FREE WHITEWATER

Bad Ideas, CDA, Corporate Welfare, Foxconn, Government Spending, State Capitalism, State Government, WEDC, Wisconsin

Foxconn: Behind Those Headlines

by  •  •  Comments

One reads that today Foxconn is promising a less advanced facility in Wisconsin by 2020, and today’s promise has captured a few headlines.

The truth – even if Foxconn follows through on this latest promise – is an embarrassing retreat, as Bloomberg’s Tim Culpan observes:

Sounds like it’s more than a year late, and well below scale. Foxconn taking THREE years to create 1,500 jobs is a glacial pace for them. Long term target was 13,000, with ~2,000 by end 2019.

Meanwhile, even over much smaller commitments, Foxconn has been silent for months:

In late August, UW-Madison announced a partnership with Foxconn Technology Group that Chancellor Rebecca Blank said would be the largest research partnership in the university’s history.

But more than six months later, it’s hard to tell what kind of progress has been made on the deal.

Foxconn representatives did not answer a list of questions related to their partnership with Wisconsin’s flagship university, instead providing a statement that said the Taiwanese electronics maker is proud of its partnership with UW-Madison.

Via Kelly Meyerhofer, Six months after $100M partnership announcement, UW-Madison and Foxconn mum on details.

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, and Foxconn: Evidence of Bad Policy Judgment.

CDA, Economy, Employment, Government Spending, Local Government

Non-College Men in the Labor Market

by  •  •  Comments

Adam Harris asks Where Have All the Men Without College Degrees Gone?
(“Economists are trying to understand the steady decline of non-college-educated men in the labor market”):

In the late 1960s, almost all prime-working-age men, typically defined as 25 to 54, worked—nearly 95 percent. That figure had dipped to 85 percent by 2015—a decline most acutely felt among men without college degrees. The trend of men dropping out of the labor force, particularly non-college-educated men, has been building for more than six decades. It has been a slow withdrawal, but a steady one—a flow that began with a sharp decline in opportunities for men who dropped out of high school, and grew to include those who earned a diploma but not a degree.

Economists have been working to understand the roots of the decline, and have come up with a cadre of theories: Perhaps it’s a case of insufficient wages for jobs that don’t require a degree; or maybe rising incarceration rates are the real culprit (people with criminal records have a harder time getting jobs); or it could be that more jobs that did not require a degree in the past do now.

A recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that maybe it’s all of the above and then some—a complex combination of low wages for non-college-degreed jobs; incarceration rates, which are higher among men without degrees; and a sharp decline in marriage rates among less educated men, which may remove an economic incentive to work—all wrapped up into a slowly rolling ball that’s knocking more and more men out of the workforce. Sure, these issues are affecting college-educated men as well, but each of them is felt more acutely by those without degrees.

Whatever the cause, it is reasonable to conclude that a government policy that provides publicly-funded relocation incentives (money, land, etc.) for businesses using a non-college labor force is economically suspect.

A plan like that is simply doubling one’s efforts on a part of the economy from which employers are walking away (perhaps in favor of automation), and for which there are fewer good-paying opportunities and long-term prospects.

The price of enticing workers to stay in publicly-subsidized industries (often so that development gurus can claim another supposed short-term success) is a long-term dead-end for workers.  A memorandum of understanding to subsidize a business like that would memorialize nothing so much as a lack of understanding.

 

 

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 3.18.19

by  •  •  Comments

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-four.  Sunrise is 7:00 AM and sunset 7:05 PM, for 12h 05m 01s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 89.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM, and the Whitewater School Board’s open session tonight begins at 7 PM.

On this day in 1953, Braves Move to Milwaukee: “the Braves baseball team announced that they were moving from Boston to Milwaukee.”

