Wisconsin’s Foxconn Boondoggle Looks Worse Than Ever

October 22nd, 2020

Cryptogon 2017: My guess is that … the thousands of workers thing is being thrown out there for political fodder to secure corporate welfare from the state.

Via: Reason:

In June 2018, President Donald Trump and then–Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin broke ground on the outskirts of Milwaukee for what was supposed to be a $10 billion, 20 million-square-foot factory for Taiwanese tech giant Foxconn.

It was going to be “the eighth wonder of the world,” Trump said, proof that he was “reclaiming our country’s proud manufacturing legacy”—even if the project was dependent on $3 billion in subsidies from the state of Wisconsin, one of the largest corporate handouts in American history.

A little more than two years later, the factory that was supposed to produce LCD screens for TVs and smartphones doesn’t exist and “probably never will,” reports The Verge this week in a must-read investigation into the downfall of Wisconsin’s propped-up Foxconn project. The buildings that have been built on the plot of land where Trump and Walker overturned ceremonial shovels of dirt two years ago are being used for storage, not manufacturing. Promised renovations to a decades-old skyscraper in downtown Milwaukee—once intended to be Foxconn’s U.S. headquarters—have not materialized. Neither have most of the 13,000 jobs the company promised to create in return for piles of public cash.

“Even the handful of jobs the company claims to have created are less than real: many of them held by people with nothing to do, hired so the company could reach the number required for it to get tax subsidy payments from Wisconsin,” writes The Verge’s Josh Dzieza. “Foxconn failed at that objective, too: last week, Wisconsin rejected the company’s subsidy application and found it had employed only 281 people eligible under the contract at the end of 2019. Many have since been laid off.”

Posted in Economy, Fraud | Top Of Page

One Response to “Wisconsin’s Foxconn Boondoggle Looks Worse Than Ever”

  1. Loveandlight says:

    Yes, the only tangible purpose the whole thing served was to ferry some public money into the pockets of people who already had way more money than anyone could possibly ever need. The only probable reason Foxconn hasn’t packed up and left Wisconsin is because they negotiated legal agreements with local governments in Racine County, the litigation of which would probably cost the company any further good will they might receive in future business dealings in the USA.

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