure in derivatives and credit swaps, which are big bets on securities. When Bear Stearns failed, the Fed didn’t know whether it could let those derivatives and credit swaps unwind (settle out) without causing a run on other entities or other huge problems. So, it stepped in. According to the NYT, the Fed and the Treasury have since put people into the brokerage firms to see what their exposure actually is. They seemed quite sure it would be safe to let Lehman fail, that it would not in itself push other entities into free fall. Let’s hope they are right.

    Fannie and Freddie are very different. They have issued trillions of dollars of debt securities, actual debt, which is backed only by the mortgages they have purchased. Those debt securities are widely held. Foreign countries hold hundreds of billions. You can be sure the Treasury has been telling those people that the US stands behind those debt instruments. Banks hold them as part of their capital reserves. If the debt instruments were worthless, banks would lose their capital cushion, and many would be more likely to fail. Pension funds hold them. Money Market funds hold them. We just couldn’t let them fail.

    I know Ian Welsh thinks it might have been ok, because the US had never actually said it would make them good, but the risks really were systemic and terrifying. At least the Treasury stands ready to really wipe out the common shareholders, and to take an equity position for when things get better.

  22. masaccio says:

    I said that the Fannie and Freddie securities are backed only by mortgages, which might be misleading. What I meant is that the vast bulk of the assets of the entities are mortgages, not that the debt instruments themselves are secured by mortgages.

  23. JohnLopresti says:

    re MadDog, supra, ATT has a long tradition of losing execs to smaller companies. It may be a bug looked at as a bureaucracy mill, but it is a feature to many startups, especially well funded startups soon after their IPO and their stock finds a more natural niche. The Carleton Fiorina effort to nudge HP into a kind of modernity which it had not exhibited for many years, in her successful effort to merge with Compaq, I saw as mangerial genius, though it got bad press from grumpies. It was 1999 when she joined HP; the merger deal with Compaq finalized two days prior to 9/11/01. She was forced to resign early in her own pretexting compromise of HP’s longstanding ethics standards, and her successor Pattie Dunn had a similar pretexting problem, though the latter had the opportunity of taking her views to a congressional hearing, in the company of one of silicon valley’s most respected lawyers; for their part, HP underwent a little turmoil over the illegal information acquisition, and on the morning of the congressional hearing HP’s lawyer Baskins resigned, announcing she would take the 5th at the hearing. An election in 2006 saw the state AG migrate to a different elective office, and exiting he cut a deal with HP to be gentle upon Dunn and many of the perpetrators of pretexting as corporate bigbrotherism/bigsisterism; when the new state AG took office, he, too, observed respect for the icons of silicon valley; soon HP proffered $14. million incubus money to a fund to oversee corporate skullduggery; and some folks got fines or community service assignments. Congress wrote a pretexting ban law. One of the HP pretexting detective agents’ companies in 2008 received a $600,000. fine in FL for continuing the practice of selling cellphone records. Both Fiorina and Dunn had problems with an active boardmember who may have resisted their respective leadership styles. It was a fun story to read, even though permeated with inpulchritudinous hegemonisms and bias. I have no idea why Fiorina camps at the Republican doorstep, but I was glad for the dash with which she awoke the sometimes creative HP. And she probably can afford to return a portion of the golden parachute. The following is a link to December 2006 coverage of the House committee hearing at which Dunn appeared, even featuring one of Dingell’s quotable critiques of corporate malfeasance. Here’s a Dunn segment from pretexting’s timeline at HP. So, yeah, CarlyF should return the money; but, then again, I am one who thought adequate sanction for Bernie Ebbers would have been taking away most of the cash but making him live in a tract home instead of a mansion. People have pointed out that retirement savings were lost for a lot of people at Bernie’s company; but HP remains a kind of cyberGibraltar, so far.

    • MadDog says:

      …ATT has a long tradition of losing execs to smaller companies. It may be a bug looked at as a bureaucracy mill, but it is a feature to many startups, especially well funded startups soon after their IPO and their stock finds a more natural niche…

      John, I ordinarily find much to agree with in your commentary, but on this one, I’ll have to agree to disagree. *g*

      I’ve a wee bit of experience and knowledge regarding some of those tech startups, and many of the ones I’ve dealt with thought buying a former AT&T management busybody was the key to success only to be sorely disappointed.