Recommended for reading in full:

David Leonhardt writes It Isn’t Complicated: Trump Encourages Violence:

He has talked about “Second Amendment people” preventing the appointment of liberal judges. He’s encouraged police officers to bang suspects’ heads against car roofs. He has suggested his supporters “knock the hell” out of hecklers. At a rally shortly before 2018 Election Day, he went on a similar riff about Bikers for Trump and the military.

I’m well aware of the various see-no-evil attempts to excuse this behavior: That’s just how he talks. Don’t take him literally. Other Republicans are keeping him in check. His speeches and tweets don’t really matter.

But they do matter. The president’s continued encouragement of violence — and of white nationalism — is part of the reason that white-nationalist violence is increasing. Funny how that works.

Noah Lanard writes Trump and His Allies Have Lost the Public Debate Over Immigration (“Over the decades, Americans have grown steadily more supportive of immigration”):

Twenty-five years ago, Democrats and Republicans felt the same way about immigrants: The Pew Research Center found that nearly two-thirds of both parties agreed they were a burden. Immigration critics were confident that those numbers would increase as a backlash to rising immigration took hold among native-born Americans. Instead, the opposite happened. By the time Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign, the share of Democrats and independents who said immigrants strengthen America had nearly doubled, while Republican opinion on the question had barely budged.

And under Trump, anti-immigrant sentiment has fallen even further as the president’s rhetoric about immigrants alienates large swaths of the public. According to a Pew poll from January, 55 percent of Republicans—8 percent fewer than in May 2015—and a record-low 13 percent of Democrats believe that immigrants burden the United States by taking jobs, housing, and health care from native-born Americans. And according to Gallup surveys, 67 percent of Americans now say immigration should be increased or kept at its present level, the highest number since Gallup began asking the question in 1965.

The United States is in the midst of a two-decade-long shift in favor of immigration, and it is only accelerating under Trump. For all the nativist movement’s efforts over the decades to rein in immigration, the chances of preserving a white majority are effectively gone.

A Chicken Egg In a Chicken Egg in a Chicken…

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 3.17.19

by  •  •  Comments

Good morning.

St. Patrick’s Day in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-three.  Sunrise is 7:01 AM and sunset 7:04 PM, for 12h 02m 06s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 83.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

On this day in 1941, General Mitchell Field gets its name: “On this date Milwaukee’s airport was named to honor the city’s famous air-power pioneer, General William Mitchell.”

Recommended for reading in full:

Guy Boulton reports Study cited in Wisconsin debate on expanding Medicaid and taking federal money called ‘garbage’:

Lost in the ongoing debate over whether Wisconsin should expand eligibility for Medicaid — and accept roughly $184.9 million a year in federal dollars for doing so — is one small detail:

Former Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican-controlled legislature already expanded the Medicaid program.

They just didn’t take the federal money available to states to offset much of the cost.

Wisconsin is the only state in the country that expanded eligibility for its Medicaid program — the change made in 2014 covered 147,000 adults without dependent children as of January — while not accepting the federal money available to states through the Affordable Care Act.

….

Republicans in the Legislature — whose votes Evers would need — have largely stood firm in their opposition. And now legislators are citing a study that contends expanding the program would shift $1.1 billion in costs to private health plans.

The study — released last month by Republican lawmakers at a news conference at the state Capitol — was by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty and the Center for Research On the Wisconsin Economy, or CROWE, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Economists and policy analysts quickly criticized the study for what they contend is a lengthy list of flaws, with one describing it as “baloney.”

“My real concern is they are trying to affect policy with such garbage work,” said Tim Classen, a professor of economics at Loyola University in Chicago.

The authors of the study — Will Flanders at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty and Noah Williams, an economics professor at UW-Madison — stand by the study and its conclusions.

….

Critics of the study done by Flanders and Williams also contend that it did not account for the fact that Wisconsin already partially expanded Medicaid.

“The issue that really is not addressed for me is Wisconsin’s expansion has sort of already happened,” said Laura Dague, an economist and associate professor of health policy at Texas A&M University. “The application of these numbers to the Wisconsin context is pretty questionable.”

