Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of seventy-four. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 20m 25s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 51.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1816, troops arrive at Fort Crawford:
After the War of 1812, the United States Congress approved a plan to erect a chain of forts along the Fox-Wisconsin-Mississippi waterway. In 1816 Fort Crawford was erected on a mound behind the main village of Prairie du Chien. It was a four-sided enclosure made of squared logs, set horizontally. At the two opposing corners stood a blockhouse. Soldiers’ quarters formed the walls of the fort, faced the parade ground, and accommodated five companies. By the middle of the year, the 8th Infantry had established three posts on the east bank of the Mississippi: Fort Edwards, Fort Armstrong and Fort Crawford, the latter named for the Secretary of War. [Source: The History of Wisconsin, Volume 1, SHSW 1973, page 97]
Recommended for reading in full —
Adam Schell reports Stocks end lower, wiping out Dow’s gains for year after new Trump tariff threat:
The Dow erased its gains for the year Tuesday, finishing 287 points lower and extending a global stock sell-off triggered by President Donald Trump’s threat to levy billions of dollars more in tariffs on Chinese goods.
It’s the latest escalation in a dispute that Wall Street fears could develop into a full-blown trade war. Trump has directed the U.S. Trade Representative to prepare new tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese imports. The president accused Beijing of being unwilling to resolve the dispute over complaints it steals or pressures foreign companies to hand over technology. China’s Commerce Ministry criticized the White House action as blackmail and said Beijing was ready to retaliate.
The Dow Jones industrial average, after falling nearly 420 points at its low, closed down 287.26 points, or 1.2 percent, at 24,700, according to Bloomberg data. That means the blue-chip index has slipped below the level where It finished 2017 – 24,719.22. Roughly half of the Dow’s losses are due to two stocks, Boeing, which fell $13.61 a share, or 3.8 percent, and Caterpillar, which declined $5.39, or 3.6 percent.
Rick Barrett reports Tariffs squeeze Wisconsin automotive parts suppliers and could raise car prices:
“I am a fan of doing something to combat poor behavior from China, relative to intellectual property theft and other things they do to prop up their domestic industries … I just think this tariffs policy is a terrible, counterproductive way to get after it,” said Austin Ramirez, chief executive officer of Husco International, a Waukesha manufacturer of engine controls for the automotive industry.
In addition to its U.S. factories, Husco has plants in China and other countries. About half of the company’s business is in automotive components, and the other half is in components for off-highway equipment such as excavators and mining trucks.
Like most manufacturers, Husco’s supply chain crosses many borders.
“The biggest impact that these tariffs have is it puts us at a disadvantage to our global competitors” in Germany and Japan, Ramirez said.
“When a tariff structure like this is put in place, it adds to my costs, but they don’t have it in their costs. So they are automatically, overnight, 25 percent more competitive.”
(All that support over the years for the GOP, and money from Walker’s WEDC, and all Austin Ramierez got was this lousy trade war. Live by state intervention, perish by state intervention.)
Paul Farhi asks Propaganda or news: Should media publish government’s child-detention photos?:
Based on the photographic evidence, living conditions inside government-run detention centers for immigrant children separated from their parents in south Texas look reasonably orderly and clean.
But there’s a major catch: All of the photographs depicting life inside the facilities have been supplied by the government itself. There’s been no independent documentation; federal officials, citing the children’s privacy, have barred journalists from taking photographs or video when they’ve been permitted inside.
This has left news organizations with a quandary: Do they publish the handouts supplied by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) — which has an incentive to make its facilities look as humane and comfortable as possible — or do they reject the photos as essentially propaganda?
AJ Dellinger reports Scott Walker Finally Gave Foxconn Enough Handouts to Get the Company’s US Headquarters in Wisconsin:
Foxconn’s decision to set up shop in Wisconsin is a score for the state only achieved by completing favor after favor in order to woo the manufacturing giant. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and the majority-Republican state legislature agreed in 2016 to provide Foxconn with a $3 billion package of tax breaks and incentives if the company would build a plant in the state.
The original deal included $1.5 billion in state income tax credits for job creation, another $1.35 billion for capital investment, and $150 million for sales and use tax exemptions—all in exchange for 3,000 jobs. (Foxconn has claimed it could bring as many as 13,000 to the factory, but the company announced a $4 billion investment in automation earlier this year and bragged about replacing 60,000 factory workers with robots in 2016. That will likely keep a cap on just how many people it actually employs.)
Governor Walker has happily played up the 13,000 figure but even if Foxconn managed to hit that high ceiling, Wisconsin would still be paying out a massive amount to create those jobs. Per CNN, the state will pay between $15,000 and $19,000 per job per year in incentives, assuming 13,000 positions are created—well above the standard cost of $2,400 per job per year, according to a report from the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.
(The Wisconsin Foxconn project is economic development for confidence men and easy marks – it won’t work, and it dupes only the gullible or desperate.)
So, Can Anyone Try to Climb Everest?: