Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, is running for governor of California. I saw a snippet of one of her ads, on The Huffington Post, I think. In it, she says something like politicians should join the real world.
Come on, Carly, when were you last part of the real world? Your first year at HP you had compensation of over 69 million dollars. Is that a real-world salary? That's over a thousand times what many people wish they could make in a year.
A few years later, you were fired from HP with a severance pay of 22 million dollars. A lot of people in the real world aren't making one thousandth of that every year and when they get laid off they get zilch.
Now you're trying to buy your way into being the CEO of California. Are you going to arrange to buy Nevada like you bought Compaq?
Sadly, the so-called capitalist system as run by CEOs and their crony boards is getting worse than what I wrote about ten years ago in "Talk about Boards with Conflicts of Interest", Reader Weekly, 2000-04-26. One thousand teachers in Duluth were trying to get a two-year raise that was one-tenth for all of them of what you got in a single-year.
