NORTON META TAG

07 January 2016

Carly Fiorina says U.S. didn't address cybersecurity in economic dialogues with China & Can a CEO Who Laid Off Thousands, Botched a Merger, and Left With $21 Million Become President? 17DEZ15 & 7JAN16 & 4MAI15

Carly Fiorina's "Demon Sheep" ad from her 2010 campaign has become one of the most infamous in recent political history.
carly fiorina is a low class Fotze, a lying Schlempe. She is the typical repiglican tea-bagger Hure. She falsely attacks the Obama administration over cybersecurity to scare the electorate. Her campaign is based on lies, deception, manipulation of the truth and fear-mongering (remember her demon sheep ad?), she offers nothing to improve the lives of the poor, working class and middle class. Regarding fiorina and the prc, she does know something about china. She knows labor is cheaper there and workers have no rights, that is why, when she ran HP / Hewlett Packard, she eliminated well over 18,000 jobs in the U.S., outsourced them mostly to the prc and when she was fired left HP with a $21 million golden parachute. She really is the perfect repiglican presidential candidate. This from +PolitiFact and +Mother Jones .....

Mostly False
Fiorina
"When we held recent economic dialogues with China, we agreed on over 100 different things  —  including wildlife trafficking and volcano research. None of these 100-plus points of agreement addressed cybersecurity."
Carly Fiorina on Thursday, December 17th, 2015 in a column posted on Medium

Carly Fiorina says U.S. didn't address cybersecurity in economic dialogues with China

President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama greet Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan as they arrive for a State Dinner on Sept. 25, 2015, on the North Portico of the White House. (AP/Andrew Harnik)
Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina recently took President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to task on the issue of cybersecurity, via a column posted on Medium. She said Obama and Clinton have left the United States "woefully uprepared for cyberterrorism."
Fiorina said cybersecurity is "a critical piece of our strategy to defeat ISIS and restore American leadership in the world." She made a number of assertions in that column; here we’ll look at one she made about the United States’ efforts to prevent cyber attacks from China.
"When we held recent economic dialogues with China," Fiorina wrote, "we agreed on over 100 different things —  including wildlife trafficking and volcano research. None of these 100-plus points of agreement addressed cybersecurity."
China has been implicated in past data breaches, including perhaps the most far-reaching hacking incident so far, which accessed a large cache of sensitive personal data held by the federal Office of Personnel Management.
Campaign spokeswoman Anna Epstein told us that Fiorina was referring to a news release in which the White House summarized 127 areas of agreement reached in June 2015 at the Strategic & Economic Dialogue, a periodic summit between high-level representatives of the United States and China.
Fiorina has a point that none of the 127 items on that list explicitly addressed cybersecurity. However, her argument is weaker if one looks beyond that list of 127 items: Fiorina ignored a subsequent agreement between the United States and China that dealt directly with cybersecurity.
But let’s start with the summit. In their public addresses at the summit’s opening, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew each said that cybersecurity was an important issue for U.S.-China relations, and Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang agreed in his speech.
The cybersecurity discussion -- a thorny one -- apparently did not lead to an agreement by the end of the summit, though experts told PolitiFact it may have been covered within the 127-point list by point 4, which confirmed the existence of "candid, constructive discussions between the two sides on strategic security issues."
The biggest problem with Fiorina’s claim, though, is that it fails to account for significant developments later in 2015.
The most important of these is an agreement on cybersecurity between the United States and China announced in September. That came almost three months before Fiorina posted her column.
On Sept. 24 and 25, Obama hosted President Xi Jinping of China for a state visit. During that visit, the two leaders announced an agreement on cybersecurity. Here are some of the key elements the two countries agreed on:
• Cooperation on investigating malicious cyber-activities coming from their territory;
• A pledge not to conduct or knowingly support cyber-theft of confidential business information to aid companies or industries;
• Efforts to promote international consensus on norms for state behavior in cyberspace;
• Creation of a "high-level joint dialogue" on cybercrime with regular meetings, as well as a "hotline" to prevent the escalation of issues.
"This was important, because China accepted that states should not conduct cyber espionage against commercial entities to create competitive advantage," said Adam Segal, senior fellow for China studies and director of the Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations.
And there have been notable developments since then, Segal has written: "There was positive follow up in the first round of cyber talks between the Department of Homeland Security and Chinese Ministry of Public Security in December 2015" when the two sides "agreed on guidelines for requesting assistance on cybercrime or other malicious cyber activities, as well as to conduct ‘tabletop exercises’ in spring 2016 and to define procedures for use of the hotline."
In addition, since Xi’s visit, the White House has worked to advance cybersecurity policies with other countries. A similar agreement between the United Kingdom and China has been struck, and there are indications that Germany would sign a "no cyber theft" deal with Beijing in 2016, Segal wrote.
Meanwhile, during the G-20 summit in November 2015, the White House announced that the leaders in attendance reached a notable consensus that international law applies to state conduct in cyberspace, including pledges not to "conduct or support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property."
It’s worth noting that experts acknowledge significant difficulties in enforcing cybersecurity agreements. "Just three weeks after the agreement, cybersecurity companies reported new attacks on pharmaceutical companies," Segal wrote.
Our ruling
Fiorina said, "When we held recent economic dialogues with China, we agreed on over 100 different things — including wildlife trafficking and volcano research. None of these 100-plus points of agreement addressed cybersecurity."
One document listing agreements struck during a June 2015 U.S.-China summit supports Fiorina’s point, but citing that one document is a case of extreme cherry-picking. Three months later -- and three months before Fiorina published her article -- the United States and China struck a significant cybersecurity agreement, and since then, the countries have taken steps to implement the agreement and forge cybersecurity agreements with other nations.
The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, so we rate the claim Mostly False.

