Name: Scott Walker, Donald Trump Secured Scam Foxconn Deal for Wisconsin
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Scott Walker, Donald Trump Secured Scam Foxconn Deal for Wisconsin

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Yes, sir. And no later than this morning. I went to my work as usual at ten o'clock, but the door was shut and locked, with a little square of cardboard hammered onto the middle of the panel with a tack. Here it is, and you can read for yourself." He held up a piece of white cardboard, about the size of a sheet of note paper. It read in this fashion: "THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE IS DISSOLVED. Oct. 9, 1890.—"The Red-Headed League," Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.Not to pile on Wisconsin, which is being battered by the pandemic and continually harassed by President* Superspreader, but has produced what may be the definitive account of how the state was swindled out of its socks and underwear by Foxconn, the Taiwanese tech company that the president* and departed homunculus Scott Walker promised would convert Wisconsin into a magic kingdom of 21st century technological whizbangery. This, of course, has turned into one of the biggest public-private scams in American history, and one that living Wisconsinites have bequeathed to their posterity. Hold onto your gob while you read it, because it will be smacked, repeatedly. We begin. Which is why new recruits arriving at the 1960s office building Foxconn had purchased in downtown Milwaukee were surprised to discover they had to provide their own office supplies.Not an auspicious beginning.They listened to the cries of co-workers trapped in the elevators that often broke, noted the water that occasionally leaked from the ceiling, and wondered when the building would be transformed into the gleaming North American headquarters an executive had promised. The renovations never arrived. Neither did the factory, the tech campus, nor the thousands of jobs. Interviews with 19 employees and dozens of others involved with the project, as well as thousands of pages of public documents, reveal a project that has defaulted on almost every promise. The building Foxconn calls an LCD factory — about 1/20th the size of the original plan — is little more than an empty shell. In September, Foxconn received a permit to change its intended use from manufacturing to storage.In the Sherlock Holmes adventure referenced above, a pawnbroker named Jabez Wilson comes to Baker Street because he had taken a position with a group composed entirely of red-haired men like himself, which required him to sit in an office and copy an encyclopedia by hand. It turns out that Wilson's pawnbroker's shop enabled his employers, a criminal gang, to tunnel into a nearby bank and rob it. Holmes, of course, busts the gang. It turns out that Wisconsin was Jabez Wilson and that Foxconn was the gang.That illusion has had real costs. State and local governments spent at least $400 million, largely on land and infrastructure Foxconn will likely never need. Residents were pushed from their homes under threat of eminent domain and dozens of houses to clear property Foxconn doesn’t know what to do with. And a recurring cycle of new recruits joined the project, eager to help it succeed, only to become trapped in a mirage. Months after the 2018 groundbreaking, the company was racing to hire the 260 people needed to receive the first tranche of payments from the lucrative subsidy package passed by then-Gov. Scott Walker. Recruiters were told to hit the number but given little in the way of job descriptions. Soon, the office began to fill with people who had nothing to do. Many just sat in their cubicles watching Netflix and playing games on their phones. The reality of their situation became impossible to ignore. Multiple employees recall seeing people cry in the office. “The best is when you’re in the elevator with somebody and then they just scream out of nowhere,” said an employee who experienced this several times. “They’ve had enough, because things don’t make sense here.”They at least could have given them encyclopedias to copy.Going great, fellas.There's no point in quoting the highlights, because there are too damn many of them to cite. Gaze in awe as Terry Gou, the founder and CEO of Foxconn, sees suckers coming from a hemisphere away and sizes up Walker and the Republican state legislature for the rubes they are. Marvel at how El Caudillo-del-Mar-a-Lago, master of The Deal, gets hauled into the big con. You'll laugh, you'll cry, as Foxconn tries to find something to manufacture in Wisconsin. They searched for things in Wisconsin they could export to China: cosmetics, designer handbags, ice cream, carp. Yeung asked them to draw up a plan for building an aquaponic fish farm in Mount Pleasant, having been inspired by a company in northern Wisconsin and reasoning that Foxconn had access to cheap water the state provided for LCD manufacturing. They briefly explored doing something with esports, maybe sponsoring a gaming team that could use the empty innovation centers, according to one source. A plan to export dairy to China got as far as a meeting with the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture before collapsing.Here's the problem. Public-private partnerships are always a gamble with other people's money. (Many cities finally came around to seeing through the subsidized-stadium riff.) But now, with the public half awash in corporate money, and the private half consumed with a philosophy based on discreet fraud, you get what happened in Wisconsin. Grandparents in Wisconsin can go to their graves secure in the knowledge that their great-grandchildren will be paying for this in one way or another. Then, there were the golf carts.Foxconn only ever got as far as buying the golf carts. They arrived from China disassembled, in orange, pink, and other festive colors. One employee described them as “the biggest pieces of shit,” like something “bought off Wish.com.” Unable to make them autonomous, Foxconn put them in storage in the multipurpose building. At one point, the company discussed outfitting them with lights and turning them into security vehicles, but the subsidiary in charge of security refused to pay FEWI for the carts, according to one employee. As the divisions bickered, bored employees would come down from the Milwaukee headquarters to race the carts around the empty building, until the batteries finally died.The Red-Headed League is dissolved.Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has his three children.This content is imported from OpenWeb. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.&nbsp;Advertisement - Continue Reading BelowAdvertisement - Continue Reading Below

Yes, sir. And no later than this morning. I went to my work as usual at ten o'clock, but the door was shut and locked, with a little square of cardboard hammered onto the middle of the panel with a tack. Here it is, and you can read for yourself." He held up a piece of white cardboard, about the size of a sheet of note paper. It read in this fashion: "THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE IS DISSOLVED. Oct. 9, 1890.—"The Red-Headed League," Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.Not to pile on Wisconsin, which is being battered by the pandemic and continually harassed by President* Superspreader, but has produced what may...

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Charles P. Pierce is a writer-at-large for Esquire and his work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the LA Times Magazine, the Nation, the Atlantic, Sports Illustrated and The Chicago Tribune, among others.

Scott Walker, Donald Trump Secured Scam Foxconn Deal for Wisconsin

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