-As President Biden touted his infrastructure plan
to create jobs and stimulate the economy,
one of the signature scams of the Trump era,
a deal that was also supposed to
create jobs and stimulate the economy,
fell apart, revealing yet again
that the GOP's new brand of supposed pro-worker populism
is a giant fraud.
For more on this, it's time for "A Closer Look."
♪♪
Let me just say right off the bat
that we are aware that federal investigators
executed search warrants of Rudy Giuliani's office
and apartment this morning,
and I promise we will have a lot more to say about it tomorrow
because there is no subject nearer and dearer to our hearts
than Rudy Giuliani being a giant [bleep]
I'm guessing, when they arrived,
Rudy tried to flush his phone down the toilet
as the feds were carrying away the toilet.
"Sir, it's a floor model. It's not attached to anything."
"Oh, no, Rudy, ya dope!
You're supposed to have pipes."
Also, President Biden delivered his first address
to a joint session of Congress tonight.
And we're taping this beforehand,
so we don't know what he said,
but something tells me he had a slightly different energy
than the speeches he attended as President Obama's VP,
where he was always doing stuff like grabbing John Boehner's arm
or giving finger guns to people in the crowd
like he was walking around a villa in Miami Beach
making sure everyone at the pool party was having fun.
"Cam, that glass looks empty. You need a refill?
Stacy, I better see you in the pool later.
I got the jets turned on.
Brad, throw another dog on the grill for me.
I worked up an appetite kicking Steve's ass in volleyball.
You got to work on your dig, Steve."
One thing we do know about Biden's speech
is that he has very likely spent some time
touting his infrastructure plan, and as he pitches that plan,
he's also dealing with an intransigent GOP
that has its own idea for infrastructure,
a GOP that's also trying to rebrand itself
after decades of subservience to corporate interests
as a populist, pro-workers party.
They've gone from defending so-called job creators
and decrying class warfare
to calling corporations that don't side with them
on cultural issues woke.
-This past month, we have seen the rise
of the woke corporation.
We have seen the rise of big business
enforcing a woke standard.
-I think corporate America,
by trying to genuflect to this wokeness,
I think they have gone down a really bad road.
They're going to tie themselves in knots
trying to please the extreme left.
-Senator McConnell says corporations
are, quote, behaving like woke parallel governments
and becoming like a vehicle for far-left mobs
to hijack our country.
-Let's just cut to the chase.
The big tech platforms are owned and operated
by woke capitalists.
They're leftists. They're liberals.
-There's no way Mark Zuckerberg is woke.
At most, he's switched on.
And none of those Plutocrats are leftists.
I'm pretty sure Jeff Bezos and Bernie Sanders
aren't on the same page when it comes to most political issues.
I doubt Bernie even uses Amazon.
"I get everything I need from the co-op,
and when I run out of batteries,
I just connect some copper wire to a potato.
Hey, turn down the A/C.
Potatoes don't grow on trees."
And just because
they pulled some Dr. Seuss books with racist language
and put out statements against voter suppression laws
doesn't mean companies like Amazon and Delta are suddenly woke.
For one thing, they both tried to bust unions.
Amazon put up anti-union posters in employee bathrooms,
and Delta handed out flyers that said,
"Union dues cost around $700 a year.
A new video game system with the latest hits sounds like fun.
Put your money towards that
instead of paying dues to the union."
Yeah, exactly. And if you get sick in real life,
all you have to do is hit a brick with your head until a mushroom pops out.
The point is, these giant corporations aren't suddenly woke
just because they've done the bare minimum of, say,
coming out against racist voter suppression laws.
But Republicans are still infuriated by that,
so they've tried to co-opt the anti-corporate language
of actual left-wing populists
like Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, and AOC.
For example, Florida Senator Marco Rubio
wrote an absolutely ludicrous screed
against supposedly woke corporations
in the "New York Post" this week,
where he said, "No policymaker would allow a company
to dump toxic waste into a river
upstream of a thriving town he is charged with governing.
Yet corporate America eagerly dumps woke, toxic nonsense
into our culture,
and it's only gotten more destructive with time.
These campaigns will be met with the same strength
that any other polluter should expect."
What any other polluter should expect?
So, basically, total and complete loyalty from the GOP?
Republicans cut so many environmental regulations,
I'm pretty sure they made it legal
to sell toxic sludge as an energy drink.
And do I drink a sludge every now and then?
Yeah.
That's only because I'm up all night
writing this week's corrections.
These guys are, in many way, just following
in Donald Trump's footsteps.
He was not in any serious way a populist,
except that he co-opted some of the language of populism
while doling out trillions in giveaways
to corporations that mostly just
gave the money to their wealthy investors.
