Tag Archives: fiorina

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Vote — All the Cool Kids Are Doing It

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We come from all walks of life. Some of us are students, some are workers, and some are jobless. Some of us are laden with student debt. Some of us work to support our children, some work to support our parents. Some of us have had to postpone starting a family, and some of us have had to move back in with our parents just to make ends meet. But we all have one thing in common — we are the young voters of California. And it’s time for us to flex our muscle at the polls, take control of California’s future and fight off the right wing’s attempt at a hostile corporate takeover of our state.

Our generation has been hit disproportionately hard by the recession. According to a recent report from the AFL-CIO, a third of all adults under age 35 cannot pay their bills, and 70 percent don’t have enough saved to cover even two months of living expenses. We just can’t afford to sit back and wait for things to get better, because if corporate candidates like Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina triumph on Tuesday, things will undoubtedly get worse.

These Wall Street candidates have spent hundreds of millions in order to buy this election, and if elected, they plan on doling out massive tax breaks to the wealthiest individuals and corporations in California, while at the same time slashing the vital services, education, health care, unemployment benefits, civil liberties and much-needed jobs for young people trying to enter the workforce.

So what’s at stake in this election?

Our jobs. Both Whitman and Fiorina have extensive track records of outsourcing tens of thousands of jobs as corporate CEOs, and Whitman’s plan for California centers around laying off 40,000 state workers, which could cause our unemployment rate to jump a full percentage point. Whitman also believes in the categorically untrue concept that giving tax breaks to the rich will somehow create jobs. It didn’t work when Bush did it, and economists agree that the concept is totally bogus.

Our education. Meg Whitman plans to cut another $15 billion from the state budget, and nearly half of the budget goes to K-12 and higher education, which would inevitably mean more draconian cuts to schools and universities that have already been decimated under Schwarzenegger.

Our health care. Carly Fiorina vowed to repeal the new health care law that has allowed so many of us to go back on our parents’ health insurance while we finish school and look for work in this tough job market.

We can’t allow these extreme right-wing candidates to trample all over our generation. We’ve got to take matters into our own hands, and the best way we can do that is to hit the polls en masse on Tuesday, just like we did in 2008. Let’s not forget, it was the young people – both voters and volunteers — who secured Obama’s triumphant victory. And we have the power to do it again, if we commit to vote and getting others out to vote as well. As the President said last week to more than 37,000 Californians at a rally at the University of Southern California:

You’ve got to talk to your friends.  You’ve got to talk to your neighbors.  You’ve got to make phone calls.  You’ve got to knock on doors.  You have to make sure that you are as fired up and as excited now as you were two years ago – because the work is not yet done.

If you’re like me, you’re sick of the tired rhetoric from the media that young people just don’t vote as often as older adults. It seems like that message has become a self-fulfilling prophecy – many young people mistakenly feel like their votes don’t count as much, and subsequently they’re less inclined to vote.

But with an election as close as this one, our votes are more valuable today than ever before. If we do the expected and stay home on Election Day, we’re essentially handing the reins over to the mega-wealthy corporate shills whose Big Business agenda will make their super-rich friends even richer, while the rest of us are left fighting for the crumbs. It’s on every single one of us to vote, and do everything we can to get out the vote to our friends, family, co-workers, classmates and neighbors.

Writer Mike Hardcastle said it best:

Don't vote and you effectively kiss away your ability to have any influence as to how the issues play out in your world, and dude, that's just lame.

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Fiorina Hospitalized!

Carly Fiorina, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in California, has been hospitalized for treatment of an infection, her campaign said in a statement released Tuesday.

The infection is related to reconstructive surgery she had after successfully battling breast cancer, the statement said.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/PO…

While I sincerely hope she loses, I bear no personal animus to her, and wish her a speedy recovery.

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Fiorina Joins the Koch-heads. Ka-Ching!

There’s a name that’s becoming as ubiquitous in dirty oil politics  as Coke cans are in greasy spoons. And it’s pronounced like the soft drink, but spelled Koch. Koch-heads now on the radar include Carly Fiorina, the Tea Party and Proposition 23.

There’s a name  that’s becoming as ubiquitous in dirty oil politics as Coke cans are in greasy spoons. And it’s pronounced like the soft drink, but spelled Koch.

The New Yorker definitively exposed the gas and oil tycoons known as the Koch brothers. But who are the latest Koch-heads to wear the brand with pride?

