Halter and Holt : Qualifications Compared
Bill Halter spokesman "Bud" Jackson has challenged Senator Jim Holt to "prove that he has any professional work experience or record of success that he can point to as qualifications to be lieutenant governor."
I thought that was pretty brazen. Halter is the one with no resume to fit the job. And I know people pad their resume's all the time, but Halter has padded his to the point of absurdity. For example, he keeps talking about how he was "Deputy Director of Social Security" where he "fought privatization". He held the job for all of 66 days. President Bush did not even propose privatization until after Halter was long gone. But it gets better (worse?).....
(continued- click FRIDAY below for rest of article)
I thought that was pretty brazen. Halter is the one with no resume to fit the job. And I know people pad their resume's all the time, but Halter has padded his to the point of absurdity. For example, he keeps talking about how he was "Deputy Director of Social Security" where he "fought privatization". He held the job for all of 66 days. President Bush did not even propose privatization until after Halter was long gone. But it gets better (worse?).....
(continued- click FRIDAY below for rest of article)
posted by Mark Moore (Moderator) at Friday, October 06, 2006
1 Comments:
The fact is that Holt spent a lot of his adult working years in the military, where he was a watch officer at the National Security Agency. When his grandmother got sick, he came home and took care of her. He did have a couple of sales jobs, and he also worked as a counselor at Youth Bridge. When he campaigned for the legislature he made a pledge that if they elected him he would serve full time and he kept that promise.
Did Holt make a lot of money on that life path? No. Was it honorable? Yes. Very much so.
Does his experience as a Senator prepare him to be the "President of the Senate" as Lt. Governor? Of course. It is absurd for a man who has never been elected to anything in his life, Halter, to claim Holt has no experience for Lt. Governor. It's Halter himself who fails on that score.
Now I want you to contrast Holt's path with that with Bill Halter. Mr. Halter has made a lot of money, and if that is all that impresses you then you can stop reading now. If you also care about how he made it, you might be interested to know that he made a lot of money sitting on the boards of companies that lost a lot of money- $500,000,000 worth.
That is right. The big business experience Halter has been bragging about is experience in losing large amounts of money. Don't worry about him though. These were situations where the insiders got well by projecting a certain image about the company. When market realities shattered that image the stockholders got butchered, but the insiders like Halter got away with piles of cash.
There is one company which made money while Halter was a board member (even though it also had legal trouble over cheating its investors). That company was Akamai. Akamai made money, any way it could. That includes helping porn sites deliver content that included teenagers and helping online gambling sites from "off shore".
The business was sleazy and disgusting. And they actually used college servers to host the content. When the Boston Globe broke the story, the Akamai board, including Bill Halter, decided to "phase out" relationships with the porn and gambling companies. What if the Republicans had decided to "phase out" support of former Congressman Mark Foley? It would be an outrage.
Have those contracts expired? Is Akamai still "phasing out" its relationship with these firms? We don't know.
It may be that these sites were less than 1% of Akamai's profits, but Foley was less than 1% of House Speaker Denny Hastert's congressmen. If people expect Hastert to know how bad it was, then they should expect Halter to have known it too.
In conlcusion, Halter's much touted "private sector experience" consists of sitting on the boards of two kinds of companies: 1) companies that have lost big money and 2) companies that have no scruples at all about how they make their money.
If you think that is a better resume than Holt's path of lowly honor then it says more about you than Holt.
Halter did have one leadership job in Arkansas. That was in October of 1992. As President of the Arkansas Institute, Halter was fired due to his “inexperience” and because his “tenure yielded no obvious progress.” Those speaking of Halter’s immaturity as a leader are the board of the directors of the company.
The amount of money a person makes is not always an indication of how good a man they are.
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