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By Root 6690 0

American politics today is that, with a few notable exceptions, the people who know the global labor market best and are most familiar with the skills needed to prosper in it—the members of the business community—have increasingly dropped out of the national debate. Historically, groups such as the Business Roundtable and individual leaders of industry considered it their responsibility to defend, indeed to speak out in favor of, the traditional American formula for greatness. They could be counted upon to go to Washington and lobby, not just on behalf of their own businesses but more broadly for better education, infrastructure, immigration, free trade, and rules to promote constructive risk-taking. That has become less and less true in the last decade. Business leaders are less and less interested in the whole pie and more and more interested in their own slice.

With the merger of globalization and the IT revolution, when American-based multinational firms meet resistance from Washington, D.C., today—arguing in favor of more visas for high-skilled workers, for example—they just move their research facilities abroad or outsource their work to foreign subsidiaries. When Microsoft couldn’t get more visas for high-skilled immigrants to work in its headquarters outside Seattle, Washington, it opened a research center in Vancouver, Canada, 115 miles north. The flatter the world becomes, the less interested the most powerful companies become in fighting with Washington over visas, or almost anything other than their specific tax and antitrust issues. The standard approach of the American business community toward Washington today is, as medieval maps put it, “Here Be Dragons.” You go there, you lobby for your particular tax break, and then you leave—quickly.

The turning point may have come in January 2004, when a consortium of eight leading information-technology company executives, known as the Computer Systems Policy Project, gathered in Washington to lobby Congress against legislation designed to restrict the movement of jobs overseas, where labor costs are lower. As part of their public outreach, the then CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina, declared that “there is no job that is America’s God-given right anymore.” At the same time CSPP issued a report explaining that America’s lead in high technology was in serious jeopardy due to competition from other nations.

In an article about the event, the San Francisco Chronicle noted (January 9, 2004) that CSPP offered a long-term proposal to improve grade school and high school education, double federal spending on basic research in the physical sciences, and implement a national policy to promote high-speed broadband communications networks, as Japan and Korea have done. It was exactly the kind of brutally honest intervention from business—here is the world we’re living in and what we need to thrive in it—that we should welcome. Unfortunately, rather than calling for a serious national debate on this broad issue, the subsequent coverage focused almost entirely on Fiorina’s blunt declaration about jobs not being an American right. She got hammered across the country.

One CEO who was at the meeting, but asked not to be identified, told us seven years later that as soon as the words were out of Fiorina’s mouth, he and his colleagues wanted to tiptoe out of the press conference and out of town because they knew the backlash was coming. And come it did. “We have another idea,” the Seattle Post-Intelligencer wrote in a January 9, 2004, editorial that was typical of the backlash. “Why not export a few chief executives’ suites? We’re certain there’s qualified folks somewhere in a far-off land who might run a company for far less than what CEOs are paid in this country.”

Fiorina’s words came back to haunt her six years later, when she ran as a Republican for a Senate seat in California against the incumbent Democrat, Barbara Boxer. Boxer made prominent use in her television commercials of Fiorina’s 2004 declaration and of the job cuts she had made as part of HP’s restructuring during