      Having worked with AT&T over years as our top customer in a network technology company, as well as worked in a tech meteor business (briefly the brightest thing in the sky only to later totally disappear from sight), all I can tell you is that whenever we got a former AT&T management hamster resume, we laughed and shitcanned it immediately.

      As to the HP purchase of Compaq, as far as I can tell, little good came out of it other than to remove a bit better (though not by much) competitor from the playing field.

      And Compaq itself had already tanked with its acquisitions of Digitial Equipment Corp (DEC) (a totally dead-end mini-computer vendor whose creator thought (and said) that PCs would never amount to much) and Tandem Computers (another speciality non-stop computing company whose best days were behind it as the PC explosion blew by it).

      Compaq couldn’t play profitably in the PC business anymore against their Texas rival Dell, so they decided to “bulk-up” to another weight class and go a few rounds with the then punch-drunk IBM.

      So what HP/Carly Fiorina was buying was a addled and bloated competitor in Compaq whose best days were also far behind it.

      Many including me think she was just proving how truly clueless she was (and is). They don’t grow Entrepreneur at AT&T; they breed Bureaucrats. I still say Carly is the proof of that.

  26. radiofreewill says:

    OT Palin says the Troopergate Investigation is ‘tainted’ and refuses to meet with the Investigator.

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26727937/

    McCain campaign spokesman Ed O’Callaghan told a news conference Monday that the governor, the Republican nominee for vice president, will not cooperate as long as the investigation “remains tainted.” He said he doesn’t know whether Palin’s husband would challenge a subpoena issued to compel his cooperation.

    The campaign insists the investigation has been hijacked by Democrats. It says it can prove Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan was fired because of insubordination on budget issues — not because he refused to fire a state trooper who had divorced Palin’s sister.

  27. bobschacht says:

    Would it be proper to call the current market meltdown, beginning with Bear Stearns, the bursting of the Financial Services bubble?

    Per Wiki, the term “financial services” became more prevalent in the United States partly as a result of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of the late 1990s, which enabled different types of companies operating in the US financial services industry at that time to merge. The financial services industry constitutes the largest group of companies in the world in terms of earnings and equity market cap. It is also a slow growing and extremely fragmented industry, with the largest company (Citigroup), only having a 3 % US market share, again according to the Wikipedia.

    The “Investopedia” sez that Financial Services is

    A category of stocks containing firms that provide financial services to commercial and retail customers. This sector includes banks, investment funds, insurance companies and real estate.
    Financial services perform best in low interest rate environments. A large portion of this sector generates revenue from mortgages and loans, which gain value as interest rates drop. Furthermore, when the business cycle is in an upswing, the financial sector benefits from additional investments. Improved economic conditions usually lead to more capital projects and increased personal investing. New projects require financing, which usually leads to a larger number of loans.

    Back in June, Morningstar provided this assessment of the Financial Services sector:

    For almost half a decade, the financial sector was engaged in a rampant race to grow assets. Once-boring, slow-moving financials companies gobbled up almost any type of asset served by mortgage brokers, builders, and leveraged-buyout artists. And within the financials sector, few companies grew as fast as the nation’s major investment banks. Take Lehman Brothers (LEH), the most recent victim of the current crisis. In less than five years, the firm’s total assets exploded from $312 billion at the end of 2003 to $768 billion in the first quarter of 2008, an astounding 2.5-fold increase. What’s most disturbing is that during that time, equity increased only 1.8 fold, amplifying the leverage of what was already a highly leveraged balance sheet.

