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Special Interests

America, City, Daily Bread, Economy, Self-Dealing, Special Interests

Daily Bread for 9.18.24: Now’s the Time

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 83. Sunrise is 6:39, and sunset is 6:57, for 12h 18m 05s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous, with 99.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

The Library Board Development Committee meets at 4:30 PM and the Parks & Recreation Board meets at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1942,  Spring Valley endures a flood:

On the evening of September 17, 1942, after a day of heavy rain, water began rolling through the streets of Spring Valley, in Pierce Co. The village, strung out along the Eau Galle River in a deep valley, had been inundated before, but this was no ordinary flood. By 11:30p.m., water in the streets was 12 to 20 feet deep, flowing at 12 to 15 miles an hour, and laden with logs, lumber, and dislodged buildings. Throughout the early morning hours of Sept. 18th, village residents became trapped in their homes or were carried downstream as buildings were swept off foundations and floated away. One couple spent the night chest-deep in water in their living room, holding their family dog above the water and fending off floating furniture. The raging torrent uprooted and twisted the tracks of the Northwestern Railroad like wire, and electricity and drinking water were unavailable for several days. Miraculously, there were no deaths or serious injuries.

On this day in 1945, General Douglas MacArthur moves his general headquarters from Manila to Tokyo.

Now’s the time for Whitewater to make good on improving national conditions. (The best way for the city to do so is to set aside the low-quality work but above-average sense of entitlement of the aged special-interest men who have kept Whitewater back for a generation1. See of yesteryear’s serial mediocrity Whitewater’s Still Waiting for That Boom.)

Of those improving national conditions, Jeff Cox reports The Fed’s biggest interest rate call in years happens Wednesday. Here’s what to expect:

For all the hype that goes into them, Federal Reserve meetings are usually pretty predictable affairs. Policymakers telegraph their intentions ahead of time, markets react, and everyone has at least a general idea of what’s going to happen.

Not this time.

This week’s gathering of the central bank’s Federal Open Market Committee carries an uncommon air of mystery. While markets have made up their collective mind that the Fed is going to lower interest rates, there’s a vigorous debate over how far policymakers will go.

Will it be the traditional quarter-percentage-point, or 25-basis-point, rate reduction, or will the Fed take an aggressive first step and go 50, or half a point?

Fed watchers are unsure, setting up the potential for an FOMC meeting that could be even more impactful than usual. The meeting wraps up Wednesday afternoon, with the release of the Fed’s rate decision coming at 2 p.m. ET.

“I hope they cut 50 basis points, but I suspect they’ll cut 25. My hope is 50, because I think rates are just too high,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “They have achieved their mandate for full employment and inflation back at target, and that’s not consistent with a five and a half percent-ish funds rate target. So I think they need to normalize rates quickly and have a lot of room to do so.”

A rate cut of either size will be good for all America, including small-town Whitewater.

  1. One might wonder why these aged men didn’t have more time to choose well for Whitewater when they were younger. Wonder not: exaggerating, tale-bearing, pretending, posing, scheming, memorizing trickle-down jargon, and shoving themselves to the front of the line takes a lot of time, for goodness’ sake. ↩︎

City, Conflicts of Interest, Development, Economy, Local Government, Planning, Special Interests

Daily Bread for 8.13.24: Inflation Abates, Again

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 81. Sunrise is 6:00, and sunset is 7:58, for 13h 57m 38s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 59.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1961, East Germany closes the border between the eastern and western sectors of Berlin to thwart its inhabitants’ attempts to escape to the West, and construction of the Berlin Wall is started. The day is known as Barbed Wire Sunday.

Update 8.14.24: Yesterday (below) was a post on wholesale inflation. Today, one sees that the consumer price index is also lower: Inflation Slipped to 2.9% in July, Lower Than Expected (‘CPI report likely seals case for the Fed to begin cutting interest rates at its next meeting’). Good news, all around.

Of wholesale inflation, Jeff Cox reports Wholesale inflation measure rose 0.1% in July, less than expected:

A key measure of wholesale inflation rose less than expected in July, opening the door further for the Federal Reserve to start lowering interest rates.

The producer price index, which measures selling prices that producers get for goods and services, increased 0.1% on the month, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday. Excluding volatile food and energy components, the core PPI was flat.

Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for an increase of 0.2% on both the all-items and the core readings.

A further core measure that also excludes trade services showed a rise of 0.3%.

