Speaker 1: OK, I have a couple sort of like Keeping Them Honest type stories for you today.
We have been covering these scams, grifts and crony con jobs that have been many of
the contracts given out during the Trump administration.
And that includes the company that it was only around for two months with no employees.
That was given a massive contract to be basically a middleman for PPY back in twenty twenty.
Earlier this week, we talked about API JECT.
The company given a one point three dollars billion combination of contracts and loan
loans to make vaccine syringes were about 200 million doses in.
They haven't even built the factory.
They've got not a single vaccine syringe out there.
And this next story is actually about some of these so-called deals that Donald Trump
made back in 2016 and 2017.
And even before being inaugurated in 2016, he announced one or two and then made some
in 2017.
You might remember that Donald Trump once bragged about a supposed ten billion dollar
deal and factory in Wisconsin that he, I guess, convinced the company Foxconn to make.
He once referred to this deal as the, quote, eighth wonder of the of the world.
And there was really big fanfare about it at the White House in July of 2017.
Trump saying it's ten billion dollars, it's 13000 jobs.
It's an incredible example of how I'm doing my America first thing of manufacturing coming
back to the United States.
And it was all going to be incredible.
It would be a factory for cutting edge flat panel televisions and monitors, and it would
make Wisconsin a destination for tech firms.
And it was all going to be just great.
But some of us were suspicious for a couple of different reasons.
Number one, Foxconn is a supply company with a very charismatic founder and then chairman
Terry Gou, who is very PR thirsty.
And a lot of it seemed like it was mostly about public relations.
And we were also skeptical of these deals that are really just, hey, take some money
and do me a favor rather than economic policy.
And indeed, there were reports that even executives at Foxconn at the time were skeptical that
this was ever going to happen, not the least of which was because the suppliers for the
LCD panels they were supposedly going to make were nowhere near Wisconsin.
And it made very little sense to actually manufacture those there.
Case in point, the project never started as described.
And now Foxconn is announcing, you know, four years later, now we're going to scale back
what that project is going to be.
And instead of ten billion dollars, Foxconn has announced it will be six hundred and seventy
two million, not nothing, but that's a 93 percent reduction in the dollar value of the
project.
Trump also bragged it would bring 13000 jobs to Wisconsin.
Foxconn now says, well, it's not going to be 13000.
It's going to be fourteen hundred and fifty four, which is an 89 nine percent reduction
in the number of jobs that were promised and that Donald Trump Trump announced.
So should this surprise us know?
But there's another aspect to this.
I said at the time when Donald Trump and Mike Pence were doing their victory tours, announcing,
oh, Foxconn is coming to Wisconsin and carrier air conditioner is staying in.
I think it was Indiana.
I pointed out at the time, even if true.
And of course, with many of these deals, as we're now seeing, it wasn't true.
But even if true, those deals were not economic policy.
They were not scalable.
They were Trump giving specific companies a bunch of cash, often in the form of tax
breaks or loans that sometimes don't even need to be repaid to do a specific thing that
might not even be dictated by the market.
Like, for example, Foxconn making LCD panels in a place that's really far from where they
got all of their parts.
And at the time, the Foxconn deal was denounced by many in Wisconsin who were rightly saying
this is a tax giveaway to a foreign company.
They're getting they're getting tax breaks.
They're are getting water rights.
They're getting the green light to acquire and demolish houses via eminent domain to
build their factory.
It's not economic policy.
You can't scale this.
It's just a handout.
Trump bought the deal with our tax money, and that's exactly what this is becoming.
Now, Foxconn did start buying houses to demolish for their factory.
They are going to do it eventually, but it will be 90 percent smaller than was promised.
And in fact, they're not even going to be building a factory.
For the flat panel displays, that detail has also changed.
They're going to be making server components and communications technology products and
maybe medical devices, which is fine, but every detail fell apart from the original
deal, and it will be 10 percent of what it was promised to be five, six years later.
Who even knows when?
So the project is another microcosm of the Trump presidency.
In sum, total.
And it wasn't just Trump taking his victory laps with this project.
Then Republican Governor Scott Walker and the Wisconsin Republican Party at the time
were also loudly bragging and boasting about this.
And it is because it has become absolutely it's become pennies on the dollar what it
was supposed to be riding on our tax money, an important detail