About this statement:

Published: Thursday, January 7th, 2016 at 1:54 p.m.
Researched by: Louis Jacobson
Edited by: Angie Drobnic Holan
Subjects: China, Crime, Criminal Justice, Foreign Policy, Infrastructure

Sources:

Carly Fiorina, "Cybersecurity" (on Medium), Dec 17, 2015
State Department, "U.S.-China Strategic & Economic Dialogue Outcomes of the Strategic Track," June 24, 2015
State Department, "The U.S.-China Strategic & Economic Dialogue / Consultation on People-to-People Exchange," June 23, 2015
Department of Homeland Security, "First U.S.-China High-Level Joint Dialogue On Cybercrime And Related Issues Summary Of Outcomes," Dec. 2, 2015
White House, "Fact sheet: President Xi Jinping’s State Visit to the United States," Sept. 25, 2015
White House, "Fact Sheet: The 2015 G-20 Summit in Antalya, Turkey," Nov. 16, 2015
Justice Department, "U.S. Charges Five Chinese Military Hackers for Cyber Espionage Against U.S. Corporations and a Labor Organization for Commercial Advantage," May 19, 2014
Adam Segal, "The Top Five Cyber Policy Developments of 2015: United States-China Cyber Agreement," Jan. 4, 2016
Washington Post, "Chinese breach data of 4 million federal workers," June 4, 2015
The Hill, "UK, China mirror US anti-hacking pact," Oct. 21, 2015
South China Morning Post, "Handshake to end the hacking: China and Germany pledge for peace in cyberspace by 2016," Nov. 9, 2015
Reuters, "China tried to hack U.S. firms even after cyber pact: CrowdStrike," Oct. 19, 2015
New York Times, "U.S. and China Seek Arms Deal for Cyberspace," Sept. 19, 2015
Email interview with Malcolm Lee, senior fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution, Jan. 6, 2016
Email interview with Susan Landau, professor of social science and policy studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Jan. 6, 2016
Email interview with Adam Segal, senior fellow for China studies and director of the Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations, Jan. 6, 2016
Email interview with Eric Schultz, White House spokesman, Jan. 6, 2016
Email interview with Anna Epstein, spokeswoman for Carly Fiorina, Jan. 6, 2016

Carly Fiorina enters the GOP's 2016 battle with plenty of corporate baggage.