On a year-over-year basis, the headline PPI increased 2.2%, a sharp drop from the 2.7% reading in June.

Inflation is abating, and growth is up, and in these improving conditions residents of both big cities and also small towns (like Whitewater!) have a chance to avoid the economic mistakes of the past (and those who made them).

Some of Whitewater’s special-interest men (from the 2000s and 2010s) are like declining athletes who should have retired from the game years ago. They stayed too long, and now can’t hit, can’t field, can’t circle the bases. Overweight and underpowered. They want to blame everyone else for their below-average performance. One wonders: why pretend it’s a major-league game with these minor-league banjo-hitters stumbling up to the plate?

Whitewater deserves better.

Orbits:

Bad Ideas, Boosterism, CDA, City, Corporate Welfare, Daily Bread, Flop Sweat, Foxconn, Low Standards, Misplaced Priorities, Special Interests, Willful Ignorance, Wisconsin

Daily Bread for 5.9.24: A Reminder on Whitewater’s Fumbling & Stumbling Old Guard

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will see morning showers with a high of 59. Sunrise is 5:36 and sunset 8:05 for 14h 28m 43s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 2.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1662, the figure who later became Mr. Punch makes his first recorded appearance in England.

FREE WHITEWATER has chronicled and critiqued the failed corporate welfare scheme that was the Wisconsin Foxconn project (links to many of those posts at the bottom of this post). Now, with Foxconn nothing more than a shell project vanished into the fog, there’s a genuine, private, multi-billion dollar Microsoft investment on that Wisconsin site: Microsoft AI center on site of Trump’s failed Foxconn deal? (‘The multibillion-dollar [private!] investment is expected to create 2,000 permanent jobs and 2,300 temporary union construction jobs’).

In Whitewater, an old guard of bankers, landlords, lobbyists, public relations men, etc., pushed Foxconn more than once. Any ordinary person of normal reasoning and sound basic knowledge would have seen Foxconn was a political scheme masquerading as a legitimate project. And yet, somehow, these same Whitewater types hold themselves out as experts on development policy. They backed a joke plan because they were — and are — unsuited to serious policy. See A Sham News Story on Foxconn. (The local business group was the ‘Greater’ Whitewater Committee.)

Trickle-down sloganeering is the best these local types have ever produced. It’s not a free market they want; small-town boosterism and cronyism haven’t uplifted household and individual incomes in this city. See A Candid Admission from the Whitewater CDA.

Some of these men, when at the Community Development Authority, let this city languish while promoting themselves. Even at the tail end of an economic boom, these gentlemen were walking around trying to figure out which end was up. See Whitewater’s Still Waiting for That Boom.

Whitewater deserves better than this ilk. These men deserve an ongoing critique, and detailed review of their record, if they capture that institution again.

Here is the Foxconn scheme, that these local, old-guard Whitewater men touted, as succinctly described in a national story:

In 2018, when Foxconn, at Trump’s urging, announced plans to create 13,000 good-paying jobs in Mount Pleasant, Wis., he celebrated the company’s $10 billion venture as the “Eighth Wonder of the World.” Wielding a golden shovel, Trump touted the Foxconn flat-panel display factory as evidence of a broad manufacturing revival stirred by his 2017 tax cuts and tariffs on imported steel. “You know, 18 months ago, this was a field, and now it’s one of the most advanced places of any kind you’ll see anywhere in the world. It’s incredible,” Trump crowed.

The Foxconn facility was to have included dozens of buildings dotting a giant plot of land three times the size of New York’s Central Park. But the project accomplished little more than the destruction of 100 local homes and farms before the company drastically scaled back its ambitions.

In 2020, Wisconsin state officials denied the Taiwanese company special tax credits, saying it had abandoned its original commitment, employed fewer than 520 people and spent just $300 million. Local taxpayers were left with a tab of more than $500 million for site preparation.

By last summer, Foxconn had built four structures on one corner of the site, which were in sporadic use, according to locals. One large building that was originally billed as a manufacturing facility was being used as a warehouse, one former employee said. Foxconn at the time said it employed 1,000 people in Mount Pleasant building computer servers. The flat-panel display factory never materialized.