Trump, for example, said the 2017 tax cuts
would be rocket fuel for the economy,
and earlier this month, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
said rolling them back would destroy jobs.
-This tax bill of 2017, undone,
would create an extensive loss of jobs in our country,
do exactly the wrong thing,
and move us in the wrong direction.
-You hear that, woke corporations?
The Republican party is on to you.
If you don't stop dumping woke toxic waste
into our cultural river,
then we are going to punish you by allowing you to...
continue paying zero dollars in federal income taxes.
That can't be right. Wally, I think the card is wrong.
-That's what it said in the script.
-But does it seem right to you?
-Hey, Seth, I just write the cards, baby.
-Wally, the only way you could be cooler
is if you wore sunglasses under your face shield.
Anyway, the point is, this is the scam.
Republicans call themselves pro-worker populists
while doling out cash to giant companies
who mostly use it to decrease their tax liabilities
and enrich their wealthy investors,
even though the whole point was supposed to be
to use that money to invest in the economy and create jobs.
And there was a perfect test case of this scam in Wisconsin
at the start of Trump's presidency.
-After months of speculation, Foxconn promises
to build its first American factory here in Wisconsin.
-It's the largest economic development project
in state history
and will initially require more than 16,000 construction jobs
sourced from Wisconsin businesses.
The LCD manufacturing campus
expected to be operational in 2020
and the project expected to have
at least a $7 billion annual economic impact on the state.
-And with this project moving forward,
Governor Walker coined a new term today,
the Wisconn Valley,
describing our area as a new hub for technology and innovation.
-They wouldn't have done it here except that I became president,
so that's good.
Congratulations on truly one of the eighth wonders.
I think we can say this is --
We can say the eighth wonder of the world.
This is the eighth wonder of the world.
-Yeah, it goes great pyramids,
the Colossus of Rhodes,
and then a factory in Wisconsin.
You get the sense Trump has used "eighth wonder of the world"
to describe a lot of his projects over the years.
"Trump Taj Mahal -- It's going to be
the eighth wonder of the world.
Blackjack tables, cocktail waitresses,
and we're going to pump in oxygen
to keep people gambling longer,
just like the guy who built the real Taj Mahal,
the Emperor Shah Jahan.
Great guy. Great guy.
Met him at Studio 54 back in '86.
He was there with Christie Brinkley.
She went on to marry Billy Joel, Mr. Piano Guy himself.
You know, I love the song 'We Didn't Start the Fire,'
but I always thought 'Trump' should be in that song.
A lot of famous people in there, but no Trump.
What do we think, folks? Should Trump be --
Should 'Trump' be in 'We Didn't Start the Fire'?
Space monkey, Mafia, Donald Trump --
Has a nice ring to it.
You don't want to mess with the space monkey Mafia.
Almost impossible to do construction on other planets."
"Got to kick back a lot of space bananas.
You know, they'll say...
they'll say Trump tried to start the fire,
but we know that's not true.
We know that's not true."
The Foxconn deal was supposed to be the shining example
of Trump's claim that he was bringing manufacturing jobs
back to the United States,
and it was proof of concept for the Republican way of doing it,
not by investing directly in infrastructure
but by doling out subsidies to big companies.
Trump was even there for the ground-breaking ceremony
with then Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker,
where he picked up some dirt with a gold shovel
and then gently tossed it back on the ground
near the spot where he dug it up from.
"There you go. I loosened it up for you."
For a guy who was supposedly in construction,
he doesn't even know how to fake it.
If you handed him a hammer, he would talk it into like a phone.
"Send me your best nail guy."
Under the deal, Foxconn was promised
a stunning $4 billion in taxpayer subsidies,
and, in return, they were supposed to spend $10 billion
employing 13,000 people
at a 20-million-square-foot manufacturing campus
in Wisconsin
and instantly establish Wisconsin
as a destination for tech firms.
Again, this was supposed to be proof positive
of Trump's ability to magically bring back manufacturing jobs
without actually making
any of the real direct investments in the economy
that, say, Joe Biden and the Democrats are now proposing.
It was also a distillation of the core GOP philosophy,
which is that if you give massive handouts
to giant businesses that are already flush with cash
instead of giving the money directly to workers,
those handouts will eventually trickle down and create jobs.
And credit, where it's due, the plan worked.
The project has been a huge success.
What's that? It wasn't.
Shoemaker, you got to tell me this stuff before the show.
This is not cool. Wally, are you cool with this?
-I'm cool with everything, baby.
-Rock and roll, Wally. How can I stay mad?
The point is, the Foxconn deal was a giant scam.
It was obvious it was a scam from the very beginning.
For one thing, they kept missing key goals
and failing to deliver on their promises,
cycling from one idea to the next.
