Steven Rattner, "Carly Fiorina Really Was That Bad": Rattner Derides Fiorina?

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In a New York Times op-ed entitled "Carly Fiorina Really Was That Bad," Steven Rattner writes of Republican presidential candidate and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina:

"HER silver tongue honed by decades in corporate marketing, Carly Fiorina has used two debates, and a steely determination on the campaign trail, to climb near the top of the polls for the Republican nomination.

But Americans should pause on her biggest professional credential for our highest office: a short, disastrous stint atop one of America’s iconic technology companies, Hewlett-Packard.

The clearest measure of her performance — and the report card preferred by Wall Street — is H.P.’s stock price, which dropped by 52 percent during her tenure of almost six years.

Yes, Mrs. Fiorina served during the worst fall in technology shares in history. But she managed to underperform her key competitors; IBM’s shares declined by 27.5 percent and Dell’s fell by 3 percent."

Indeed, as also appears in a Wikipedia article about Fiorina (footnotes deleted, my emphasis in red):

"HP's revenue doubled due to mergers with Compaq and other companies, and the rate of patent filings increased. According to reports, the company underperformed by a number of metrics: there were no gains in HP's net income despite a 70% gain in net income of the S&P 500 over this period; the company's debt rose from US$4.25 billion to US$6.75 billion; and its stock price fell by 50%, exceeding declines in the S&P 500 Information Technology Sector index and the NASDAQ. In contrast, stock prices for IBM and Dell respectively fell 27.5% and 3% during this time."

Okay, Got it! A capricious manipulable stock market, which often is blind to the long-term impact of a corporate executive, is the ultimate arbiter of whether a person is fit to serve in government. Moreover, inasmuch as the shares of IBM and Dell performed better than those of HP within a given period, Fiorina is therefore unqualified for the highest office in the land. I wonder whether Rattner would have been of the opinion that the failure of Harry Truman's Kansas City haberdashery shop should also have disqualified him from becoming president.

Steven Rattner? We are informed at the bottom of his op-ed: "Steven Rattner is a Wall Street executive and contributing opinion writer." That's all? In a February 20, 2013 Columbia Journalism Review article entitled "The New York Times and the rehabilitation of Steven Rattner," Ryan Chittum provides additional background material:

"The New York Times is declaring that disgraced private equity mogul Steven Rattner has gotten his reputation back in the Manhattan lunch circles that matter. This was probably only a matter of time given that it was the Times itself that played a leading role in his rehabilitation.

It’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, naturally, who pronounces the cleansing complete, even wondering aloud if Rattner could be a Treasury secretary someday.

This about a guy who just two years ago paid $16 million to settle SEC and New York lawsuits against him for taking part in a kickback scheme with public officials to get $150 million in pension-fund business. His firm, Quadrangle, coughed up another $12 million and said what Rattner did was 'inappropriate, wrong and unethical.' They might have added 'corrupt.'

Recall that Rattner was Obama’s car czar responsible for bailing out and overseeing GM and Chrysler. Three months into the administration, it emerged that Rattner was under investigation by Andrew Cuomo, then the New York Attorney General, and by the SEC for paying kickbacks to get business from the giant New York pension fund. Rattner originally got immunity in the investigation until Cuomo caught him covering up his own involvement."

Thought you might like to know.

Paul Krugman, "This Republican Economy": The Buck Doesn't Stop Here

Paul Krugman is a master of smoke and mirrors.

Obama has been president for the past three and a half years, and for the first two of those years he controlled both the House and Senate, but in his latest New York Times op-ed, "This Republican Economy" (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/opinion/krugman-this-republican-economy.html), Paul would have us believe that the current economic debacle is all the Republicans' fault. Krugman even tars the Republicans for defrauding the American electorate:

"So the Republican electoral strategy is, in effect, a gigantic con game: it depends on convincing voters that the bad economy is the result of big-spending policies that President Obama hasn’t followed (in large part because the G.O.P. wouldn’t let him), and that our woes can be cured by pursuing more of the same policies that have already failed."

The Republicans didn't let Obama get away with big-spending policies? Oh really? True, total government spending is going down because near-bankrupt state and local governments can't print money, but meanwhile US debt exceeds $15 trillion; the federal deficit for fiscal 2011 was some $1.65 trillion, equal to "10.9% of gross domestic product, the largest deficit as a share of the economy since World War II" (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703361904576143253522341850.html); and in February 2012 the US government recorded its highest ever monthly deficit of some $229 billion (http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/03/08/government-records-highest-ever-monthly-deficit/).