On Foxconn previously: 10 Key Articles About Foxconn, Foxconn as Alchemy: Magic Multipliers,  Foxconn Destroys Single-Family Homes, Foxconn Devours Tens of Millions from State’s Road Repair Budget, The Man Behind the Foxconn Project, A Sham News Story on Foxconn, Another Pig at the Trough, Even Foxconn’s Projections Show a Vulnerable (Replaceable) Workforce, Foxconn in Wisconsin: Not So High Tech After All, Foxconn’s Ambition is Automation, While Appeasing the Politically Ambitious, Foxconn’s Shabby Workplace Conditions, Foxconn’s Bait & Switch, Foxconn’s (Overwhelmingly) Low-Paying Jobs, The Next Guest Speaker, Trump, Ryan, and Walker Want to Seize Wisconsin Homes to Build Foxconn Plant, Foxconn Deal Melts Away, “Later This Year,” Foxconn’s Secret Deal with UW-Madison, Foxconn’s Predatory Reliance on Eminent Domain, Foxconn: Failure & Fraud, Foxconn Roundup: Desperately Ill Edition,  Foxconn Roundup: Indiana Layoffs & Automation Everywhere, Foxconn Roundup: Outside Work and Local Land, Foxconn Couldn’t Even Meet Its Low First-Year Goal, Foxconn Talks of Folding Wisconsin Manufacturing Plans, WISGOP Assembly Speaker Vos Hopes You’re Stupid, Lost Homes and Land, All Over a Foxconn Fantasy, Laughable Spin as Industrial Policy, Foxconn: The ‘State Visit Project,’ ‘Inside Wisconsin’s Disastrous $4.5 Billion Deal With Foxconn,’ Foxconn: When the Going Gets Tough…, The Amazon-New York Deal, Like the Foxconn Deal, Was Bad Policy, Foxconn Roundup, Foxconn: The Roads to Nowhere, Foxconn: Evidence of Bad Policy Judgment, Foxconn: Behind Those Headlines, Foxconn: On Shaky Ground, Literally, Foxconn: Heckuva Supply Chain They Have There…, Foxconn: Still Empty, and the Chairman of the Board Needs a Nap, Foxconn: Cleanup on Aisle 4, Foxconn: The Closer One Gets, The Worse It Is, Foxconn Confirm Gov. Evers’s Claim of a Renegotiation Discussion, America’s Best Know Better, Despite Denials, Foxconn’s Empty Buildings Are Still Empty, Right on Schedule – A Foxconn Delay, Foxconn: Reality as a (Predictable) Disappointment, Town Residents Claim Trump’s Foxconn Factory Deal Failed Them, Foxconn: Independent Study Confirms Project is Beyond Repair, It Shouldn’t, Foxconn: Wrecking Ordinary Lives for Nothing, Hey, Wisconsin, How About an Airport-Coffee Robot?, Be Patient, UW-Madison: Only $99,300,000.00 to Go!, Foxconn: First In, Now Out, Foxconn on the Same Day: Yes…um, just kidding, we mean no, Foxconn: ‘Innovation Centers’ Gone in a Puff of Smoke, Foxconn: Worse Than Nothing, Foxconn: State of Wisconsin Demands Accountability, Foreign Corporation Stalls, Foxconn Notices the Noticeable, Journal Sentinel’s Rick Romell Reports the Obvious about Foxconn Project, Foxconn’s ‘Innovation’ Centers: Still Empty a Year Later, Foxconn & UW-Madison: Two Yearsand Less Than One Percent Later…, Accountability Comes Calling at Foxconn, Highlight’s from The Verge’s Foxconn Assessment, After Years of Promises, Foxconn Will Think of Something…by July, Foxconn’s Venture Capital Fund, New, More Realistic Deal Means 90% Reduction in Goals, Seth Meyers on One of Trump’s (and Walker’s) Biggest Scams, the Foxconn Deal, and Adding the Amounts Spent for Foxconn (So Far).

Boosterism, Catspaw, City, Conflicts of Interest, Daily Bread, Ethics, Low Standards, Misplaced Priorities, School District, Self-Dealing, Special Interests, Speech & Debate, Toxic Positivity, Tragic Optimism, Willful Ignorance, Wisconsin

Daily Bread for 5.8.24: The Special-Interest Hierarchy of a Small Town (Adjacent Support)

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 75. Sunrise is 5:38 and sunset 8:04 for 14h 26m 27s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.2 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1877, at Gilmore’s Gardens in New York City, the first Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show opens.