Basically, the study comes up with a national average of the purported cost shift to private health plans from a broad group — adults with incomes up to 138 percent of the poverty threshold. It then applies that average to a subset of that group — those with incomes between 100 percent and 138 percent of the threshold.

The study’s critics contend that isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison.

(The WISGOP, especially, has found researchers – like Williams who know better – willing to do low-quality work on its behalf.)

Library Holds Treasured Irish History:

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 3.16.19

by  •  •  Comments

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-two.  Sunrise is 7:03 AM and sunset 7:02 PM, for 11h 59m 09s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 72.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

On this day in 1925, Robert Hutchings Goddard achieves a breakthrough in rocketry:

Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled (gasoline and liquid oxygen) rocket on March 16, 1926, in Auburn, Massachusetts. Present at the launch were his crew chief Henry Sachs, Esther Goddard, and Percy Roope, who was Clark’s assistant professor in the physics department. Goddard’s diary entry of the event was notable for its understatement:

March 16. Went to Auburn with S[achs] in am. E[sther] and Mr. Roope came out at 1 p.m. Tried rocket at 2.30. It rose 41 feet & went 184 feet, in 2.5 secs., after the lower half of the nozzle burned off. Brought materials to lab. …[14]:143

His diary entry the next day elaborated:

March 17, 1926. The first flight with a rocket using liquid propellants was made yesterday at Aunt Effie’s farm in Auburn. … Even though the release was pulled, the rocket did not rise at first, but the flame came out, and there was a steady roar. After a number of seconds it rose, slowly until it cleared the frame, and then at express train speed, curving over to the left, and striking the ice and snow, still going at a rapid rate.[14]:143

Recommended for reading in full:

Michael Gerson asks How can you defend a president who is a danger to democracy?:

A friend just returned from some time with a group of wealthy conservative donors. “They were ambivalent about Donald Trump two years ago,” he said. “Now they are vociferously pro-Trump. There’s a psychological study to be done here.”

Those in and around Republican politics have seen this dynamic at work. In spite of past misgivings, most GOP partisans seem to have accepted the idea that President Trump is their guy in the broader culture/political war.

….

So, in the 2018 midterm elections, Trump tried to nationalize the election on issues that motivate his party — appealing to those voters who are excited by exclusion. And GOP partisans responded by turning out in large numbers. But it was not nearly enough to counteract greater public fears.

In other words, the politics of partisan mobilization works only if you don’t scare the rest of America to death. Republicans have come to the defense of a man who is incapable of widening his appeal. And this has opened up a reality gap between the GOP and the rest of our political culture. The rift between Republican perceptions of the president and the view of the broader public has grown into a chasm. This is now the main political context of the 2020 campaign.

Releasing African Penguins:

Agriculture, Bad Ideas, CDA, Corporate Welfare, Economics, Economy, Free Markets, Gov. Walker, Local Government, State Capitalism, Trade, Trump, WEDC

How Walker and Trump Destroyed Dairies in America’s Dairyland

by  •  •  Comments

One has heard so much these last eight years about how Wisconsin has been ‘open for business,’ and for Walker and the WEDC that has meant countless subsidies and tax breaks for conservatives’ preferred businesses. Walker was never a free-market man; his whole approach rested on state capitalism (government funding some producers) and crony capitalism (government funding producers who are pals).

Bruce Thompson explains how How Walker, Trump Hurt Dairy Industry (“Their policies helped fuel a dairy crisis”):

Given declining demand for milk, one might expect that the last thing state government would decide to do is encourage more milk production. Yet, on March 13, 2012, Governor Scott Walker announced a new program called Grow Wisconsin Dairy 30×20. His accompanying news release explained the name came from the intention to “achieve an annual milk production of 30 billion pounds by 2020.” The release went on to say, “The goal of the Grow Wisconsin Dairy 30×20 program is to improve the long-term viability of Wisconsin’s dairy industry through services … to meet the growing demand of the marketplace.”