| Mon May 4, 2015 10:03 AM EDT
On Monday morning, Carly Fiorina, a former CEO of Hewlett-Packard and a failed 2010 Senate candidate, announced that she too is running for the GOP presidential nomination. "I think I'm the best person for the job because I understand how the economy actually works," she said on Good Morning America. "I understand the world; who's in it." Not coincidentally, she has a new book coming out this week.
Fiorina's sole claim to president-ish experience is her tenure at HP, and that stint was marked by layoffs, outsourcing, conflict, and controversy—so much so that several prominent former HP colleagues recoil at the idea of Fiorina managing any enterprise again, let alone the executive branch. Seven years ago, when Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), then campaigning for the presidency, recruited Fiorina as an ambassador to women voters—and she was mentioned as a possible veep pick for McCain—I noted that her record at HP essentially disqualified her as an economic expert or a potential candidate. In the years since, she has not done anything that would prompt a reassessment. Her biggest accomplishment in recent years appears to have been running a losing campaign against Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California—an effort perhaps best known for its production of the bizarre "Demon Sheep" ad. Though she has defended her time at HP, it remains heavy baggage.
Here's how I described it when she partnered up with McCain:
Her stint as a corporate titan was more mixed than master-of-the-universe. In 1999, Fiorina took over Hewlett-Packard, the troubled computer company, becoming one of the top women in Corporate America. Previously, she had built a successful career mostly in marketing and sales at AT&T and Lucent, but she had the not-so-good fortune to be taking the helm of an engineering-driven tech company as the tech boom was ending. Her solution to HP's ailments was controversial: buying Compaq. She pushed the $19 billion acquisition over the opposition of many HP stockholders, including, most notably, Walter Hewlett, the son of the company's founder, who argued the merger would not make HP more competitive.
At HP, Fiorina developed the reputation of a manager who knocked heads together—or who chopped them off. And there were massive layoffs during her tenure. In 2003, the company announced it would dismiss almost 18,000 people. (That year, the firm posted a $903 million loss on $56.6 billion in revenue.) When the outsourcing of jobs turned into a national political issue, Fiorina became the poster-girl for an industry campaign aimed at blocking any legislation that would restrict a company's ability to can American employees in favor of workers overseas. She and executives from seven other tech companies issued a report that argued that any such measures would hurt the U.S. economy. The best way to increase American competitiveness, they declared, was to improve schools and, yes, reduce taxes. At a Washington press conference, Fiorina said, "There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore. We have to compete for jobs." The remark did not go over well with critics of outsourcing, who have ever since used it as an indicator of corporate insensitivity.
Fiorina's stint at HP was marked by other moments of controversy. In March 2004, after HP shareholders voted 1.21 billion to 925 million to expense stock options, she opposed the move, essentially opting to stick with accounting practices (that were used by other corporations) that did not reveal a company's true value. That same year, Forbes reported that Hewlett-Packard was "among many other U.S. companies that kept offices in Dubai and were linked to Iranian traders there." The article suggested that HP and other countries were skirting export controls to trade with Iran. And in early 2005, Fiorina announced that pop star Gwen Stefani would join the HP design team and work on the company's line of digital cameras.
Fiorina wasn't around long enough to see her Plan Stefani to completion. In February 2005, she was pushed out of HP. The company's board, with which she had been battling for years, had had enough of her. The Compaq merger had not yielded the benefits—improved shareholder returns and greater profits—she had promised. At the time of her dismissal, Hewlett-Packard stock was trading at about the same price as when she first unveiled the Compaq deal. Eighty percent of the company's operating profits were coming from its old-line printing business. She had not succeeded in reviving HP as a computer-selling powerhouse. The day she was dumped, the company's stock price rose 7 percent. That was Wall Street exclaiming, Hooray. As Robert Cihra, an analyst with Fulcrum Global Partners told Money magazine, "The stock is up a bit on the fact that nobody liked Carly's leadership all that much. The Street had lost all faith in her and the market's hope is that anyone will be better."
A Business Week post-mortem noted:
Management experts say Fiorina, through the Compaq acquisition, created a good executive team with a can-do attitude. That helped a rank-and-file, engineering-focused organization consider how to market products instead of simply making them. But the charismatic leader refused to delegate operations to top lieutenants managing HP's far-flung divisions. What's more, she had a tough time getting them to work together…
As a result, many of the execs who came to HP through Compaq have jumped ship since the merger. That left Fiorina with much the same slate of HP'ers who were in key positions before the blockbuster deal.
Larry Magid, technology analyst for CBS News, observed:
There is plenty to criticize about Fiorina's tenure at HP. At this point, the changes that Fiorina made didn't turn out so well for the thousands of Hewlett-Packard and Compaq employees that were laid off and the millions of HP stockholders who lost equity since she took over. HP stock is worth less today than it was in 1999. Dell and IBM stock has increased in value.
But Fiorina did fine for herself. She departed the company with a $21 million severance package. "I doubt very much that she's worried about making ends meet," Magid cracked.
In her 2006 book, Tough Choices, Fiorina defended her management of HP and claimed the firm's subsequent successes were a result of changes she had implemented. But it had been a rocky tenure at best. Nevertheless, McCain is deploying Fiorina as a surrogate on economic policy and as an ambassador to women voters. But in this time of economic insecurity, there's not much about Fiorina's time at HP that can be reassuring to voters (female or otherwise) experiencing financial jitters. After six years at Hewlett-Packard, she ended up symbolizing not one but at least three corporate excesses: outsourcing, M&A-mania, and golden parachutes. Workers and shareholders did not prosper during her reign, but Fiorina made millions, got a book deal, and now is a top PowerPointer for a presidential candidate. She's a real American success story—for corporate Republicans.

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