This is a real summary
of all the different projects Foxconn considered for the site.
The company spent years pivoting wildly from idea to idea.
The enormous Gen 10.5 LCD factory
specified in the contract
became a far smaller Gen 6,
then was canceled, then came back.
The company announced it was building something
called the AI+8K+5G ecosystem
to be developed in a network of innovation centers,
buildings that the company purchased only to leave empty.
It looked into building fish farms,
exporting ice cream, storing boats.
It announced plans to build coffee kiosks and ventilators
that never moved forward.
Most recently, it said it would build electric cars,
though maybe, the company acknowledged,
that will happen in Mexico.
Man, that sounds like how I plan a Mother's Day gift for my wife.
I'm going to commission a painting of our family.
Nope, I don't have time for that.
I'm going to take a picture of our family.
Nope, ran out of time.
I'm going to find an existing picture of our family
and have it framed. Nope, I don't have time.
I'm going find an existing picture of our family
and text it her with "Happy Mother's Day."
Nope, I'm going to forget entirely,
and then I'm gonna wake up two Sundays from now
in an empty bed while it slowly dawns on me
that I am [bleep]
"Honey, I built you a place to store boats."
And yet, as this scam was unfolding,
the village where the campus was supposed to be located
was in the process of buying up properties
and building new roads to make way
for this fancy new factory they were promised.
Wisconsin has already spent at least $400 million
on land and infrastructure,
and as of 2019, the village where the plant is located
had paid just over $152 million
for 132 properties to make way for Foxconn,
plus $7.9 million in relocation costs.
Meanwhile, Foxconn
owns a lot of real estate in southern Wisconsin now,
and it has built an odd collection of buildings,
including the million-square-foot structure
it called the LCD Fab
and a glass orb.
Cool, so now instead of 13,000 jobs
building high-tech LCD displays,
taxpayers ended up spending hundreds of millions of dollars
on a useless glass orb.
Although, shout-out to Donald Trump
on being our first two-orb President.
What do you even do with a glass orb you don't need anymore?
Turn it into a community center?
"All right, kids, it's time for recess.
Everyone line up outside the glass orb,
and remember, do not touch the orb.
We still don't know what it does or what its powers are."
Or maybe they'll use it as a Packers training facility.
"All right, go long, but remember,
don't run into the glass wall again."
But it gets even crazier than that
because the state actually demolished homes
and built new roads that, in a metaphor
that's almost "two" on the nose, actually lead to nowhere.
Former President Trump announced
Foxconn was coming July 26, 2017.
The following June, Trump, former Congressman Paul Ryan,
and former Governor Scott Walker were among those
who broke ground on the plant in Mount Pleasant.
And since then, roads have been widened,
land flattened, homes demolished,
and the plant has not built anything yet.
-I was there. It's the weirdest thing, Bertha.
There's basically a giant clear dome
that I think is some kind of data center/museum,
a couple of big warehouses,
and then farms and some homes down the street.
It is -- There's a bunch of new roads
that kind of lead to nowhere.
-What did they use for the blueprints,
an M.C. Escher dorm room poster?
A giant orb and a bunch of roads that lead to nowhere.
This whole thing is starting to sound like a David Lynch project.
Did they also give them $4 billion
to build a state-of-the-art red room
where a little man in a red suit
teaches you how to dance and talk in reverse?
And even now that Foxconn has mostly abandoned the project,
they're still scooping up taxpayer handouts
even as they leave behind a trail of debt,
broken promises, and chaos.
Foxconn is still eligible for $80 million in tax subsidies,
and under the revised deal,
the state is still paying a per-job subsidy
of about $55,000.
$55,000 for each job.
Instead of giving that to a massive foreign company,
how about you give that directly to workers
to build useful stuff here,
like bridges and broadband infrastructure,
instead of roads to nowhere
and a giant glass orb that's just going to sit there empty
and inevitably cause traffic delays?
"Honey, I'm going to go to Kroger to pick up some milk.
I'll be back in about two hou-- The road leads to nowhere.
I got to go around the giant orb.
What do you mean, which giant orb?
The Foxconn orb.
Turn off the hairdryer if you want to have this conversation."
So as Biden talks up his infrastructure plan
which would raise corporate taxes
in order to make direct investments in workers
to build things we actually need,
the Foxconn scam is a cautionary tale about
what Republicans would have us do with that money instead.
They want to shovel handouts to giant corporations
already flush with cash,
and all the while, they're ludicrously trying
to rebrand themselves as a party of pro-worker populists.
Say what you will about a scam like this,
but one thing's for sure.
-They wouldn't have done it here except that I became president.
-This has been "A Closer Look."
♪♪
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