Wisconsin State Senator Jon Erpenbach reminds that people lost homes and land over the Foxconn proposal, and communities spent far over one-hundred millions on an idea that was – to any reasonable, discerning person – doomed to fail. Doomed to fail: dozens of analyses and warnings from across America, of which merely one is Tim Culpan’s Wisconsin Is Finally Facing the Reality of Foxconn’s Plans (“The economics of building display panels in the state would never work. Any agreement was mostly a political exercise”).
Each and every person – including Whitewater’s public officials, business lobbyists, and local reporters – who kept pushing Foxconn is either disqualifyingly ignorant or disconcertingly mendacious.
Now in Whitewater, the local private business lobby (the Greater Whitewater Committee) is enmeshed with the public Whitewater Community Development Authority (almost as though the public body were a private landlord’s plaything), and both have flacked Foxconn.
The public CDA and the private Greater Whitewater Committee (however conflicted in the way one imagines organizations in a small, one-mule southern town to be) have both pushed a ‘neighborhood preservation effort’ that seeks to preserve local single-family homes. Pushing single-family housing by stifling opportunities for new rental properties would seem to benefit the incumbent landlord who has a leading role in the Greater Whitewater Committee and the CDA, but it’s unlikely that residents in Whitewater are unfamiliar, generally, with others’ seeming motivations from self-interest and entitlement.
For all that concern about single-family homes in Whitewater, know this: these advocates of corporate welfare lifted not a finger, nor shed a single tear, for dozens of homeowners near the Foxconn site whose homes meant something to them.
There is no greatness, and never will be, for Whitewater or any city, in fantastic schemes of cronyism and corporate welfare like 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, and WISGOP Assembly Speaker Vos Hopes You’re Stupid.