Eclipse in Small Town America

The Solar Eclipse

Best in Small Town America

Our family went to Virginia, Nebraska to watch the solar eclipse this past Monday. We watched the sun dance behind the moon above constantly shifting bands of clouds before a muted darkness descended during the brief totality. While not as dramatic as seeing the corona of the sun surrounding a black moon, our experience was quite satisfying and I got a t-shirt memorializing the event to complete the bargain.

Our experience was shared by about 100 people who decided that a small, almost ghost, town surrounded by corn and soybean fields in southern Nebraska was the place to be. Virginia, Nebraska has a population of about 20 on a good day. Downtown is three blocks long with the major hub being the grain elevator. Large trucks pulled in and out the whole time we were there dumping their loads and going out for more. No time to stop to watch the once in a lifetime event happening in the clouds.

There were three small places open on the main drag to welcome the population surge. Terry’s steakhouse is evidently the only restaurant in the area for miles around and called in every worker to prepare and serve a special eclipse styled breakfast, lunch and dinner to all who came. There was a steady trickle of customers in and out of Terry’s all day with folks retiring to lawn chairs set up in the empty lots on either side of the building, food and drinks in hand, to gaze upward. Across the street, the five people who work at Citizen’s State Bank closed up from 11 to 2 and brought their lobby and desk chairs into the street to watch the show.

The American Legion Post, a vacant lot down the street from Terry’s, put on the best welcome for traveling strangers. They opened the doors so visiting sun gazers could use the bathrooms. Legion members prepared pulled pork in roaster ovens and set out sides of coleslaw to sell to the hungry that did not bring picnic supplies. They put out a clearly homemade sheet cake decorated with a large sun at the total eclipse phase to share with the anticipated revelers, asking only that visitors fill out a large poster board with their name and hometown along with how many miles they had traveled to get to small town Virginia for the eclipse.

The rest of Virginia’s main street is made up of long empty small buildings. The faded sign for Staples Store hovered over windows boarded up and most of the rest had broken windows or none at all speaking to the town’s decline as a local center of commerce.

We set up our chairs in the town park across the street from the grain elevator and a small deserted shop that locals opened to set up their picnic table. The park had oak shade trees, a swing set, a half basketball court and a push me, pull you merry go round that I went round on with my grand daughters and some other kids who stopped by the red painted antique. The two picnic tables used hand welded farm wagon wheel rims to support the seats and tabletop. We got there around 10 am and by 11:30 there were 6 other families looking up through the clouds at the sun with our special glasses or welding goggles brought from work. Two local young teen boys walked around with a cardboard sign proclaiming tongue in cheek, “The End is Near,” before playing some hoops and then pulling out their glasses for the event.

We chatted amiably with others who came to look up into the sky. There was a three generation local family, a couple from Minnesota with a fancy filtered camera, a family from Texas and two guys with very fancy drones that hovered 400 feet up while filming the event at opposite ends of the street. I could not understand what they gained from a higher aerial view that was still under the cloud cover, but to each his own. When the totality arrived, all the watchers cheered and whistled.

It was refreshing to be at that small town event, bigger than all it held, and share it with family and quietly nice people who just wanted to see something they had never seen before. It was a thoroughly positive and genuinely American event.

Waring R. Fincke is a retired attorney and serves as a guardian for the elderly and disabled.

Foxconn is a con.

Foxconn is a Con

It must not pass

Praise was almost due to a few remaining sane GOP Wisconsin Senators who refuse to get sucked into the latest Scott Walker/Robin Vos con job. Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald recently told the Governor that the Senate republicans may not have enough votes to pass the Assembly bill approving Walker’s deal with technology giant Foxconn. Fitzgerald and some of his colleagues appeared concerned that the Foxconn con is truly a bad deal for Wisconsin taxpayers and our environment. Fitzgerald soon retreated to safe GOP ground, introducing the bill in the Senate and sending it to the Joint Finance Committee.

It should have been easy to heed the non-partisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau’s numbers showing that a child starting first grade now will be suffering from the tax payments to Foxconn until they are well into their thirties before Wisconsin starts to see a financial break-even point in 2043.

When Republicans tell us they cannot pass the current state budget because they cannot find the money to pay for transportation and education commitments, where do you think they will find an extra $250 million plus per year for the next 25 years to give to Foxconn? They will either have to raise taxes or make further cuts to already strained transportation and education funding. Not a good choice for the “no new taxes” crowd faced with mounting pressure to fund roads and public schools.

Sen. Fitzgerald was also initially concerned with the lightening speed with which Walker and Vos, backed by President Trump who put no federal dollars into the deal, got the Assembly to move on this latest bait and switch con. Only one official public hearing monopolized by invited guests who support the deal before the bill gets a vote next Tuesday is a new low point in the current GOP dominated public discourse. Now Fitzgerald appears on board with speedy passage as well.

Critics from the business community, led by Bloomberg, tell us that this is a truly terrible deal. $3 billion for 13,000 new jobs, many of which will go to folks from Illinois who live close to the border, amounts to a $1200 per Wisconsin family tax payment each year for a good portion of their working lives. When coupled with the $50 million in lost sales tax revenues each year from additional Foxconn tax incentives, the GOP senators with sense should pause to jump on this train.

Even pro-business, anti-government regulation members of the GOP Senate should balk at the wholesale abrogation of state environmental protections in Foxconn’s Walker/Vos proposed new technology district. If the package is passed, Foxconn will alter the course of rivers and streams, fill wetlands with dredged material and divert significant amounts of water from Lake Michigan, all without DNR oversight or burdensome state regulatory filings. The DNR has already hired a project manager to show Foxconn how to avoid environmental laws. Have no doubt, there is going to be little federal oversight either from the newly gutted Trump/Pruitt led Environmental Protection Agency. Wisconsin residents will suffer from Foxconn’s environmental damage long after the sting from their increased tax burdens and spending cuts has vanished.

These objections to the con that is Foxconn should be sufficient to scuttle the deal, but there is more. Topping the list is Foxconn’s history of failed promises to deliver economic prosperity with new facilities. The tech giant failed to follow through on a deal with Pennsylvania to build a new facility there. It has not delivered promised economic benefits in deals in Vietnam, Indonesia, Brazil and India. Next, consider Foxconn’s failure to protect workers in its existing factories from long hours, unsafe working conditions and abusive labor policies. Its leaders have compared their employees to animals and imposed animal behavior modification techniques for control. Hardly a Wisconsin model employer. Fitzgerald complained there is no timeline for the promised job creation in the plan, but backed away from this limited concern for jobs.

Other concerns should give legislators pause. The plan is to give the job of negotiating and then policing Foxconn’s economic promises to Wisconsin’s troubled Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WDEC). You will remember WDEC’s stellar record with shady loans and incentives to businesses that promised to create jobs that never materialized and its subsequent multiple failures to recoup taxpayer money spent to incentivize the failures. It is no surprise that many of those failures were with folks who made substantial campaign contributions to Walker and the GOP.

Gov. Walker is gearing up to run for another term in 2018 and desperately needs an economic victory to distract from his past failed job promises and inability to shepherd a budget through a legislature with solid republican majorities. Here’s hoping there is enough sanity in the GOP Senate ranks to stop this boondoggle in its tracks, even if it costs Walker his re-election bid.

Waring R. Fincke is a retired lawyer and serves as a guardian for the elderly and disabled.