In September, I wrote of The Special-Interest Hierarchy of a Small Town:

In a small town, and perhaps elsewhere, there are four tiers within a special-interest hierarchy: principals, operatives, catspaws, and residents. Only the first three serve, reliably, the special interest; the fourth is a large group of unaffiliated people that the special interests must persuade or dissuade repeatedly. 

A special-interest faction, or in the case of the Whitewater Schools an unresponsive board and superintendent, depends on the reliable service of the first three groups (principals, operatives, and catspaws). Some residents, however, may be counted on now and again to support special-interest or insider-group actions. These kinds of residents offer hit-or-miss support. I’ll list a few of them, readily recognizable in Whitewater and towns across the world.

Boosterism and Toxic Positivity. There are always a few residents who feel that criticism is a crime, an offense against man and God, and so must not be tolerated. The boosters feel that accentuating the positive, and burying the negative, is a legitimate (indeed necessary) pursuit. You’ll see them patrol social media looking to rebuke others who offer sincere criticism.

The delusional are sufferers of toxic positivity; the most acute cases are simply lickspittles.

Many of these types are a few moments away from screaming ‘love it or leave it.’ All of those who would do so are ignorant of their own country’s proud history of robust criticism. Even the most degraded hovel in medieval Europe, flea and lice-infested, had apologists of someone’s special schemes. Centuries later, in an America that is a world-historical state, there are still a few locals who live as though American liberties meant nothing, carrying on as though vulgar locals in a rat-dominated hamlet of 1300s Bavaria.

The indictment and conviction of the boosters: narrow of mind and small of heart.

These types, however, are useful as apologists and enforcers of special-interest schemes.

(A better outlook: Tragic Optimism as an Alternative to Toxic Positivity.)

The Concerned Passerby. When faced with a challenge to their position, special interest men cannot always count on themselves as principals, or their operatives and reliable catspaws. Cronyism and entitlement do not run themselves! They’ll look around, and find someone who seems unaffiliated, but is willing to do their work now and again. Although not reliable all the time, these types can be persuaded for a specific task.

They’ll seem like concerned passersby, simply trying to help, but no! They’re truly working to advance a special-interest or closed-government perspective. They’re harder to spot than boosters, sufferers of toxic positivity, or lickspittles, but still identifiable to ordinary residents. They’ll show up and profess simple concern, as ‘adults in the room,’ but after listening to them, it’s clear they’re rationalizing a nefarious cause (e.g., advancing a self-dealer’s plan, or shutting down a discussion).

Scoundrels. Special-interest men want to win, and that means bending public policy to their own ends. Closed-government types want to control public policy without public consent. In both cases, they pervert public life. They create a corrupted, degenerate form of government.

When faced with a difficult challenge, and when smearing challengers is too much even for principals, operatives, and catspaws, they’ll turn to scoundrels. The Oxford American Dictionary offers a plentiful list of synonyms that describe the type (e.g., rogue, rascal, good-for-nothing, reprobate, unprincipled person; cheat, swindler, fraudster, trickster, charlatan; informal villain, beast, son of a bitch, SOB, rat, louse, cur, hound, skunk, heel, snake, snake in the grass, wretch, scumbag, bad egg, stinker).

Scoundrels will say anything to aid a special-interest or closed-government cause, while the principals, operatives, and catspaws delight from a distance. (These main types know what’s happening, hoping it will benefit them, yet hoping it won’t be identified back to them.)

In all of this, however, the overwhelming majority of ordinary residents are normal & well-adjusted. It’s a only few, entitled and avaricious, or entitled and autocratic, who beset and bedevil a community.

NASA Simulation’s Plunge Into the Whitewater School District’s Central Office a Black Hole:

City, Daily Bread, Local Government, School District, Special Interests

Daily Bread for 3.4.24: Two Quick Points on Local Government, Special Interests, Etc.

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 Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny during the day, and rainy this evening, with a high of 64. Sunrise is 6:22 and sunset 5:49 for 11h 26m 33s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 39.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

There will be Election Inspector Training today in Whitewater at 2:30 PM and 4:30 PM. Whitewater’s Lakes Advisory Committee meets at 5 PM, and the Equal Opportunities Commission also meets at 5 PM.

On this day in 1776, the Continental Army fortifies Dorchester Heights with cannon, leading the British troops to abandon the Siege of Boston.

Two quick reminders on local government, special interests, etc.:

First, the closer you look, the less you see. Stand back a bit, and what seems large is only one part of a panorama.  