Grow Wisconsin Dairy 30×20 quickly achieved its goal. Rather than waiting until 2020, Wisconsin milk production passed 30 billion pounds in 2016.

….

This odd misdiagnosis is reflected in a 2012 op ed by Ben Brancel, at that time Wisconsin’s secretary of agriculture:

Production grew less than 1 percent in 2011 to 26.1 billion pounds. Good, but not good enough to keep us on pace to meet the demands of the state’s growing processing industry and customers around the world. Wisconsin dairy farmers produce approximately 90 percent of the milk volume needed by the state’s dairy processors. We need it to be 100 percent.

This suggests that Walker and his administration were influenced less by farmers than by “the state’s growing processing industry.” Unfortunately, the demand for milk did not grow along with increased production.

A second blow to dairy farmers came more recently as the result of President Trump’s tariff war against America’s trading partners. This war was triggered by the Trump administration’s series of tariffs on imports of certain products from America’s trading partners. Several countries responded by imposing retaliatory tariffs on selected American products, including agricultural.

Rather than allow market conditions to set supply and demand through the price system, Walker chose to boost supply to help processors and in doing do devastated the dairies that produce milk.   Trump came along and made dairies’ distress worse by rejecting free trade in favor of tariffs and a trade war.

Small-town, pro-business notables have adopted this same approach, directing local development agencies to waste hundreds of thousands – and in Whitewater over the years millions – of dollars for their pet projects and crackpot ‘capital catalyst’ ideas. For it all, they’ve done nothing to advance individual and household incomes, and family poverty in Whitewater has increased during their control of the Whitewater Community Development Authority.  See A Candid Admission from the Whitewater CDA, Reported Family Poverty in Whitewater Increased Over the Last Decade, and Private Businesses Craving Public Money.

Walker and Trump, meanwhile, have harmed the very dairies on which America’s Dairyland depends.

Cats, Science/Nature

The Genetic Secrets of Celebrity Cat Lil Bub

by  •  •  Comments

 

View this post on Instagram

 

BUB sees stuff that we don’t. #lilbub #scienceandmagic #goodjobbub

A post shared by Lil BUB (@iamlilbub) on

Karin Bruillard reports Scientists have finally discovered what makes celebrity cat Lil Bub so ‘magical’:

Lil Bub is a kitten-size cat with 2 million Instagram followers, a talk show, a stage production, an album and a book. The new study reveals the weird DNA behind what is often described as her magical appeal.

….

It helps to know what Lil Bub looks like to understand why they did this [examined her DNA]. The cat has a short snout, enormous green eyes and a pink tongue that hangs from her stunted jaw like an errant piece of bubble gum. She never developed teeth, and she stopped growing around four pounds. Each of her paws boasts an extra toe, for a total of 22. (Six on the front paws, five on the back.)

….

First, they compared her genome with that of a reference cat, then they focused on genes that control bodily functions. Finally, they asked a colleague who specializes in bone disorders which of those are known to cause osteopetrosis.

That led them to a mutation in a gene called RANK/TNFRSF11A, which has been found in about 15 humans and one mouse — all of whom, the researchers said, share physical similarities with Lil Bub. In X-rays, their bones look deformed and bright white, with little to no marrow cavity. The mouse, like Lil Bub, also was missing teeth, because they can’t erupt through bone that hardens too quickly. (Bub can eat just fine, and she runs and jumps thanks to a pulsed electromagnetic field therapy.)

 

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 3.15.19

by  •  •  Comments

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be breezy with a high of forty.  Sunrise is 7:05 AM and sunset 7:01 PM, for 11h 56m 14s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 61.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

It’s the Ides of March.

 

Recommended for reading in full:

Rosalind S. Helderman, Tom Hamburger, and Ellen Nakashima report Documents shed light on Russian hacking of Democratic Party leaders:

Documents unsealed Thursday in a lawsuit have shed new light on how hackers breached Democratic Party email accounts before the 2016 election.