•   Carly Fiorina

•   The Tea Party

•   The Proposition 23 campaign

Fiorina: The California Senate candidate recently aligned herself with the dirty-energy brothers by ramping up her courtship of the Tea Party in Northern California and the Central Valley. She also just gave a  mealymouthed endorsement of Proposition 23, the California ballot initiative aimed at killing the state’s climate-change law, known as AB32.

In return, Fiorina is getting some ka-ching from Koch Industries. The company is listed as a host of a  fund-raiser for her at Republican senatorial campaign headquarters in D.C. tomorrow.

Tea Party: The recent New Yorker exposé by Jane Mayer put David and Charles Koch on the political map by uncovering their early and continued funding of Tea Party organizations. In fact, the piece makes a good case that the Kochs invented the Tea Party movement.

Proposition 23: The Kochs’ $1 million contribution to the Prop 23 campaign aligns with their oil interests, and their ferocious denial of global warming. They’re longtime and usually unnamed funders of the climate-change denial industry, according to a Greenpeace report a few months ago.

All of this helps explain why Tea Partiers were out the other day supporting poor little Valero, the Texas company (and owner of two of California’s dirtiest oil refineries) that’s the top funder of Proposition 23.

So the Koch-heads among us are now visible, even if it isn’t always stamped on their foreheads.

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Posted by Judy Dugan, research director for Consumer Watchdog, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to providing an effective voice for taxpayers and consumers in an era when special interests dominate public discourse, government and politics. Visit us on Facebook and Twitter.

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Brown, Boxer hold marginal leads

An Ipsos/Reuters poll out this morning shows Jerry Brown leading Meg Whitman 45-39 in the Governor’s race and Barbara Boxer leading Carly Fiorina 45-41. http://www.ipsos-na.com/news-p…

Obviously, these races are going to be hard fought and there is a lot of work to do. Brown’s lead is very good news, seeing as Whitman has saturated the airwaves for months and Brown hasn’t had a presence at all. Boxer’s lead is narrower, but as the campaign goes on, Fiorina’s tenure at HP will be one of the main focuses and that will give Boxer more of an edge. Brown and Boxer haven’t hit the airwaves (at least I haven’t seen any ads), so they still have a lot of room to get their numbers up.

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The Battle for California’s Future Begins Tonight

The results of tonight’s primaries set in motion a battle for the soul of California. It’s Main Street vs. Wall Street, with the winner having an opportunity to shape California’s future for decades to come.

After months of obscene campaign spending, billionaire CEO Meg Whitman will use her seemingly unlimited fortune to try to stage a hostile takeover of our state. She’s made clear that, if elected, she plans to bring a Wall Street agenda to California. What that means for working families is more massive tax giveaways for corporations and the wealthy, and wholesale cuts to education, public safety and programs that our state’s most vulnerable rely upon. Whitman’s economic philosophy, which she honed as a corporate executive and director in places like Goldman Sachs, is simple: What’s good for Wall Street and the wealthy is good for everyone. California families know all too well just how flawed that philosophy is.

The contrast between the candidates couldn’t be starker. Jerry Brown shares the Main Street values that built this state’s economy into a global powerhouse and expanded our middle class. Brown has a spent a lifetime fighting for working families. He presided over the creation of nearly 2 million jobs as Governor. He fought the exploitation of workers by large corporations as Attorney General. His experience, values and leadership are exactly what this state needs to get back on track.

It’s equally critical that Sen. Barbara Boxer is sent back to Washington to continue to fight for working families on key issues like financial reform, health care and workers’ freedom to join unions. Boxer is a champion for working families. Californians can’t afford to have a Senator like failed CEO Carly Fiorina, who joins Whitman on the “Wall Street Express” ticket.

With record unemployment, a huge budget gap and a rapidly shrinking middle class, the challenges California faces in the next four years are epic in proportion. Because the stakes are so high, the California labor movement intends on engaging like never before. We’ll counter Whitman’s massive spending with an unprecedented grassroots campaign to reach voters on the issues they care about: jobs, health care, retirement security and rebuilding the middle class. We’ll work harder than ever to re-elect Sen. Boxer to the US Senate and send more worker-friendly candidates to Sacramento.

The battle for California’s future begins tonight. Workers look forward to meeting the challenges that face our state and using this election as the springboard for California’s economic rebirth.

