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.

Trump Fails to Protect Mother Earth

On Thursday, President Trump glibly announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement negotiated by former President Obama in 2015.

Trump made the announcement to fulfill a campaign promise, but failed to mention that we would be following the withdrawal protocol in the accord that will take three to four years to complete. That means we can change course by voting for the environment in 2018 and, more importantly, 2020 before the damage becomes too permanent.

The reactions from all but those in fossil fuel industry pockets were universally horrible. The clear winners were climate change deniers like Scott Pruitt, Trump’s head of the US EPA and shadow president Steve Bannon, whose primary goal is to dismantle the government.

Trump’s decision relies upon severely discredited theories on the impact of climate change, a deeply flawed belief that the way to economic prosperity is found by using more coal and oil and ignores the clear scientific consensus on the environmental and public health consequences of failing to reduce carbon emissions.

Pandering to a small base of his supporters, Trump ignored at his peril the majority of American voters who support the Paris Accord. A November poll by George Mason and Yale universities shows 70% of registered voters say we should stay in the Paris Accord and only 13% contend we should leave.

Foreign leaders around the planet condemned the decision. Trump ignored our global allies pleas to remain in the international effort to save the planet. Unwittingly, he turned over leadership on climate change to the Chinese who have used their economic engine to ramp up production of renewable energy technologies and are poised to take over solar panel production, which just happens to be one of the fastest growing sectors of the American economy. China’s leaders are already stepping into the global leadership vacuum Trump’s decisions are creating and exerting all the leverage their economic engine can produce to extend their influence. Trump even ignored the letter from a noted scientist who also happens to be Pope Francis urging his continued support to reduce the effects of climate change.

American businesses understand the climate change science and the economic opportunities it provides. In January, 630 business leaders and investors like DuPont, Hewlett Packard, Pacific Gas and Electric signed an open letter to then president-elect Trump urging him to reject climate denier theories, to continue investment in a low-carbon economy and to not withdraw from the Paris Accord. As Trump was finalizing his decision, other prominent business leaders such as Apple’s Tim Cook, Tesla’s Elon Musk and GE Chief Jeff Imelt, all urged him to stay in the effort to fight climate change. Musk and Disney leader Robert Iger resigned from Trump’s business advisory council in protest over the decision. US farmers, already reeling from increasingly bad weather due to climate change, stand to lose even more from Trump’s decision to change policy.

More enlightened state and local leaders also stepped into the breach, vowing to continue the Paris Accord guidelines to reduce carbon emissions. Mayors from New York City, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Boston all vowed to continue their environmental protection efforts. Over 60 mayors wrote an open letter to Trump urging him to stay in the Paris agreement. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has joined with other mayors, state governors and business leaders and plans to donate $15 million to the United Nations Climate Secretariat to continue its work on reducing global climate emissions in anticipation of Trump’s cutbacks to UN funding. California Governor Jerry Brown has already committed to continuing to use renewable energy sources and to reduce carbon emissions.

Not unexpectedly, climate scientists and environmental groups that have been sounding the alarm over greenhouse gas emissions, rising seas, vanishing glaciers and polar ice caps, rising temperatures, increasingly violent weather patters from hurricanes to tornadoes and other environmental catastrophes for decades also joined the condemnation of Trump’s decision.

Besides gearing up to defeat the climate change deniers in the White House and halls of Congress in the upcoming elections, there is a lot we can do locally to combat the looming disasters caused by carbon emissions. Buying food grown locally by small farm entrepreneurs will cut down on carbon emissions from food trucked over long distances. Conserving energy with efficient appliances and lighting, buying electric vehicles and installation of renewable energy technology in homes and businesses are good places to start. Join an environmental group and work to protect our clean air and water. Go to politician’s offices and town halls and demand they stand up for the environment by supporting bills to combat climate change. 

Our economy will react favorably to the need for technological changes to protect the environment. There is no Planet B to head to if we don’t protect her.