The documents include a forensic analysis by a former top official in the FBI’s cybercrime division, which concluded that a Web server company owned by a Russian Internet entrepreneur was used by Russian operatives to hack Democratic Party leaders.

The Russian businessman, Aleksej Gubarev, has denied involvement in the hack, and his lawyers argued for months that the forensic analysis should be kept under seal and hidden from public view.

The analysis was completed as part of a federal lawsuit Gubarev filed in Florida against BuzzFeed, the online news outlet. Gubarev argued BuzzFeed defamed him by publishing a dossier written by former British spy Christopher Steele. The dossier alleged that hackers used servers from two of Gubarev’s companies — Webzilla and its parent company XBT Holding.

The 35-page Steele dossier also alleged that Gubarev played a “significant” role in the hacking operation “under duress” from the Russian security agency FSB. Gubarev has also denied that allegation — and the new forensic analysis, conducted by an expert paid by BuzzFeed as part of the suit, provides no evidence to support the claim that Gubarev was involved.

The Committee to Investigate Russia writes Wanted Russian “Reported” From Mar-a-Lago:

Sergey Danilochkin, a Russian real estate investor charged with tax fraud in connection with the organized crime figures behind the Magnitsky case, now lives in South Florida and attended a January 2018 fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, during which he made a video bragging about his inside access to the property and noting the surprising number of Russian-speakers in attendance.

Miami Herald:

While the guests sipped cocktails and studied photos of African wildlife, Danilochkin, who is also an aspiring journalist, filmed the bustling ballroom on a smartphone and posted the footage on YouTube. Holding a flute of champagne and wearing a dark suit, the Russian émigré addressed the camera in his native tongue, alluding to the uncanny way Russians seem to turn up in the president’s orbit.

“The most interesting thing,” Danilochkin said, “is that we met a lot of people here who speak Russian.”

Ceratogyrus attonitifer – new horned baboon spider from Angola:

America, Babbittry, Culture

The Antidote to Boosterism

by  •  •  Comments

Bret Stephens offers Neal Armstrong as a worthy example in Apollo 11’s Forgotten Virtues (“Armstrong stayed humble, and human, in the era of relentless puffery and self-promotion”):

There’s a short scene near the end of “Apollo 11,” the thrilling new documentary about history’s greatest spaceflight, in which Mike Collins, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong make a TV broadcast on their way home from the moon.

“We’d like to give a special thanks to all those Americans who built the spacecraft, who did the construction, design, the tests, and put their heart and all their abilities into the [space]crafts,” says Armstrong. “To those people tonight we give a special thank you.”

The film cuts to a shot of thousands of technicians assembled in an immense hangar, beaming with pride. At the zenith of his fame, the hero proves his worth by honoring those to whom the glory is truly owed.

….

He stayed humble, and human, in the era of relentless puffery and self-promotion. This, too, feels as bygone as the Saturn V, the Right Stuff, and the “one small step”— and as missed.

Dr. Jonas Salk is another good example of humility from those who have achieved great things.  See For Your Consideration, Dr. Jonas Salk.

We find ourselves with too little modesty, too little humility, in small towns that should embrace these virtues as virtues.  Instead, one finds small-town special interests speaking and writing in a grandiose and flamboyant style:

The GWC is an action-oriented group committed to working with citizens, elected officials and policy makers to identify, craft and implement a pro-business agenda. The agenda advances the economic, education and social policies required to energize and secure the Whitewater area’s economic future, as well as protect Whitewater’s quality of life.

By working closely with the City of Whitewater, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Whitewater Unified School District and the local community, Whitewater can increase its visibility and become a beacon for business and leisure in the state of Wisconsin.

See The Middle Lane is a Dirt Road to Decay, Pt. 2.

