Remember the huge Foxconn campus that was to be developed in Wisconsin? The one where people were kicked out of their homes in order to make room for it? I think former Governor Scott Walker (R-WI) and his cohorts in the Wisconsin legislature, current and former, are trying to forget about it, because it appears to be an epic fail. The Verge leads off with this spectacular opening:
HOPES WERE HIGH among the employees who joined Foxconn’s Wisconsin project in the summer of 2018. In June, President Donald Trump had broken ground on an LCD factory he called “the eighth wonder of the world.” The scale of the promise was indeed enormous: a $10 billion investment from the Taiwanese electronics giant, a 20 million-square-foot manufacturing complex, and, most importantly, 13,000 jobs.
Which is why new recruits arriving at the 1960s office building Foxconn had purchased in downtown Milwaukee were surprised to discover they had to provide their own office supplies. “One of the largest companies in the world, and you have to bring your own pencil,” an employee recalls wondering. Maybe Foxconn was just moving too fast to be bothered with such details, they thought, as they brought their laptops from home and scavenged pencils left behind by the building’s previous tenants. They listened to the cries of co-workers trapped in the elevators that often broke, noted the water that occasionally leaked from the ceiling, and wondered when the building would be transformed into the gleaming North American headquarters an executive had promised.
Granted, The Verge isn’t a Trump-supporting news source, but this is both interesting and unsurprising.
Foxconn would spend the next two years jumping from idea to idea — fish farms, exporting ice cream, storing boats — in an increasingly surreal search for some way to generate money from a doomed project. Frequent leadership changes, a reluctance to spend money, and a domineering corporate culture would create an atmosphere employees described as toxic. Many of the employees The Verge spoke with have since left the company, and all of them requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation. It has been a baffling ordeal for the people who thought they were building the Silicon Valley of the Midwest — “Wisconn Valley,” Walker called it — all the more so because so many others still believe the vision.
“All people see is the eighth wonder of the world,” said an employee. “I was there and it’s not real. I mean, it’s not. This is something I can’t talk about ever again, because people think you’re crazy, like none of this could ever happen. How could this happen in the US?”
That’s not a hard question to answer. For a political party full of arrogant third-raters, this is one of those reality moments when an entire group of people are shown to be naked – no matter how certain they are that they’re the Chosen of God.
Such people aren’t hard-nosed realists. Those who buy into one delusion often buy into many. But this ending to the “Wisconn” (to use Walker’s name) fantasy will surprise very few outside of the Party. They turned out to be just a bunch of goofball provincials who thought they knew something. Plus – if you’ll recall – President Trump, who falls into the same category.