Art Pulaski is executive secretary-treasurer at the California Labor Federation, which represents more than 2 million workers in 1,200 unions throughout the state.

Budget, Economy

Q and A with Robert Kuttner

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As the editor of Labor’s Edge, I had the unique opportunity to sit down with journalist and author Robert Kuttner at the annual ‘Building Workforce Partnerships’ conference, sponsored by the California Labor Federation’s Workforce and Economic Development Program. Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos. His latest book is “A Presidency in Peril: The Inside Story of Obama’s Promise, Wall Street’s Power, and the Struggle to Control our Economic Future.”

See the flip

Labor’s Edge: What role do you see unions playing in our nation’s economic recovery?

Robert Kuttner: Let’s look at the 1930s — a period of higher joblessness but also a great time for union growth. It really all depends on how well-informed the workforce is. Some folks who aren’t well-educated look at public employee unions and say, “These folks have it too good.” Other more informed people look at union workers and say, “I want what they have.” It’s up to labor and political leadership to use this recession as an opportunity to educate, mobile and organize workers.

Labor’s Edge: In 2009, you wrote about the White House’s Task Force on Middle Class Working Families. What has the task force accomplished so far, and what still needs to be done?

Robert Kuttner: The task force is a good first step — it has created a new venue where the issues that matter to working families can be raised and addressed. But unfortunately, the task force is understaffed, and the proposed executive order to give contractors extra points for treating their workers well is hung up at Office of Management and Budget. We need the President to prioritize the task force himself (currently it’s being headed up by the Vice President’s program) and make it a top priority, in order to target those large, high profile companies who are low road employers.

Labor’s Edge: In terms of stabilizing the economy and reinvigorating job growth, what has Obama done right, and what still needs to be done?

Robert Kuttner: The stimulus package was a good thing — it helped create a lot of jobs. But it’s not enough; the money will run out soon and the package must be repeated. Right now, I’ll give financial reform a B+ — the bill is getting better as public understands the stakes. For his first few years in office, Obama should have been completely focused on the economy, financial reform and mortgage relief. The health care bill consumed too much time and attention and didn’t go far enough; and it could have waited until Obama’s second term. And the ongoing emphasis on deficit reduction is the wrong approach – it’s only making it harder to get other bills passed, because everyone is scared of increasing the deficit (which is actually a good thing in times of high unemployment).

Labor’s Edge: What exactly would the federal financial reform bill do? Is it enough rein in Wall Street greed?

Robert Kuttner: The Consumer Financial Protection Agency is a very important component of the financial reform package – but it needs to be a free-standing agency. In the Senate version of the bill, the CFPA lies within the Federal Reserve, but in the House version, it’s a committee of regulators, which is what we need. The “Audit the Fed” amendment is good. The derivatives reform component is also pretty good, but it could be better – there are just too many loopholes. The bottom line is that the financial reform bill doesn’t do enough to change the current business model of banks acting like hedge funds, creating exotic assets too confusing for people to understand, and profiting richly at the expense of working people.

Labor’s Edge: What do you think needs to happen to break California out of its perpetual budget woes?

Robert Kuttner: California’s budget is going to be a mess until we get rid of Proposition 13 and the supermajority requirements on budgets and taxes. As long as we have those hurdles in place, our hands will always be tied, even if we had a great Governor. But these rules have fostered a political climate that makes it easy for the Governor to impose his cuts and pit us against each other, playing welfare programs against worker pensions, and so on.

Labor’s Edge: Do you think the anti-Wall Street sentiment will carry over and affect the November election in California, in the event that we end up with two corporate CEOs (Whitman and Fiorina) at the top of the ticket?

Robert Kuttner: Well, you would think so, but I believe we need to make this an issue for it to resonate. Buying your way into public office should be politically radioactive.

Labor’s Edge: What does the BP oil spill mean for the future of the green economy?

Robert Kuttner: If there’s one thing that this oil catastrophe has demonstrated, it’s that we absolutely cannot trust the oil companies to regulate themselves and control our energy policy. We need real regulation to save them from their own greed. But there’s more to it. We can’t rely on oil in the long-term; we must shift to a cleaner, greener economy, which would benefit the workforce, environment and trade. If ever there was an impetus for the Obama Administration to make this move, the oil spill is it.

Rebecca Greenberg is communications organizer at the California Labor Federation, which represents more than 2 million workers in 1,200 unions across the state.