Senator Barbara Boxer made a campaign stop in San Jose on Tuesday, to win support in the place that first put her rival Carly Fiorina in the public eye. Speaking to employees at Cisco Systems, Boxer repeated her commitment to saving local jobs, while blasting Fiorina for laying off 30,000 employees as the head of HP and for shipping their jobs to China. Cisco CEO John Chambers, a prominent back of John McCain’s presidential run, is also one of Boxer’s most ardent local supporters.

The town hall came under fire, however, because of Boxer’s connections with Chambers. The Wall Street Journal contends that half of Cisco’s workforce of 70,700 is situated overseas and that the company has been building up its holdings in Bangalore and other South Asian locales at the expense of its San Jose branch. It adds that three-quarters of Cisco’s $40 billion cash holdings are kept overseas to avoid the U.S. corporate tax rate of 35 percent.

The Fiorina campaign has picked up on this and launched an attack ad on Boxer, claiming that her Cisco supporters are doing precisely what she condemns Fiorina for doing.
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