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Comment by quasse | Hacker News Reader

This entire project was a shameful example of political pump-and-dump by our former governor.

He sold the more gullible elements of our state on this fairy tale about Foxconn, got lots of air time and Trump points out of it, made an abortive presidential run, and then got replaced and slunk into the shadows before the music stopped.

Now our new Governor is left cleaning up the embarrassing mess while simultaneously being blamed for its failure by the very people who made the whole thing happen.

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I was upset about losing the high speed rail, but the Foxconn deal made me wild. It was so clearly a con job from the beginning.

And the only reason they obsessed over killing high speed rail was that it would make southern Wisconsin slightly more attractive to young people, who would tip the voting scales.

The WI legislature was also committed to stopping the governor from having any oversight.

What does Foxconn get out of it? From the article they seem to have lost lots of money.

If I had to guess, I would say that they thought that they'd still get the money anyways for a greatly stepped-down facility. The fact that Wisconsin is cancelling the money for Foxconn not delivering on their promises (which they probably never intended to keep in the first place) seems to have come as a surprise to Foxconn.

Terry Gou was running for president of taiwan, and he needed support and endorsement from Trump. He got it, and he still lost.

At least that parallels Walker's story well...

Foxconn provided a bulk quantity of unicorn farts to power the Walker and Trump administrations through tweets, photo ops, TV ads, etc. In return they were expecting the angel of tariffs to skip their door, in addition to the river of incentives money that was to be directed their way.

It says they failed to qualify for a subsidy so I assume they were planning on getting money from that.

They were tax credits with requirements they did not meet. If they were planning on taking advantage of those credits, it seems like they would have put in the minimum effort to at least appear to meet them. Something a little stranger happened here. I think related to global politics, not just something with Trump or Scott Walker.

I don’t entirely disagree but I do think that’s explained by, they weren’t actually planning on having to actually meet any benchmarks, rather than just having a friend in the Governor’s mansion.

I got the sense that they did try to put in that minimum but misjudged how high the bar would be. They sent in their "we hired enough people so give us the money" message, but then (unexpected, I suspect) scrutiny by some civil servants revealed that they hadn't hired enough.

Yeah, I guess what the article describes seems shockingly incompetent. That's what I'm struggling with. The feeling that if they were really trying to a do a fraud they would have gotten closer to succeeding. But what the article describes seems like what would be in a satirical movie. I mean, I know multinational corporations have their moments, but this seems so beyond just average incompetence.

I don’t know anything about the leadership but it makes me wonder if they’re used to a certain grift-effort level in China and they weren’t adjusting to the slightly higher grift-threshold in the US.

Promises are easy, ask any politician.

Now it sounds a lot like what Bush left behind for Obama.

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