Spend more? The problem is that ultimately "someone" will have to pay for this. Meanwhile, allow Obama to make more Solyndra-type loans? I don't think so.

In furtherance of his grand conspiracy theory, Krugman states:

"For some reason, however, neither the press nor Mr. Obama’s political team has done a very good job of exposing the con."

America's left-leaning press and Obama's team of political dilettantes, i.e. Axelrod and Plouffe, have been unable to expose the con? The fools! Or maybe there is no "con" to expose. Maybe it's time for Obama to take responsibility for what he has wrought. In August 2011 Obama declared
(http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-3445_162-20095106.html):

"'It frustrates people, understandably, when you've got an unemployment rate that is still too high, an economy that's not growing fast enough. And for me to argue, 'Look, we've actually made the right decisions, things would have been much worse has we not made those decisions,' that's not that satisfying if you don't have a job right now,' the president said. 'And I understand that, and I expect to be judged a year from now on whether or not things have continued to get better.'"

Well, not surprisingly Obama no longer wants to take responsibility and no longer wishes to be judged "on whether or not things have continued to get better."

Krugman concludes that Obama and his political team's "best bet, surely, is to do a Harry Truman, to run against the 'do-nothing' Republican Congress that has, in reality, blocked proposals — for tax cuts as well as more spending — that would have made 2012 a much better year than it’s turning out to be."

Or in other words, Krugman would have Obama pass the blame on to someone else. Obama should declare, "The buck doesn't stop here," and instead battologize the immortal words of Homer Simpson, "I didn't do it."

The problem is that Americans are far smarter than Krugman thinks.

David Brooks, "The White House Argument": Never Kick a Turd on a Hot Day

President Harry Truman was famous for his pithy witticisms. All of us are familiar with "The buck stops here," but how many know that Truman was also fond of declaring "Never kick a turd on a hot day." Sometimes, however, we cannot avoid kicking that turd.

Today, as Obama faces reelection, he is faced with a plethora of dilemmas: Whether to continue to function as president and make the hard choices, or whether to delay decisions until after November. Regarding the Iranian nuclear threat, it plainly appears that there is a confluence of interest between the agendas of both Obama and Iran: While Iran stalls for time to achieve the capacity to build an atomic bomb, Obama stalls for time to avoid a nasty confrontation that could impact in an unforeseen manner on his reelection campaign.

Regarding America's burgeoning budget deficit, Obama is also facing difficult choices, and as observed by David Brooks in his New York Times op-ed "The White House Argument" (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/opinion/brooks-the-white-house-argument.html):

"Under the Obama budget, debt would skyrocket to 124 percent of G.D.P."

You don't need to be an economic wizard to realize that debt of this magnitude is unsustainable. Moreover, I question whether this percentage takes into account the ominous warning recently issued by Chuck Blahous, public trustee for Medicare and Social Security (see: http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/publication/The-Fiscal-Consequences-of-the-Affordable-Care-Act.pdf), that over the next decade, Obamacare will:

"add at least $340 billion and as much as $530 billion to federal deficits while increasing federal spending by more than $1.15 trillion over the same period and by increasing amounts thereafter."

Yes, this is a train wreck in the making.

In his New York Times op-ed, Brooks concludes:

"I’ll just say that my conversations reaffirm my conviction that Obama is a pragmatic liberal who cares about fiscal sustainability, who has been willing to compromise for its sake, but who has not offered anything close to a sufficient program to avoid a debt crisis.

But we have a campaign in front of us. If the president is truly committed to a strategy for progressive fiscal stability, as Bill Clinton was, he’ll make that the center of his campaign. He’ll earn a mandate. He’ll win over independents who want fiscal discipline but worry about the way Republicans get there.

If he doesn’t have a passion for fiscal stability, he’ll campaign on side issues and try to win by scaring everybody about the other side."

Or in other words, will Obama decide between now and November to make hard, unpopular, decisions involving Iran and the budget, or seek to remain president by engaging in scaremongering and divisive tactics, e.g. accusing Paul Ryan of "social Darwinism"? I think we know which way Obama is leaning.

As Harry Truman also once said:

"America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand."

If only Obama could take Truman's words, which have yet to make their way onto the screen of his infamous teleprompter, to heart.