Cisco CEO John Chambers and Presidential Candidate John McCain: Connecting the dots...

Am intrigued that the highly successful CEO of Cisco - John Chambers, is such an ardent supporter of presidential candidate John McCain. So I've decided to try and connect the dots... between McCain and Chambers and hopefully understand why Chambers seeks to help elect John McCain as President of the United States.

The following strictly represents the views and opinion of yours truly and does not represent those of Network World nor the Cisco Subnet:

Chambers is a strong financial supporter of John McCain's presidential campaign as well as other Republican and even a few Democrat nominees, and over the years he has personally contributed $1,331,191 to political/special interest campaigns.

Furthermore, Chambers holds the unique distinction of being both a National Campaign Co-Chair and a National Finance Committee Co-Chair of McCain's presidential campaign.

And perhaps most interestingly, in a new McCain administration Chambers appears to be on the "short list" of possible Treasury Secretaries. Such an appointment would put Chambers in total control of the business world, with unprecedented power to spend $700 billion of U.S. Taxpayer money at his discretion.

So lets try and connect the dots...

First Dot

The Senate Commerce Committee is in charge of all Senate matters related to Telecommunications as well as Broadband Policy:

Telecommunications has become such an important issue that the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications was discontinued in favor of Full Senate Commerce Committee hearings.

John McCain is a current member of the Senate Commerce Committee.

Additionally, McCain has served as Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee three times, between the years 1997-2001 as well as between 2003-2005.

Since its debut in 2003, The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital Conference created by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, has been promoting informal but pointed conversations about how digital technology will impact us now and in the future. At the D5 Conference in May 2007, Senator John McCain was interviewed revealing:

6:58 p.m.: Sen. McCain suggests that there should be as little government regulation of broadband as possible.

Walt notes that the telecom industry is re-aggregating back into "one unified AT&T."

It could be argued that AT&T is simultaneously both the largest user of Cisco equipment (i.e. a customer) as well as the largest reseller of Cisco equipment and services.

Coincidentally, the following sums up the Cisco Net-neutrality Position:

"Regulate Only if Problems Occur, Not Before"

It dovetails quite nicely with Senator McCain's Net-neutrality position mentioned earlier above.

Also auspiciously, former FCC Chairman Michael Powell was appointed to the Cisco Board of Directors.

Second Dot

McCain Town Hall Meeting in Philadelphia, PA on June 11th, 2008:

At approximately the "2:40 time mark" in the McCain Philadelphia Town Hall Meeting video below, McCain invoked the name of John Chambers as well as that of Cisco in order to advocate McCain's position that corporate taxes should be lowered substantially:

In the above video, McCain used John Chambers and Cisco as his example in order to pontificate that American companies paid the second highest corporate tax rate in the world (behind Japan according to McCain) of 35%, and that America should reduce its corporate tax rate to 25% if Americans wanted to keep jobs in the U.S. from going overseas.

Alarmingly, only 45 days later on July 26th, Cisco reported paying a corporate tax rate of only 21.5% for its entire 2008 fiscal year.

Cisco paid $1.386 billion less in corporate taxes then what John McCain implied to American voters that Cisco would be paying!

Cisco even paid less in corporate tax (21.5%) than what John McCain proposed as his reduced corporate tax rate target amount (25%).

View corporate tax rates around the world.

Third Dot

H-1B Visa Question asked in Santa Ana, California back in March, 2008:

At approximately the ":34 time mark" in the video below, Senator McCain confirmed that he supports increases in H-1B Visas.

In Spring 2008 John Chambers stated:

In April 2008, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security invoked a highy unusual and rare ruling to assist Cisco with H-1B Visas.

Additionally, a May 2008 study unmasked that Cisco was not using the H-1B visa program to hire the best and brightest.

Finally last summer, Cisco's immigration law firm was audited for suspected improper behavior by the U.S. Department of Labor.

What dots... can you add to connect Chambers and McCain?

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• The highly successful CEO of Cisco - John Chambers