Whitewater’s better future does not rest with local appeals to vanity and self-promotion, but to the long tradition of humble achievement in America and places beyond.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 3.14.19

by  •  •  Comments

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will see showers with a high of sixty-three.  Sunrise is 7:07 AM and sunset 7:00 PM, for 11h 53m 19s of daytime.  The moon is in its first quarter with 50.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

It’s Pi Day:

Pi Day is celebrated on March 14th (3/14) around the world. Pi is the symbol used in mathematics to represent a constant — the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — which is approximately 3.14159. Pi Day is an annual opportunity for math enthusiasts to recite the infinite digits of Pi, talk to their friends about math, and to eat Pie.

Recommended for reading in full:

Paul Rosenzweig writes Four Lessons From the Manafort Sentencing (“This is bad news for Trump, and good news for the system”):

Last week, many commentators were decrying the perceived lenity of Ellis’s sentence. Today Jackson offered a systemic correction. Given Manafort’s age and the severity of his crimes, seven and a half years seems about right. It’s actually on the high end for similar offenses. And given his age, Manafort may well die in jail, which cannot be a happy prospect for him.

….

Second, and more important for the American public, the New York authorities have made clear that they are willing to serve as a pardon insurance policy for America.

….

Thus, even were Trump to issue a full and complete pardon to Manafort for all the crimes he has committed, that move would not excuse Manafort from answering the New York State charges.

….

Third, the New York indictment is not good news for Trump, personally. The Manhattan prosecutor has brought charges of fraud against Manafort for falsely inflating the value of certain real-estate properties he owned for mortgage purposes.  Those allegations find a strong echo in the recent congressional testimony of the former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who said the president engaged in the exact same course of conduct in his personal capacity—inflating real-estate values to increase his net worth when it suited him, and then deflating those same values to avoid taxation.

….

And finally, as bad as this news is for Trump, it is likely even worse news for the Trump Organization—now also possibly in [Manhattan District Attorney] Vance’s crosshairs for real-estate shenanigans.

The Committee to Investigate Russia writes Manafort Lawyer Lies Outside Courthouse:

Paul Manafort‘s attorney Kevin Downing blatantly lied to the media as he stood at microphones outside the DC federal courthouse and announced, “Judge Jackson conceded that there was absolutely no evidence of Russian collusion in this case. So that makes two courts. Two courts have ruled no evidence of any collusion with any Russians.”

In fact, Judge Berman Jackson, made a point of telling the court the matter of collusion was not even under consideration in Manafort’s case. Her effort to prevent Downing from repeating the lie he told the first time around when he spoke to reporters outside the courthouse after Manafort’s Virginia sentencing hearing apparently failed.

Four Motorcycle Stories:

Bad Ideas, Business, CDA, City, Corporate Welfare, Economics, Economy, Foxconn, Gov. Walker, Government Spending, Innovation Center/Tech Park, Local Government, WEDC

Foxconn: Evidence of Bad Policy Judgment

by  •  • 2 Comments

From the moment then-Governor Walker signed the Foxconn deal, it was clear to national economists (from across the political spectrum) that it was a dubious idea. As the months wore on, one could find more – and detailed – critiques of the project.

FREE WHITEWATER has post after post addressing these sound critiques. The posts themselves aren’t what matters – the links contained within them to national-quality assessments are what matter.

A reasonable and diligent person would see that Foxconn was a sham venture — showy politics but shabby policy.

And yet, and yet, at the local level in places like Whitewater, both the Whitewater Community Development Authority and the Greater Whitewater Committee business league pushed Foxconn long after any reasonable person would have seen the implausibility of that project.  (In Whitewater, the Community Development Authority has been run – for years – by the same men who run that local business lobby.)

Indeed, on November 15, 2018 – after analyses published major publications made indisputable the unsoundness of Foxconn – local officials were still speaking as though it might succeed. From the Whitewater CDA meeting, November 15, 2018:

What Mark Johnson and I have talked about, and Mark’s the director of the Innovation Center here, is we’ve talked about, you know, really trying to establish some connections with Foxconn, see what they’re looking for in terms of, you know, actual product supply chain and innovation supply chain.

