Friday, October 30, 2020

To reward more Foxconn failure is financially & morally repulsive

There are two ways to look at Foxconn's latest bid for even more Wisconsin taxpayer money.

1. The first is through the narrow, legalistic but important lens of contract compliance, and good for the Evers administration for doing just that in its latest effort to deal with the unprecedented financial and environmental debacle Scott Walker, GOP legislative leaders and the WMC dumped here.

2. The other way to view Foxconn's demand for money it has not earned through its early and often over-promising and under-performing is common sense money-management in an unprecedented crisis.

COVID-19, along with mass illness and death, is also spreading record-breaking job loss, small business failures, and devastating cuts in budgets from everyday households to city halls - big and small.

That Foxconn wants more millions of scarce public dollars in this uniquely tragic and stressed political and financial environment is beyond unconscionable.

Especially money that was committed and converted hurriedly into policy and law without any consideration for the environment, and environmental justice and the needs of long-neglected communities and families of color.

Wisconsin should continue to say "no" to Foxconn's demand for having failed the contract compliance standard, and underscore it with the moral imperative that makes the case and sharpens the view through lens number two.  

More about Foxconn is at an archival link covering the last 40 months, here.

From NBC Nightly News, 7/21/19
And it is not a coincidence that you will find one of the state's most reckless GOP politicians having playing a crucial and negative role in the major public health and public financing calamities facing Wisconsin right now:

Robin Vos looms over twin WI debacles; a devastating pandemic & more Foxconn fiasco

It's not a coincidence Wisconsin is roiled right now by two major negative stories - the worsening COVID-19 catastrophe - 

Record-shattering 4,591 coronavirus cases as state catches up on reporting; record 218 COVID-19 hospitalizations

- and the FUBAR Foxconn fiasco in Mt. Pleasant - 

Three years later, the factory — and the jobs — don’t exist, and they probably never will.

- and that GOP Assembly Speaker Robin Vos played key roles in launching both of these realities into Wisconsin homes and an exhausted political environment.

Basically, Vos's role in these twin failures speaks volumes about the dangers of power concentrated in a key state position held by an ultra-partisan who keeps betting badly with other people's money and lives that he and his corporatist ideologies know better.  

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