Second, a good way to measure the strength of a position (considering its quality of being strong, its merit, and its desirability) is to ask: would one trade that position for another one?  

Dangerous Winds and Deep Snow Ensnarl California: 

Business, CDA, City, Conflicts of Interest, Daily Bread, Development, Local Government, Special Interests

Daily Bread for 2.1.24: Private Company, Public Company, Public Agency

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 Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 47. Sunrise is 7:08 and sunset 5:08 for 9h 59m 35s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 63.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Ethics Committee meets at 5 PM. 

On this day in 1942, Voice of America, the official external radio and television service of the United States government, begins broadcasting with programs aimed at areas controlled by the Axis powers.

There’s a difference between a private company, a public company, and a public agency. Ordinary people understand this difference, but special interests conflate these three different arrangements to maximize their influence over wholly public agencies. 

First the distinctions, with help from Matt Levine’s description of Elon Musk’s influence on private companies as against public companies. A private company is held individually or by shareholders with shares that do not trade on a public exchange. A public company is a private enterprise with shares that do trade on a public exchange (e.g., the New York Stock Exchange). Levine writes of Musk’s considerable leeway with a purely private company like SpaceX:

At all but one of his companies, he could stroll into the boardroom, throw a big bag of ketamine down onto the table, and say “I need the company to spend $50 million to build a giant golden statue of me riding a rocket,”1 and

  1. the board would be like “yes definitely let’s do it,”

  2. the board members themselves probably are, or represent, big shareholders of the company, and as shareholders they would happily go along with the statue plan to keep Musk happy and dedicated to their company,

  3. the other shareholders, the ones without board seats, are probably even bigger Musk fans, and are probably working on their own Musk statues in their garages anyway, so they’ll be fine with the company spending their money on a corporate gold statue, and

  4. nobody else really has any standing to complain.

And so in fact when Musk went to SpaceX and asked to borrow $1 billion until payday so that he could buy Twitter Inc., the board was like “here’s the check, we’ve left the amount blank, take whatever you need.” And, look, was there a Wall Street Journal article saying “hey that’s weird”? There was; it was weird. Did anything come of that? No. SpaceX could just do that: Musk controls SpaceX, the board loves him, the shareholders love him, nobody in a position to complain has any complaints, and everybody else is in no position to

SpaceX is a bigger version of many private companies: these companies may have one or more owners, and those owners may be shareholders, but those shares are not available for ready trading by the general public. These owners have considerable leeway. 

By contrast, a public company is also a private enterprise, but it offers shares on a public market to which the general public has access during trading hours. Trading on public markets comes with public — governmental — rules & regulations. (There’s a Securities and Exchange Commission, after all.) Levine explains how rules for a public company like Tesla limit Musk:

Tesla is a public company, which means that, even if 99% of shareholders love him, if 1% of shareholders don’t, they can sue.3 They can say: “Look, the board has a fiduciary duty to manage the company on behalf of all shareholders. Giving Musk a giant golden statue of himself is not necessary, or a good business decision, or fair to the shareholders; it’s just the controlling shareholder fulfilling his own whims with corporate money, and an ineffective board of directors giving him whatever he wants. He should have to give it back.” And they will go to court, and the shareholders will make those arguments, and the board will say — accurately! — “no you see giving him this giant golden statue is necessary for us to get more of his incredibly valuable time and attention,” and that will sound bad in court. And then a judge will get to decide whether the deal was fair to shareholders or not, and if it was not, the judge can make Musk pay the company back. Even if the board, and 99% of the shareholders, want him to keep it!

Levine’s description of Musk ends here, understandably, because Levine is writing about Musk’s role in private and public companies. An analysis of these companies is distinct — as Levine knows intuitively — from public agencies and governmental bodies. 

Special interests, however, don’t see it that way: they look at public bodies (a town council, a school board, or a community development agency) and expect that they can manipulate and control that public institution like a private company. They see a public body as another of their private possessions. 

No, and no again: formed only by statutes and ordinances, maintained only under statutes, ordinances, and publicly-adopted policies, these councils, boards, and agencies are public from alpha to omega. 

Special interest men in Whitewater take public bodies and illegitimately and wrongfully refashion them through catspaws into versions of private companies. In this way, they place their hands around a public agency and squeeze until it does their private bidding.  

