Thread by @doctorow

In 2017, Donald Trump declared victory. Working with the far-right Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, he had brokered a deal to bring high-tech manufacturing jobs back to America, with a new, massive Foxconn plant that would anchor the new Wisconn Valley.

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Right away, there were three serious, obvious problems.

I. Foxconn are crooks. It's not just the Apple device factories where they drive workers to suicide, it's a long history of promising to build massive factories, absorbing billions in subsidies, and then bailing.

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It's a con they'd already pulled in Indonesia, Vietnam, Brazil and in Pennsylvania. The US heist happened only four years before the Wisconsin deal (which offered $4b in subsidies!) was signed.

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II. The plant made no sense. Foxconn promised that it would employ tens of thousands of American workers building massive LCDs. The world did not need massive LCDs. It had a glut of them. The price for cheap LCDs built by low-waged workers in the Pacific Rim was tumbling.

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III. There was already stuff where the plant was supposed to be built. Notably, there were family homes, places that had been owned by Wisconsinites for generations, real homesteads.

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In order for Foxconn to build its nonsensical plant and receive $4b in US public subsidies, these families would have to be expropriated and their homes - their whole communities - literally bulldozed and dumped into landfills.

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The deal revealed - if there was any doubt - that Trump is a rube, a sucker, a fool. Foxconn played him and played Walker and the state of Wisconsin. They never planned to build an LCD plant. Indeed, they seem never to have planned to build ANYTHING.

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They wanted the free money as a subsidy for exploring what they might build, and they knew that the best way to get Wisconsin and the USA to subsidize this speculation was to tell risible lies about multibillion-dollar LCD factories that credulous US leaders would swallow.

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No news outlet has done more to chronicle the endless, absurd, idiotic Foxconn grift than @TheVerge, and while many writers there have worked on the story (like Bruce Murphy and James Vincent), @joshdzieza has been the most indefatigable chronicler of the Foxconn shitshow.

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Now, after reporting out piece after piece on the Foxconn deal, Dzieza has published a kind of master narrative that tells the whole story from beginning to end, piecing it all together and augmenting it with new insider dope:

theverge.com/21507966/foxco…

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Dzieza's masterpiece leaves no doubt that this was a titanic fraud, nor that it was incompetently negotiated by Wisconsin's local and state officials as well as the federal government.

Take the subsidies: to qualify for them, Foxconn had to meet various hiring targets.

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But those targets were easily gamed. So long as Foxconn had a certain number of workers on the books in December, it could count them as employed for the whole year, even if it laid them off in January.

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Which, of course, it did. Indeed, the way Foxconn uses human lives as conveniences not worthy of any consideration make it clear that the suicides at its Apple factories are not isolated incidents (and also constitute a stinging rebuke to Walker and Trump's union-bashing).

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To prop up its sham, Foxconn sent recruiters out to hold high-pressure job fairs where applicants were pressured to immediately accept job offers and tender their resignations at their current employers.

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Then they were strung along for months as they jobs they'd been promised didn't materialized, and, for many, those jobs did not ever materialize. Workers who DID get jobs hardly fared better, showered in racist abuse about their inferiority to Asian workers.

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They were asked to work in facilities without furniture, made to bring in their own pencils AND NETWORKING EQUIPMENT, made to buy new elevator carpets out of their own pockets to assuage the screaming rages of their managers, given impossible duties or none at all.

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At various stages, these workers were called in to brainstorm ideas for building something, anything, in the facilities that Foxconn had been given at firesale prices by the state of Wisconsin.

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Some ideas:

* A fish-farm that could absorb the subsidized water they'd been guaranteed for cooling the data-center they would never build

* An AI research lab

* A Wework clone

* A dairy exporter serving the Chinese market

* A federal tech contractor

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None of this bore fruit. The only time Foxconn turned a nickel was when they bought in-use office buildings with the intention of using them for some harebrained scheme but lost interest before they could evict the businesses tenanted there, and so earned some rent.

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Foxconn eventually laid off the bulk of its US workforce and hired Indian and Chinese tech-workers on H1B visas, whom it showered with even more abuse, backstopped by threats of deportation if any of them dared to complain.

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All along, Foxconn just told stupid lies that Wisconsin's business community gobbled up: Foxconn founder Terry Guo got fantastic praise for his $100m donation to the U Wisconsin system. None of that praise was revoked when he only delivered $700k of it.

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The Foxconn deal is a black hole that has sucked Wisconsin's productive economy through its event horizon. The company charged local businesses thousands of dollars to get signed up as suppliers, then stiffed them on their invoices.

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And the towns - like Mt Pleasant - that destroyed their residents' family homes to clear the way for Foxconn lost those taxpayers - and never got the promised tax payments that a Foxconn facility was supposed to deliver.

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Here's Dzieza's masterful summary: "Trump promised to bring back manufacturing... Into the gap between appearance and reality fell people’s jobs, homes, and livelihoods."

Trump calls the Foxconn plant "The Eighth Wonder of the World."

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In 2018, Wisconsin voters fired Scott Walker for being such a plute-sucking rube.

In 2020, they have the chance to fire Trump.

eof/