James Rowen’s excellent compendium of the whole Foxconn mess
(Ask your Republican Assembly and Senate candidates in 2018, why they voted for this disaster -Editor. If you have any additional material of your own to contribute, submit them to us: Submissions at (click))
From now until eternity, every time that local government henceforth asks for more funding from the Wisconsin Legislature, the answer is going to be a flat-out “No: We’re broke.” The hidden part of that message will always be, “because we blew all our money on the Fox Con.” This post is to help you understand why, henceforth, we cannot have nice things in Wisconsin. At least, not with the current regime in power.
The global leader in building robotics to replace human labor in mainland China is the corporation Foxconn of island nation Taiwan (many people still confuse the two Chinas when trying to understand Foxconn). Foxconn is the corporation you have heard will be getting up to $3 billion of Wisconsin People’s Money in order to build an enormous plant in suburban Racine County. A plant which will no doubt be one of the largest fully-robotic production facility of consumer electronics when fully operational. (With damn few human workers when fully robotized). Of course, the bait that gets the $3 billion in public money is the promise of “13,000 jobs,” which Republicans repeat as a kind of religious mantra whenever speaking with awe about the Fox Con.
However, we should distinguish between magical thinking and reality thinking. James Rowen is good at the reality thinking part. Once you have thoroughly read Rowen’s exposure of this “job-creation” fraud, I think you’ll start to recognize what we need to do about this Legislature.
Now that the one-party system has boxed-in the Wisconsin budget to the point where there won’t be any funds to spare thanks to the Fox Con of the Governor and the One Party to Rule Them All in the Legislature, I thought everyone should have James Rowen’s excellent resource list of his postings from The Political Environment (the independent blog separate from his work at Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel).
Some samples of James Rowen’s expose of the Fox Con, to help you slog through the whole scandal/fiasco/disaster:
* Here is the actual, 29-page Foxconn contract, as signed.
* Summary post about the WI GOP war on the environment includes an explanation of Foxconn’s coming collision with state wetland and water law.
Insiders, experts explain WI GOP’s damage to the environment
In perspective: the con began long before Foxconn.
* Yipes! Local taxpayers will pony up $764 million local dollars For Foxconn.
* Foxconn is Walker’s biggest use of gov’t to pick winners and losers, yet…
Despite denials, Walker uses gov’t. to pick winners & losers
Lots more stories linking to other stories and background material, etc. (dozens and dozens and dozens of stories)–
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