Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Are WI/Foxconn stakeholders at today's DC power-broker session?

News of a scheduled White House visit by Foxconn is being dangled in front of media as a signal of something after weeks of confusion, mixed messages and official, tweeted jitterbugging:
7:29 PM - 24 Apr 2019  Calm down. Probably fake news 😂 Who has the crystal ball 🔮 to predict if 13,000 jobs will be created by the year 2032? Esp in April ‘19 🤔 🤗😀😎
In the meanwhile, tut-tut, those of you in the no-need-to-know demographic: someone will get back to you about something, sometime later. Unless the crystal ball says 'ask again later.'



So while the power brokers meet behind closed doors without a publicly-released agenda, Wisconsin taxpayers' at the state and local levels whose money is being spent in torrents - - through commitments made by a failed job-creator and defeated former Governor - - are back in wait-and-see-mode.

Perhaps the people's newly-elected representatives like Governor Evers who is not at the table, perhaps because he's from a party with the irritating word Democratic in its name that is regularly denounced by the current White House occupant. 

Who openly jokes dreams of serving more terms than allowed by law, as some of the dictators he admires have managed to arrange.

Today's White House set-up in the Foxconn saga is more than another reminder of how little input is exercised by or implemented from those most directly in the bulldozers' way or the tax-collectors' reach.

It's also an unwelcome echo of the old top-down Soviet 'development' model that treated people, villages and homes as units of production fed into the charts and fine print of five-year plans. 

The distant and impenetrable leadership holding all the cards will again decide how the Village of Mount Pleasant will be used - - how its taxes are spent, who at ground level is moved out of their houses or off farmland labeled 'blighted' to give officially-dictated expendability a temporary patina of legitimacy.

Or when a factory will be opened, and employing how many workers and how many robots, and with what damage 'protections' will be added to the air and water for generations- - all in the name of progress defined by current managers and beneficiaries of the Corporate Welfare State.

Don't take my word for it. Even though it's behind a pay wall, the headline and top on this piece Monday from very establishment Wall Street Journal tells the story:
Foxconn Tore Up a Small Town To Build a Big Factory - - Then Retreated
The iPhone maker got fat incentives to build a $10 billion LCD plant that largely hasn’t materialized on land where Mount Pleasant, Wis., razed homes and crops
Further facilitated by loyal underlings and self-perpetuating clerks, like Robin Vos and his expanded squad of functionaries - - all more interested in clutching their crumbs of authority with a death grip and winning donor approval and promised promotions than embracing the truth and the democratic transparency that is needed to make it work.

Meanwhile, we await some news. Of something. From someone.

A full Foxonnn archive is here.


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