In Whitewater, there’s a top-notch think tank right-wing landlord’s business group that flacked Foxconn both privately and through that group’s sway over the Whitewater Community Development Authority. The group invited a state operative to spin Foxconn as a tech city of gold, and at the Whitewater CDA one could hear fantastic tales of high-tech wonders that Foxconn was sure to produce. These gentlemen could feel the magic, really they could…
Predictably, Foxconn’s simply a fiscal con, but perhaps the gentlemen of the Greater Whitewater Committee and the Whitewater CDA can grab themselves a robot-prepared cup of coffee at the airport:
Photo: Briggo. It’s automated, so spokesmodel-employees not included.
[Foxconn] known best for helping create the world’s most popular electronics devices predominantly in its Chinese factories, today announced a partnership with a Texas-based company called Briggo, which makes automated coffee dispensers the size of modest mall kiosks mostly for airports and corporate offices. The news was reported by the Milwaukee Business Times.
Foxconn will help the company manufacture its units in its Wisconsin LCD factory, which doesn’t exist yet — and thus produces no LCDs, or any other product for that matter — and which Foxconn has previously claimed it plans to use for a variety of manufacturing purposes.
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Via Foxconn’s first announced product for its Wisconsin factory is an airport coffee robot.
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, and Foxconn: Wrecking Ordinary Lives for Nothing.
It sure looks like Foxconn is having some indigestion over the whole Wisco-World deal, too. Terry Gao is gone. His upwind piss at the job of Taiwan President has predictably gone the way of most vanity runs by over-larded industrial/business titans. See Schultz, Howard, and Steyer, Tom, for some domestic exemplars. Louis Woo has now bailed from the project, too, for unspecified “personal reasons”. I think that is Mandarin for “spend more time with my family”.
It’s always been kind of hazy to me just how Foxconn was going to prosper in this whole deal. It was clear why Walker might, if all the pies came down from the skies, but how was it going to work for Foxconn? Foxconn clearly knew up front that they were never going to make 13,000 jobs, and the glass-supplier debacle shows that they never were going to build big displays here, either. The whole concept of building a huge factory in a high-wage area with a 10,000 mile-long supply chain is regarded as certifiably crazy by anyone at all familiar with what Foxconn builds. So why did they buy up a bunch of Potemkin innovation centers and enter into a bunch of agreements that they had no chance of making whole and would not get paid for until they did?
It makes no sense for Foxconn to go thru this whole expensive and (guaranteed to be) embarrassing ruse unless there was some sort of huge as-yet-unknown payoff downstream. I can see Walker being simultaneously desperate enuf and stupid enuf to guppy-in on the deal, but what was in it for Foxconn? That they (and Walker) were willing to engage in a conspiracy that had no possible outcome other than to smear them liberally with shit is an enigma.
Yes, indeed. It’s no surprise that Walker would spend any amount of public money to boost his chances (although billions weren’t enough). Yet, for Foxconn, this was one crazy insurance policy against something or crazy down payment for something…
It’s all one big giant swamp!