Because, as I’ve explained to some people, there’s certainly going to be suppliers that provide, you know, things that go into the products that Foxconn makes. You know, whether it’s glass, they’re going to build their own glass factory down there, whether its other things that go into the glass, it’s cutting these things into bigger display monitors. But Foxconn is also putting a lot of focus on what they are calling a development of an ecosystem of innovation, and they are really basing it on what they call a 5G, 8K platform. 5G talks about the speed of internet transmission, and 8K talks about the resolution of video quality. And 8K is very high resolution. The applications for that technology really are kind of endless and the significant ones like starting telemedicine to other high resolution things.

But what they’re doing is they’re trying to attract innovative, innovation talent, you know, from around the world, and domestically here, to start working on products that can advance sort of the need for their base core base product, that I think they also are really talking about really branching into developing some of those products and new uses themselves.

So, you know and every day I learn a little bit more about Foxconn.

The full video of the 11.15.18 Whitewater CDA meeting is available online.

The FW posts that precede this November 15th meeting – with links to national publications’ critiques – are highlighted in bold, below.

By the time of this meeting, the case against Foxconn was already overwhelming.

To think otherwise is a significant failure of policy judgment.

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, and Foxconn: The Roads to Nowhere.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 3.13.19

by  •  •  Comments

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of fifty-four.  Sunrise is 7:08 AM and sunset 6:59 PM, for 11h 50m 22s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 39.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

On this day in 1781, astronomer William Herschel’s observations of Uranus establish that celestial object as a planet:

Sir William Herschel observed Uranus on 13 March 1781 from the garden of his house at 19 New King Street in Bath, Somerset, England (now the Herschel Museum of Astronomy),[24] and initially reported it (on 26 April 1781) as a comet.[25] Herschel “engaged in a series of observations on the parallax of the fixed stars”,[26] using a telescope of his own design.

Recommended for reading in full:

  Charlie Sykes writes Why the Democrats Chose Milwaukee:

“No city in America has stronger ties to socialism than Milwaukee,” declared the executive director of Wisconsin’s GOP. “And with the rise of Bernie Sanders and the embrace of socialism by its newest leaders, the American left has come full circle. It’s only fitting the Democrats would come to Milwaukee.”

Well, yes. And no. Milwaukee has had three Socialist mayors: Emil Seidel (1910–12), Daniel W. Hoan (1916–40), and Frank Zeidler (1948–60). But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez they were not. Unglamorous municipal officials, they were stolid, competent, somewhat dour practitioners of what became known around here as “sewer socialism.” By modern standards, their policies were not particularly controversial or divisive. Among Hoan’s most radical innovations were public housing, harbor improvements, and a city bus system.

….

One Republican insider told me that a better gauge of the current state of play in Wisconsin was the Senate election in which Baldwin decisively defeated her Republican challenger, who ran on an unabashedly pro-Trump platform. Baldwin won Milwaukee County with 71.5 percent of the vote and Dane County with 77.7 percent. She won statewide by more than 10 points and a margin of more than 288,000 votes. If that race really does reflect the political landscape in Wisconsin (and Democrats seem to think that it does), Trump’s reelection is in deep trouble.

….

But perhaps the best point of comparison is, simply, 2016. Hillary Clinton famously neglected to visit Wisconsin, and ended up losing it by just 23,000 votes. Trump won rural, blue-collar counties, some of which had voted twice for Barack Obama, and won the Green Bay area by double digits. The key to that race, however, was Milwaukee County. Clinton got about 39,000 fewer votes there than Obama did four years earlier. She didn’t show up to ask for those votes, and she didn’t get them.

So the DNC’s decision to come to Milwaukee was less about “socialism” than it was about those votes, and a commitment to voters that they will show up this time.

  Opportunity’s last images from Mars: