Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 5:44 AM and sunset is 8:18 PM, for 14h 33m 48s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 39.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred sixty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1588, the English defeat the Spanish Armada in the Battle of Gravelines. On this day in 1863, the 13th Wisconsin Infantry fights in a skirmish at Fort Donelson, Tennessee.
Recommended for reading in full —
Annie Lowrey assesses the economics of the Wisconsin’s latest corporate handout in Foxconned:
….tax incentives tend to sap state coffers without necessarily generating good jobs or creating positive spillovers in the regional economy—both things that would boost a state’s tax revenues and thus help justify the investment. “Incentives are still far too broadly provided to many firms that do not pay high wages, do not provide many jobs, and are unlikely to have research spin-offs,” argues Timothy J. Bartik of the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, a labor-market research organization, in a major analysis of such state and local tax breaks. “Too many incentives excessively sacrifice the long-term tax base of state and local economies. Too many incentives are refundable and without real budget limits. States devote relatively few resources to incentives that are services, such as customized job training.”
Plus, states rarely seem to consider whether the money they lavish on corporations might be better spent elsewhere—on public goods like bridges, say, or educational initiatives for their workforces. “If offering more tax incentives requires spending less on public education, congestion-relieving infrastructure projects, workforce development, police and fire protection, or high technology initiatives at public universities, the overall impact on a state’s economy could actually be negative,” argues the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonprofit research group. “While the long-term economic benefits of education and infrastructure investments may not be as flashy as incentive-backed ribbon-cutting ceremonies, these investments are even more fundamental to any successful economy.”
All of these things might be true of the Foxconn deal—and one way or another, 3,000 or 13,000 jobs does not a manufacturing renaissance make. If it even happens: Foxconn made a splashy and lavishly praised promise to build a new high-tech factory in central Pennsylvania a few years ago. It never followed through.
Molly Beck reports that a pending Bill significantly rolls back environmental rules for Foxconn:
Despite $3 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies, technology giant Foxconn would be given wide latitude to bypass state environmental regulations in building and operating its 1,000-acre electronics manufacturing plant in southeastern Wisconsin under a proposal from Gov. Scott Walker.
Walker unveiled the sprawling bill Friday as he called lawmakers to convene a special legislative session to pass the measure aimed at speeding up construction of Foxconn’s planned liquid-crystal display panel factory.
The bill lawmakers will consider as early as Tuesday allows the company to move or change the course of streams, build man-made bodies of water that connect with natural waterways and discharge materials in state wetlands without authorization from the state Department of Natural Resources. It exempts the company from being subject to an environmental impact statement.
Richard Engel reports that the Russian Kaspersky Lab faces new scrutiny, suspicion:
Much of Thursday’s hearing was spent getting at the bigger question: Why is the Russian president so fixated on the Magnitsky Act?
There are two reasons, according to Browder:
The first is purely financial. Browder believes Putin is the richest man in the world, with an assortment of assets worth what Browder estimates to be $200 billion at his disposal, but those assets are “held all over the world” including in America. When the accounts of Putin’s intermediaries are frozen because of the law, that is in effect, freezing some of Putin’s cash flow as well.
The second is that the banking sanctions imposed by the law devalue Putin’s promises, and so decrease his power. Putin gets his intermediaries to “arrest, kidnap, torture and kill” by promising absolute impunity, Browder said. But the law’s sanctions create a tangible consequence. Not only do the sanctions affect violators vis-a-vis their U.S. dealings, but, internationally, other banks abide by a sanctions list put out by the Treasury Department that includes those found to have violated the Magnitsky Act, Browder explained to lawmakers. “As a result, you basically become a financial pariah,” he said.
“This is a war of ideology between rule of law and criminality,” Browder also told the senators. “And if we allow all the corrupt money to come here, then it’s going to corrupt us until we end up like them.”
BBC Earth shows how Whales, Sharks, Dolphins and Sea Lions snack on sardines:
The Foxconn deal has an unmistakable whiff of WEDC about it. WEDC, as you have written eloquently about, was essentially a Walker-doner giveaway, run by hacks with no concept of how to assure they were getting anything for our bux. They also “made room” for big biz to ignore environmental reality.
I noted, with interest, that Ashley Furniture, who got gubernatorial dispensation to move a creek and build in a wetland, flooded out last week. Wetlands flood, every now and again. Who would have thought? I imagine their application for flood-relief money is in the mail, as I rant.
Foxconn has a bit of an unsavory rep, having driven 18 of their Chinese employees to attempt suicide on the factory grounds, 14 of them successfully. They now have suicide barriers along the edge of the factory roofs. They have teased big deals in other places, only to back out.
Everything about this smells of a hustle, and Walker has a habit of being pretty easy to hustle. 20,000,000 square feet of factory is 450 acres under a roof. That is several times the size of the pentagon. Foxconn has bandied about estimates of employee numbers ranging from 1000-55,000. Walker has rushed to gift them with the equivalent of a year of WI roadbuilding and the equivalent of a year of combined UW and prison funding. None of what Foxconn is planning to do seems real to me.
I’ll be surprised if it all happens.
Thanks much for these comments, and your kind words. Foxconn’s quite the corporate welfare project. In the midst of so much else happening nationally, here so close at hand is an example of so much that’s wrong with economic policy making: the grandiose claims, the high public costs for a private few, the location of these projects in the districts of the most powerful lawmakers.
Of all the Congressional districts in America – which is to say of all the places in America – it’s the Republican Speaker of the House whose district gets the project. One might never have been naive enough to think that a Democratic district would be the choice, but even within the GOP, it seems that some Republican districts are more equal than others.
I much agree that this project seems unlikely to pan out as advertised, in large part because the product claims are so grand (and as you helpfully note) the producer has so dubious a track record.
There’s a lot to sort out (these are eventful times): the national political scene as we find it, the slow degeneration of a our national and local politics that led to this present scene, the actions of a foreign dictatorship to intervene in our politics to undermine our domestic process, that dictatorship’s selection of particular buffoons and bigots to most effectively degrade America being principal topics.
One can guess that I’m as far from a Marxist as one could go, and yet I am reminded of the Marxist conviction that few significant things (if any) happen by accident.
Easily-swallowed claims of the Foxconn sort are surely no accident. A people less susceptible of Trump’s false claims, the false claims of Putin & his trolls, and the tiny lies and deceptions of a thousand small town hacks before them would not be so quick to see all this as The Next Big Thing.