    As it turns out, financials also suffer ill effects if they engage in obsessive eating. To avoid permanent harm to their health, many now need a serious diet, or in the sector’s lingo–deleveraging. A few things you can do to delever: sell assets, cut the dividend, hit the breaks on spending, and raise capital. Many financial institutions needed to take all these steps, and quickly. The investment banks have once again led the way, with the first to raise capital being Citigroup (C) (not a pure investment bank, but its need for capital came from this line of business) and Merrill Lynch (MER). Bear Stearns, the most troubled among the group, shortly followed with an extreme solution: selling itself to a competitor for a pittance. Lehman didn’t stay behind for long and recently announced that it will raise another $6 billion to boost capital. In addition, Lehman disclosed that in the second quarter of 2008 alone it sold $130 billion in assets, almost 30% of all the assets it had accumulated since 2003.

    Nevertheless, we don’t believe the industry’s deleveraging process is over. Although we might have passed the peak in the recapitalization process, we don’t think the industry is ready to resume asset growth. Assets of financial firms, excluding a few like J.P. Morgan (JPM), are likely to remain flat or decline further in the following quarters.

    One thing that will certainly keep growing in the following quarters is loan losses. Until this point, the industry has been busy estimating what the final bill will be for its reckless behavior during the past five years. Non-performing loans mounted in recent quarters and write-offs of various securities reached unprecedented levels, but substantial charge-offs have yet to hit the books. This is about to change. Over the next few quarters, we expect many financial institutions–including Washington Mutual (WM), Wachovia (WB), and National City (NCC)–to report significantly higher net charge offs, in some cases higher than ever before. The question remains whether the capital, future earnings, and loan-loss reserves that are supposed to absorb all these losses will be high enough to leave a meaningful amount for investors. In our view, the answer in several cases is a resounding yes, but for some financials, more pain is in the cards.

    This was back in JUNE, fer pete’s sakes. But I don’t know of any sector “average” tracking, equivalent to the Dow Jones 500, or the Lipper Index, etc. But I think we’re seeing the Financial Services bubble bursting, or some subset of it.

    Bob in HI

  28. perris says:

    so I am told from the big lake that palin had her governors mansion re-electrified so she could install a tanning machine, which does not bother me one bit

    however they point out, was she tanning while preggers?

    also, I would like to know, did SHE pay for this upgrade since SHE is the one that wanted it for vanity purposes only?

    also, did SHE pay for the tanning bed?

    I think we need to find out if she paid for the bed or “earmarks”

    my pillow has earmarks when I wake up in the morning

  29. perris says:

    this is just in at think progress;

    McCain campaign says Palin won’t talk to Troopergate investigator.Filed Under: Ethics
    By Ali at 9:21 pm McCain campaign says Palin won’t talk to Troopergate investigator.
    The McCain campaign said tonight that Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) “won’t speak with an investigator hired by lawmakers to look into the firing of her public safety commissioner” in the controversy known as “Troopergate.” The campaign declared the investigation to be “tainted,” despite the fact that the five-member committee is composed of three Republicans and two Democrats. Palin had previously agreed to cooperate and thus was not subpoenaed. Reporting the story tonight, Keith Olbermann said, “It is like installing a giant neon sign over her head saying, ‘I’m hiding something.’”

    sounds tons like bush

    man, mkkkain really is trying to emulate this president

  30. pdaly says:

    Yes, Lehman Brothers was a multibiollionnaire ($700 billion?) walking the streets just a few days ago.
    And now it is a corpse lying in the road with an empty wallet. The corpse is news, but I keep woundering “Who took the money– if it ever existed?’
    If it didn’t exist, is someone criminally liable for misleading investors?

    How much money did Lehman Brothers pay each of its head honchos in bonuses for the last several years?
    I have to assume the bonuses were based on profits and that the persons running the company knew the profits were full of hot air and snake oil. Sounds like Enron, sounds like the S&L scandal.

    • readerOfTeaLeaves says:

      Yup.
      Why were Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac ‘too big to fail’?
      And why do those asshats get to keep all that filthy lucre?

      … and why are WE bailing out their sorry, corrupt asses….?
      But I repeat myself.

  32. Unrepentantliberal says:

    Carly Fiorina says ‘McCain, Palin, Biden and Obama’ are all unqualified to lead a fortune 500 company. Funny thing was, neither was she.