WASHINGTON — Before her expected Monday presidential announcement, Republican Carly Fiorina took a number of swipes at liberals and capital cronyists at the National Review Institute Summit Saturday.
“Industry after industry after industry has been destroyed in California. Now, Liberals are in the slow agonizing process of destroying the agricultural industry. Yes, there’s a drought in California but there’s been droughts in California for a millennia,” Fiorina said.
She went further, saying the fight to keep the farming industry alive on the West Coast was “a battle of politics and policy that cause no new reservoirs to be built” and no new water systems to be built” in the state.
“The population doubled in the state in the last 40 years. It’s politics and policy. The cause is Washington D.C. saying, ‘We are going to control your water from Washington. We are going to protect fish called the smelt. We don’t care that we are destroying tens of thousands acres of agricultural far land in the world, because of that policy.’ That’s the result of liberal policy.”
Fiorina did not spare Silicon Valley either. The former Hewlett Packard executive took a few whacks at the CEOs for their support of the FCC’s Net Neutrality regulation among other liberal policies.
“One hundred and eleven billionaires and the highest poverty rate in the nation,” Fiorina said. “The middle class has exited. Young families have exited. The tax base is broken. California spends more money per pupil than 49 out of the 50 states.”
Comparing the FCC’s Net Neutrality regulation to Obamacare and Dodd Frank, Fiorina called all three examples of crony capitalism at work in Washington.
“Who was in the middle of arguing for net neutrality—Verizon, Comcast, Google? All of those companies were playing. They weren’t saying, ‘We don’t need this.’ They were saying, ‘We need it.’”
She explained, “And so the only way to level the playing field so that the small, the new, the entrepreneurial, and the powerless have a shot is to reduce all this complexity. And meanwhile while the big are getting bigger we are crushing the small. So now the first time in US history, we are destroying more businesses then we are creating.”
National Review writer John Fund, who was interviewing Fiorina, noted that her former company HP started out in a garage and she replied, “Google started out that way in a dorm room. They seem to have forgotten that.”