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Foxconn Roundup: Outside Work and Local Land

Foxconn’s boosters each day inch closer to a corporate welfare version of Scientology: it doesn’t make any sense, but adherents keep to themselves and repeat a shared list of crackpot claims. The latest news to pierce the cultists’ bubble: Molly Beck and Rick Romell report Wisconsin taxpayers could pay Foxconn for work done outside of Wisconsin,…

The Myth of the Adult in the Room

National stories – about national principles – apply to places big and small, including Whitewater, Wisconsin. Monica Hesse’s John Kelly and the myth of the ‘adult in the room’ summarizes about a national figure a myth that’s common locally, too: If you can remember back to Kelly’s appointment, six thousand years ago in 2017, the…

Once a Gerrymanderer…

Wisconsin, with a gerrymandered legislature and a crony capitalist, lame-duck governor, was never going to have an easy transition back to a tradition of democratically representative government and sound economic policy.  The men who engineered years of the wrong approach were never going to go gently to the political outer darkness that, deservedly, awaits them.…

Foxconn Roundup: Indiana Layoffs & Automation Everywhere

A sensible person would never have listened to a Walker Administration operative in Whitewater tout Foxconn without laughing or looking about for a nearby tomato.  No sensible person would have made that operative a guest speaker at an annual dinner or written about the event without criticism.  (See, about that Greater Whitewater Committee dinner and that…

Foxconn Roundup: Desperately Ill Edition

Before and after the recent election, solid assessments on Foxconn came to press, and they confirm how irrational and wasteful is that project. Earlier this year, the local business lobby (the Greater Whitewater Committee) invited the state capitalist stooge official overseeing the project to a dinner in Whitewater. I’ve no idea whether Matt Moroney will show…

A Site on Facebook: ‘Nothing on this page is real’

Standards have fallen so low that, whether of right or left, trolls take advantage of gullible and ignorant people on Facebook each day.  Eli Saslow reports how a liberal troll tricks impressionable conservatives.  The people tricking, and the people being tricked, are evidence of (respectively) ethical or educational decline.  First the unethical tricksters: He [forty-something Christopher Blair] had…

Foxconn: Failure & Fraud

There are two national publications with recent updates on the Foxconn project, and each report highlights fundamental problems with the billions in public subsidies for that foreign corporation. Here’s a roundup of the latest on this dodgy corporate welfare:   Bruce Murphy (writing online for national tech site The Verge) reports Wisconsin’s $4.1 Billion Foxconn Boondoggle (“Gov.…

New Developments About Jefferson, Wisconsin’s ‘Warriors & Wizards’ Festival

There are new, troubling developments concerning Jefferson, Wisconsin’s ‘Warriors & Wizards’ festival, an event about which this website has been consistently critical (for many sound reasons). One can wait a day or so to see what this new reporting shows (and how accurate and honest the reporting is, considering how wobbly it’s been). In the…

In Whitewater and Elsewhere, Employment’s Only Part of the Story

 In times of high unemployment, of course it makes sense to get people back to work. Jobs, jobs, jobs isn’t a bad mantra when people don’t have work.  (Work isn’t simply about an income, but a place in society.)  Today is not, however, the Great Depression. Listen to ‘development professionals’ go on about job-creation at…

Foxconn’s Predatory Reliance on Eminent Domain

Taiwanese-owned Foxconn is relying on eminent domain to seize Wisconsinites’ private homes for the sake of that foreign company’s project. Principles of eminent domain, sadly, have been vastly increased since a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court decision expanded government’s power to take from ordinary homeowners, among others. Those expanded governmental powers mean that residents who lose their…

‘Chinese-owned company qualifies for Trump’s anti-China farm bailout’

Listen closely, and one can almost hear the peals of laughter from a bureaucrat in the Chinese ministry of commerce… Jeff Stein reports Chinese-owned company qualifies for Trump’s anti-China farm bailout: A Chinese-owned pork producer is eligible for federal payments under President Trump’s $12 billion farm bailout, a program established to help U.S. farmers hurt…

Sad Spectacle in Jefferson, WI (and How to Do Much Better)

For four years, either Edgerton or Jefferson, Wisconsin has hosted a costume festival (originally a Harry Potter Festival, this year a Warriors and Wizards festival). Despite three years of disappointment, Jefferson held the festival again this year (after having – astonishingly – signed a five-year deal). I’ve followed the event over the years, and it…