Which appointed officials come along matters less to the health of this community than that special interests meet their match from among residents until attrition and exhaustion take their toll on that scheming faction. 

What’s in the Night Sky February 2024: 

Catspaw, CDA, City, Common Council, Conflicts of Interest, Council Leadership, Daily Bread, Disinformation, Foul Pursuits, Hubris, Local Government, Low Standards, Nepotism, Regulatory Capture, Self-Dealing, Special Interests, Sycophancy, Tantrums, Toadies, Unfit

Daily Bread for 10.1.23: The Shamelessness of the Special-Interest Men

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 Good morning. Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 84. Sunrise is 6:52AM and sunset 6:35 PM for 11h 42m 48s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 93.3% of its visible disk illuminated. On this day in 331 BC, Alexander the Great defeats Darius III of Persia in the…

Catspaw, CDA, City, Common Council, Conflicts of Interest, Council Leadership, Daily Bread, Disinformation, Foul Pursuits, Hubris, Local Government, Low Standards, Nepotism, Newspapers, Press, Regulatory Capture, Self-Dealing, Special Interests, Sycophancy, Tantrums, Unfit

Daily Bread for 9.30.23: Fierce or Bust

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 Good morning. Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 82. Sunrise is 6:51AM and sunset 6:31 PM for 11h 45m 41s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 98.2% of its visible disk illuminated. On this day in 1954, the U.S. Navy submarine USS Nautilus is commissioned as the world’s first…

Bad Ideas, CDA, City, Daily Bread, Housing, Hubris, Regulatory Capture, Special Interests

Daily Bread for 6.14.23: The Proposal to Use Whitewater’s $1.9 Million Single-Family Housing Fund to Subsidize Landlords and Non-Occupant Investors

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Good morning. Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with a chance of late afternoon showers, and a high of 78. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:34 PM for 15h 19m 07s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 13.9% of its visible disk illuminated.   The city and school district’s Aquatic…

Business, Common Council, Culture, Daily Bread, Entitlement, Freedom of Speech, Lobbyists, Local Government, Populists, Public Meetings, Regulatory Capture, Special Interests

Daily Bread for 2.24.23 More Convenient than a Cat’s Meows from the Rafters

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Good morning. Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 23. Sunrise is 6:37 AM and sunset 5:38 PM for 11h 01m 24s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 22.8% of its visible disk illuminated.  On this day in 1803, in Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court of the United States establishes the…

City, Daily Bread, Special Interests, University, UW System

Daily Bread for 11.30.22: The Diligence Required for the UW-Whitewater Chancellor Search

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Good morning. Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 29. Sunrise is 7:05 AM and sunset 4:22 PM for 9h 16m 28s of daytime. The moon is in its first quarter with 50.1% of its visible disk illuminated. On this day in 1941, the SS-Einsatzgruppen round up 11,000 Jews from the Riga Ghetto…

Business, CDA, City, Conflicts of Interest, Daily Bread, Ethics, Michels, Regulatory Capture, Special Interests

Daily Bread for 10.10.22: He Won’t Divest — He’ll Only Say He Has

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Good morning. Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 67. Sunrise is 7:03 AM and sunset 6:19 PM for 11h 16m 22s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 99.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets at 6 PM.  On this day in 1492, the crew of Christopher…

Babbittry, Bad Ideas, Blogging, Boosterism, City, Confidence Schemes, Coronavirus, Culture, Local Government, Mendacity, Politics, School District, Special Interests, Whitewater's Local Politics 2021

Whitewater’s Local Politics 2021: Marketing

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This is the ninth in a series on Whitewater’s local politics of 2021. Through all the difficult events of the last two decades (a Great Recession, an opioid epidemic, economic stagnation, creeping nativism, a pandemic, a pandemic recession), Old Whitewater has responded with the same question: how can we market the town to others? If…

Bad Ideas, Corporate Welfare, Development, Foxconn, Marketing, Mendacity, Public Relations, Scott Walker, Special Interests, State Capitalism, State Government, WEDC, WISGOP, YMBFKM

Foxconn’s Venture Capital Fund

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Bruce Murphy has a solid assessment of Foxconn’s much-touted (by Foxconn) venture capital fund in About That Foxconn Venture Capital Fund. It’s well worth reading in full. A few key points: Unfulfilled: Louis Woo of Foxconn had promised this venture fund for startup companies would naturally connect to Foxconn’s innovation centers in Eau Claire, Green Bay…