Before the election, Donald Trump
granted an interview to Charles Benson, a reporter with WTMJ in Milwaukee.
Trump obviously was treating the interview as a free campaign event, although
the well-respected Benson was not Maria Bartiromo or any of those other
sycophants on Fox News. He questioned the judgment of holding mass rallies
during the pandemic despite Trump’s own health officials advising against it.
Benson pressed Trump to explain why he didn’t support a “unified” approach to
combatting the pandemic, and Trump of course claimed that “no one could have
done better” than he. When Benson told him that his nonmask-wearing supporters
would listen to him if he personally advised that everyone wear a mask, Trump once
again played the medical quack selling snake oil, insisting that no one can
catch COVID-19 when they are “outside.”
Trump then attacked Nancy Pelosi
for failing to reach a compromise with Mitch McConnell for a stimulus package,
but Benson pushed back, pointing out that Senate Republicans were opposing any
deal over $500 billion; Trump of course erroneously claimed that he would “take
care of that problem in two minutes.” When asked if he could do more to address
racism in the country, Trump demurred, claiming that he didn’t think he could
“do much” about it; he suggested that minorities should just be “satisfied”
with all the jobs he has allegedly created for them.
Then Benson came to the real
reason for the interview: what had happened since Trump’s presence at a
“ground-breaking” event in June, 2018 with Terry Gou, the founder and CEO of
Taiwanese tech giant Foxconn, when Trump boasted of his “prowess” in bringing
thousands of new jobs to the state. Of
course there was a “catch”: significant state subsidies and massive tax breaks
based on job targets met by the company.
But as a prelude, ProPublica published a list of broken promises
of jobs that Trump had taken personal credit for “creating” just before and
after the 2016 election, promises that had three years to come to fruition
before the pandemic struck. The fact is that Trump himself is responsible for
almost none of the job growth that did occur in this country; it happened, as
it always does, through “free market” mechanisms. In fact, given his
mishandling of the pandemic, Trump is actually “better” at creating job losses.
So let’s take a look at a
sampling of what actually happened when Trump took personal “credit” for
persuading companies to create new jobs: Carrier, 500 jobs fewer than promised
for Indiana; Softbank, 40,000 fewer jobs than promised nationwide; Flat Rock,
Michigan, 700 automobile jobs not “saved”; Alibaba, nowhere near the Trump
“promised” 1 million jobs created nationwide; Bayer, 3,000 promised jobs not
created; General Motors, 5,000 fewer jobs by 2018; Walmart, 10,000 new jobs
“promised” before 2016, not yet implemented; Keystone XL, 50,000 jobs promised,
202 actually new or saved jobs; Accenture, promised 15,000 new jobs nationwide,
less than 4,000 in fact; Intel, promised 10,000 jobs in Chandler, Arizona,
3,000 in actuality; Charter Communications promised 20,000 jobs, 2,500 created
in actuality; the claim of 1 million new jobs from a trade and arms deal with
Saudi Arabia that was not reality-based; Broadcom bringing back a “massive”
amount of jobs to the U.S., but the CEO
denied that such was the plan; tax “reform” was supposed to create “a lot” of
jobs, but didn’t—AT&T invested $1 billion with tax cut, but still slashed 10,000
jobs in 2018; Ivanka’s “Pledge to America’s Workers” claimed to create 6.5
million new jobs, but the “retraining program” produced few if any real jobs.
Which brings us back to Foxconn,
which promised to build a 20 million-square-foot LCD complex in Mount Pleasant,
a village in Racine County, and would employ 5,200 people by the end of 2020,
to eventually expand to 13,000 jobs. Josh Dzieza wrote a lengthy expose in The Verge in October which examined
Foxconn’s false promises in the hopes of receiving public funding and tax
breaks, and currently employing less than 300 people, the majority of them foreign
workers on student visas. American employees reported being humiliated by
Foxconn’s Chinese supervisors, and many of the initial hires quit. Foxconn initially
rented an old office building in Milwaukee where the employees had nothing to
do and had to buy their own office supplies. The LCD plant was never built, and
most of the buildings that were built by Foxconn stood empty until the company
was granted permission for use as storage facilities.
