RUTHFULLY YOURS

Outsourcing and political double standards.

California Senator Barbara Boxer has been bludgeoning her Republican challenger, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, for outsourcing tens of thousands of jobs. We wonder if Ms. Boxer is equally outraged by her own big business backers.

In a TV ad that has been running around California, Ms. Boxer blasts Ms. Fiorina for having “laid off 30,000 workers” and having “shipped jobs to China” during her time at H-P.

Yesterday, the networking equipment giant Cisco nonetheless hosted the three-term Democrat for a townhall meeting with employees at its office in San Jose. Cisco CEO John Chambers, a former adviser to John McCain’s Presidential campaign, is one of Ms. Boxer’s most prominent Silicon Valley supporters. Cisco employees and its political action committee have donated $41,350 to her re-election campaign and rank as her sixth largest contributor, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

This wouldn’t count as notable, except for the fact that roughly half of Cisco’s 70,700 work force and half of the jobs the company has added in recent years are located overseas. A Cisco spokesman rejects the notion that any of these jobs were “outsourced,” though we’d enjoy hearing Andy Stern and other union leaders parse that distinction.

From scouring news clips, we were able to learn that in 2006 the company announced plans to invest more than $1 billion in India, triple its Indian work force and launch expansions in other South Asian countries. Cisco has since sent several of its top managers to Bangalore from San Jose.

Meanwhile, the company also parks about $30 billion of its $40 billion in cash overseas, in part because of the high U.S. corporate tax rate on repatriated earnings. Ms. Boxer and President Obama have both spent much of the midterm campaign denouncing this practice as unpatriotic tax avoidance that harms American workers. They nonetheless oppose a cut in the 35% U.S. corporate tax rate (higher with state rates added) that motivates companies to keep their cash overseas, even as Ms. Fiorina favors a cut in that rate.

The Cisco spokesman says the company also invited Ms. Fiorina for a campaign visit but that she declined. In any event, the next time we hear Mr. Chambers complain about Washington policies that make American companies less competitive, we plan to refer him to the Boxer campaign ads his company helped to finance.

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