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

Save Our Air and Water

Environmental Deregulation Fails

There is no Planet B

I grew up in Southern California in the 50s and 60s and remember well smog alerts caused by air quality so poor that my eyes watered when I played outside. I remember clearly flying into Los Angeles and seeing the basin filled with thick brown air from auto pollution. I remember seeing rivers in the Eastern U.S. clogged with waste and polluted from sewage and acid mine drainage. I recall standing on a street corner in Chicago in the 1970s and watching my shirt get dirty from flakes of ash dropping out of the sky.

After people complained about and died from dirty air and polluted water, governments finally stepped in, passing laws and creating agencies to start cleaning up our air and water resources. States and the Federal Government took aggressive action to eliminate or greatly reduce pollution from auto emissions, the dumpling of waste and pollutants into our lakes, rivers and oceans and started to regulate the industrial sources of many pollutants.

Generations reaped the benefits of cleaner air and water as a result of government imposed regulations. Unfortunately, we have let our guard down, secure in the belief that our governments will continue to protect the air we breathe and the water we drink as they have in the past.

After years of misleading and deceptive ads protesting the so-called job killing regulations that protect our water and air and promoting crackpot theories that people have no impact on climate change, the folks who currently control our state and federal governments are poised to undo the water and air protections in place in pursuit of profit and ideological purity.

In Wisconsin, Governor Walker and his climate change denier cronies in the legislature have already cut back funding for the environmental protection work done by the Department of Natural Resources and the Department of Justice. Enforcement of existing clean air and clean water regulations has been curtailed. New regulations are being written by the regulated or legislators in their employ. Walker’s proposed budget will shift regulation of large-scale animal farm operations away from the DNR and its rules limiting manure runoff into water sources. Instead, he proposes to move them to the much more farm friendly Department of Agriculture. Scientific study of pollution sources has been drastically curtailed. Walker even proposes to eliminate future publication of the DNR Magazine, once a valued source of pubic information about the DNR’s efforts to protect our environment.

At the federal level, environmental protection is being dealt an even worse hand. 45’s pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, is the poster child for White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon’s regulatory deconstruction program. Pruitt is the craven handmaiden for the fossil fuel industry and earned his chops suing the EPA for doing what Congress and the American people want it to do. He sued the EPA over a dozen times to block air pollution controls, to prevent fracking bans and, immediately after he was confirmed, vowed to aggressively roll back Obama era clean water and air regulations.

Pruitt has already directed EPA staff to begin work on rolling back regulations governing which waterways can be regulated, Clean Power regulations designed to cut back on power plant emissions, methane emissions on federal lands and many others. He praised the recent Executive Order allowing coalmine ash to be dumped into protected waterways, threating drinking water for millions.

45’s decisions to approve both the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines over legitimate environmental concerns further demonstrates his callous disregard for our health and safe water.

We have come full circle back to the environmental consequences ignorance of my childhood. Left unregulated, many of the polluters from yesteryear will be back. It will not take long to see the consequences in our air and water resources.

Those of us who see the connection between human activity, greed and climate change and believe that science, not profit, should drive how we treat the planet we inhabit need to work together to save our air and water. Pick an environmental advocacy group like the Natural Resources Defense Council, Clean Water Action, Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, Earth Island Institute, Greenpeace USA, Friends of the Earth or League of Conservation Voters and join up. Write letters to our editors and legislators demanding clean air and water.

We know that business, industry and environmental protection can co-exist. We will not go back unbreathable air and undrinkable water.

Waring R. Fincke is a retired attorney and vice-chair of the Democratic Party of Washington County.

Stand with Standing Rock

What government authorities are doing to Native American land, culture and sacred sites in North Dakota is fundamentally wrong. President Obama's wait and see response is too little and too late. If the current conflict continues to escalate, it is just a matter of time until someone dies and we face another Wounded Knee.