Dzieza’s writes “That illusion
has had real costs. State and local governments spent at least $400 million,
largely on land and infrastructure Foxconn will likely never need. Residents
were pushed from their homes under threat of eminent domain and dozens of
houses bulldozed to clear property Foxconn doesn’t know what to do with…Months
after the 2018 groundbreaking, the company was racing to hire the 260 people
needed to receive the first tranche of payments from the lucrative subsidy package
passed by then-Gov. Scott Walker. Recruiters were told to hit the number but
given little in the way of job descriptions. Soon, offices began to fill with
people with nothing to do. Many just sat in their cubicles watching Netflix and
playing games on their phones.”
One employee said that “things
don’t make any sense here,” and “Imagine being in a job where you don’t really
know if it’s real or not.” Another employee noted that an assembly line for
televisions turned out to be nothing more than a photo-op for Trump and Foxconn
executives; the rented building and the line was shut down within weeks
afterward. This is the illusion of Trump in a nutshell; he of empty promises,
empty photo-ops and empty buildings.
The reality was that most of
Foxconn’s workforce was in China, and Trump was threatening a trade war, and Gou
wanted to establish “goodwill” with the new president. Gou was engaging in what
was called a “state visit project,” and apparently didn’t really mean to
live-up to the contract he signed with Wisconsin state officials. Industry
experts noted that there was an LCD “glut” in the market, and it was doubtful
that Foxconn would actually build a major manufacturing plant in a state—let
alone a country—where labor costs would outrace falling prices for LCD
products. The fact was that Foxconn never really intended to build the LCD
plant; Gou just wanted to get in “good” with Trump so that Trump wouldn’t do
anything to hurt his business. The tax breaks and other state funding received
by Foxconn, was just money to offset the “cost” of this “goodwill” gesture.
The cost of this “good will” to
the residents of the state was also on the high side—anywhere from $200,000 to
$1 million per person, contingent on how many people Foxconn actually employed
in the state. The higher amount seems the most likely result. In a desperate
effort to justify the money being on spent on Foxconn, the company came up with
bizarre ideas on how to utilize the empty industrial park that had been built.
One idea was to use a building as a distribution center for golf carts made in
China. Dzieza writes
Foxconn only ever got as far as buying the golf carts. They arrived
from China disassembled, in orange, pink and other festive colors. One employee
described then a “the biggest pieces of shit,” like something “bought off
Wish.com.” Unable to make them autonomous, Foxconn put them in storage in the
multipurpose building. At one point, the company discussed outfitting them with
lights and turning them into security vehicles, but the subsidiary in charge of
security refused to pay for the carts, according to one employee. As the
divisions bickered, bored employees would come down from the Milwaukee
headquarters to race the carts around the empty building, until the batteries
finally died.
Foxconn didn’t even bother to
hire much locally, with much if not most of its hires eventually being H1-B and
EB-2 college students from China and India. The Chinese supervisors made no
effort to hide their contempt for American workers—even if all the students
were doing was school work on “company time”; As long as they clocked-in and
out, they counted as “employees.” When it was rumored that a Trump
administration representative was coming for a visit, the management ordered
most of the Asian employees to hide themselves to provide a façade of
“diversity” in a group photo.
In order to meet the next hiring
goal to qualify for subsidies, Foxconn “hired” about 350 new employees in the
last few months of 2019, and then promptly fired most of them at the beginning
of new year. State officials then demanded that either Foxconn abide by its
contract—which the company claimed was actually a “fluid” proposal and not a “concrete”
intention—or have its subsidies revoked. Officials in Racine County, where the
alleged LCD manufacturing was to proceed, have opposed the cancellation of
subsidies, despite the lack of evidence that anything is actually being
“manufactured” there—save for churning out, what one employee derisively noted,
“press releases.”
In his interview with Benson,
Trump claimed that Foxconn had built “one of the most incredible plants I’ve
ever seen,” typical Trump empty braggadocio, although when pressed about the
epic failure of Foxconn to follow through on its—and Trump’s—promises made in
its original contract, Trump conceded that maybe the company should not receive
any more subsidies, which is far too late in the day for what the state has
already paid for almost nothing. It is suspected that once Trump is out of
office, Gou will feel no “pressure” to fulfill his side of the bargain at all
and just pull out, just as he has done to other states and other countries
after making similar promises to create jobs.
In the end, the Foxconn debacle
is just another example of how Trump—pretending to be “Santa Claus” with a bag
full of “presents” for states he needed to win—arrived with boxes with colorful
wrappings and bows, but with nothing inside of them.
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