Foxconn deal approaches 3rd anniversary, company's follow-through negligible
We're closing in on the 3rd anniversary of the Scott Walker-engineered multi-billion giveaway to Foxconn.
Extensive archive and record, here.
For the record, the deal:
* Did not save Walker's incumbency, and probably helped build statewide momentum against his re-election.
From NBC Nightly News, 7/21/19
* Did plow under a lot of productive farmland and homesteads in Mt. Pleasant, and jacked up the village and Racine County's debt load-for decades.
* Did not produce the company's pledged $100 million gift to the UW-Madison, reports show, and there has been very little recent news of substance about it.
* Did goose along along with hundreds of millions of public dollars a rushed, calamitous, I-94 expansion that was designed to serve senior Foxconn enabler Robin Vos's district, and the company's Mt. Pleasant site - a site which still lacks production facilities for flat-screen televisions as promised.
* Has led to COVID-19 spurred face mask production in the company's completed large building in Mt. Pleasant, and ventilators are said to be scheduled there for assembly there later this year.
While the COVID-19 output is a good thing, it was of course nowhere in the original plan for which eligible per-worker state subsidies can be shelled out for decades at extremely generous rates, and for which the local governments took on heavy spending and debt to add amenities to the site plan.
All that public spending - out the door or pledged - is money which may not be available for crucial purposes at the pandemic trashes local budgets while taxpayers, families and small businesses lose everything.
And any politician who touts that serendipity as validating the Foxconn fiasco would sound like the lying-through-the-pain newlywed who still tells his buddies he wouldn't trade his Hawaii honeymoon for anything - even though his fiancé dumped him there before the plane ride home - because he'd found a pretty shell on the beach walking alone.
Extensive archive and record, here.
For the record, the deal:
* Did not save Walker's incumbency, and probably helped build statewide momentum against his re-election.
From NBC Nightly News, 7/21/19
* Did plow under a lot of productive farmland and homesteads in Mt. Pleasant, and jacked up the village and Racine County's debt load-for decades.
* Did not produce the company's pledged $100 million gift to the UW-Madison, reports show, and there has been very little recent news of substance about it.
* Did goose along along with hundreds of millions of public dollars a rushed, calamitous, I-94 expansion that was designed to serve senior Foxconn enabler Robin Vos's district, and the company's Mt. Pleasant site - a site which still lacks production facilities for flat-screen televisions as promised.
* Has led to COVID-19 spurred face mask production in the company's completed large building in Mt. Pleasant, and ventilators are said to be scheduled there for assembly there later this year.
While the COVID-19 output is a good thing, it was of course nowhere in the original plan for which eligible per-worker state subsidies can be shelled out for decades at extremely generous rates, and for which the local governments took on heavy spending and debt to add amenities to the site plan.
All that public spending - out the door or pledged - is money which may not be available for crucial purposes at the pandemic trashes local budgets while taxpayers, families and small businesses lose everything.
And any politician who touts that serendipity as validating the Foxconn fiasco would sound like the lying-through-the-pain newlywed who still tells his buddies he wouldn't trade his Hawaii honeymoon for anything - even though his fiancé dumped him there before the plane ride home - because he'd found a pretty shell on the beach walking alone.
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