Tag: governor scott walker
How Trump’s FoxConn Deal Conned Wisconsin Out Of Billions

How Trump’s FoxConn Deal Conned Wisconsin Out Of Billions

The Foxconn deal — Wisconsin’s ill-fated giveaway of billions of dollars to a Taiwanese electronics giant — is irretrievably broken.

That’s not an outside opinion. That’s the conclusion of a report commissioned by the state of Wisconsin.

Wisconsin agreed to give the company $4 billion in tax credits in return for Foxconn building a factory in the state. Foxconn promised to create 13,000 jobs, which sounds impressive until you do the math: It meant Wisconsin would be paying over $230,000 for each of the jobs, which are expected to pay an average of around $54,000 a year.

The whole deal was a GOP invention. Trump bragged that the deal was only happening because he got elected. Scott Walker, the then-governor of Wisconsin, orchestrated the multibillion-dollar giveaway.

The deal almost immediately fell apart, with Foxconn Chair Terry Gou admitting the company had no intention of building the promised LCD panels in the United States. The square footage of the proposed factory drastically decreased, dropping from 20 million to under 1 million. The promised jobs plummeted from 13,000 to 1500. And then Foxconn decided it might not be a factory at all, which means it wouldn’t provide the blue-collar jobs Walker and his cronies promised. Foxconn floated having a high-tech research facility instead.

In light of all this, the Wisconsin Department of Administration requested a report to look at the economics of the deal in light of the stripped-down factory plans.

The conclusions were not good. Having a smaller facility with fewer jobs means the amount the state is spending per job increases. In fact, the report found that, if the factory employed 1500-1800 people, the cost per job would be a staggering $290,000. And even those decreased job numbers still appear wildly optimistic. At the end of 2018, Foxconn employed 156 people in the entire state.

With that, the deal no longer seems viable for Wisconsin, so they’re hoping to get Foxconn back to the bargaining table and hammer out a different deal. The report notes that a Foxconn representative met with current Democratic Gov. Tony Evers to talk about possible adjustments. However, Foxconn can’t help itself from asking for more: They’re hoping to have a longer time to qualify for capital investment tax credits.

In the end, this is just another Trump-related deal gone horribly wrong. Trump and Walker made flashy promises, gave away billions of dollars, and left the taxpayers holding the bag.

Published with permission of The American Independent.

A Political Party Worth Joining

A Political Party Worth Joining

The best political party in America is not the Dems nor the Repubs. By far, the best political party is a real party named “Fighting Bob Fest.”

It’s a daylong, outdoor political festival run by a coalition of Wisconsin progressives who believe in “putting the party back in politics.” Held in Madison every September, Bob Fest is like a “state fair” of politics, not only featuring give-’em-hell speechifying and hot populist issues — but also terrific edibles from a dozen food trucks, bottomless kegs of great local beers, lively music, dozens of activist booths, games, political humor, a farmers market and… well, fun!

The idea behind Bob Fest is to have a political event that people actually want to come to. Plus, not only is admission free, but Bob Fest is also proud to be corporate-free, rejecting any funding or ads by corporate interests. It’s a volunteer-run festival of, by and for regular people, and it pays for itself each year by passing the bucket and getting staff support from The Progressive, the feisty, populist-spirited magazine founded 107 years ago by Sen. Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette.

Yes, Fighting Bob Fest is named for La Follette, a truly great U.S. Senator who was renowned for battling the corruption of American politics by corporate money. In fact, when he was Wisconsin’s governor a century ago, La Follette passed a law banning corporations from making donations to political candidates — a law that is still in effect.

However, corporate interests today use front groups in a political ploy to bypass such bans and dump millions of dollars into their chosen candidates — including Wisconsin’s current governor.

Some magicians perform mind boggling magic tricks, such as levitating themselves, apparently with no hidden force lifting them up. But remember, the key word in “magic trick” — is trick. Scott Walker, for example, is quite the political trickster. This right-wing extremist became so unpopular in his first term as Wisconsin’s governor that he faced a recall election in 2012. Yet he seemed to rise in front of our very eyes, magically lifting himself above the public’s anger to avoid defeat. How’d he do that?

As reported by The Guardian newspaper, some 1,500 secret emails, court testimonies, and financial records were uncovered, revealing that Walker had a hidden lifeline of corporate cash hoisting him up. Despite a Wisconsin law specifically prohibiting corporations from funding political candidates, millions of those banned dollars were pumped into Walker’s campaign.

The trick is that the corporate checks were sent to supposedly-independent political outfits that, thanks to the Supreme Court’s ridiculous Citizens United decree, are allowed to take unlimited campaign funds without disclosing the names of the corporate donors — provided that the independent groups do not in any way coordinate their electoral efforts with the campaign of the candidates they want to elect.

Even if obeyed, this farcical rule essentially sanctions organized corporate corruption, but Walker & Company didn’t even try to obey it. Rather the governor asked everyone from the Koch brothers to Home Depot to Donnie Trump to funnel checks to the “independent” political groups backing him. He wrote personal thank-you notes to the donors, and even had his media strategist handle the ads for both his campaign and the groups.

Scott Walker, his front groups, and his corporate donors aren’t a magic act – they’re debouched thieves, stealing our democracy to impose their plutocracy over us. They’re mocking the law and the people. That’s the importance of bringing us mockees together in big events like Bob Fest — where 10,000 Wisconsinites gathered last year in the fighting spirit of La Follette, determined to stop the corporate governor’s cynical end run.

To learn more about Fighting Bob Fest, go to www.FightingBobFest.org.

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

Wisconsin Recall Efforts Underway

Primary elections to recall state senators–the largest campaign in history, driven mostly by Labor and Democratic activists angry at Governor Scott Walker’s destruction of collective-bargaining–are just the first step in wrestling control of the state government back from the right. They start today:

In the balloting on Tuesday, residents in some parts of the state were voting in primary elections that are part of the broadest recall effort in state history. The outcome, to be determined in votes next week and then again next month, will decide whether Republicans, who last fall took control of the governor’s seat and of both chambers of the Legislature, maintain their hold on the State Senate.

The experts who ordinarily offer predictions about how high or low turnout might be had little to go on Tuesday; never before have nine state senators been the subjects of recall efforts all at once, much less in the dead of summer.

Leaders of both parties voiced confidence about the outcomes, but the divide in the Senate is 19 Republicans to 14 Democrats. The flipping of three Republican seats would upend their domination in Madison. The flurry of political commercials now playing — included some financed by national groups — makes clear the size of the stakes.

Watch to see how much this is just Labor’s last gasp–a desperate attempt to reverse the tide of declining unionization in a bastion of progressivism–or, alternatively, the beginning of a resurgence.