The Foxconn Con with Josh Dzieza

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

MS NOW, Chris Hayes

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4.6 • 9.1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 December 2020

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In June 2018 Donald Trump posed with then Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou at a ground breaking ceremony for the new Foxconn facility in Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin. Touted as “the eighth wonder of the world” by the president, the multi-billion dollar deal was supposed to produce a 20-million-square-foot manufacturing complex, thousands of jobs, and the beginning of a new well-paying manufacturing sector in the American Midwest. Over two years later, almost none of that has happened. Instead of thousands of new jobs and a promising facility, Wisconsin looks to have been left holding the bag on a deal that was over promised and under delivered. This week, investigations editor and feature writer at The Verge, Josh Dzieza, joins to talk about what happened with the Wisconsin-Foxconn deal and why its promise was doomed to fail. The Eighth Wonder of the World by Josh Dzieza Foxconn tells Wisconsin it never promised to build an LCD factory by Josh Dzieza

Transcript

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0:00.0	They thought they were going to be doing any number of things involved with getting this giant
0:05.5	manufacturing operation up and running. They thought they were on the front lines of
0:10.1	bringing manufacturing back to Wisconsin and that it was going to be this great project.
0:15.0	And they end up watching Netflix in a 60s office building in Milwaukee that Foxconn had purchased.
0:20.6	Hello and welcome to Why is this happening with me? Your host Chris Hayes.
0:30.5	You know if you take a step back and you think about some of the stuff that has driven
0:34.1	Trumpism and its political appeal and some of the ways that political ideology and commitments
0:38.7	between the Coalition's have shifted, there's interesting things happening around economics and
0:42.6	they're happening around essentially the right, trying to walk away from a certain kind of
0:51.2	free market neoliberal consensus that has dominated the right. Dominated both parties but the
0:57.1	left kind of peeled away from it, I think earlier and more decisively. And now we're in this kind
1:01.2	of post neoliberal world where the old consensus about low inflation, tight monetary policy,
1:08.3	big tax cuts, deregulation would lead to broadly shared prosperity and also peace and democracy
1:16.9	across the world through globalization and global trade. And like that has not worked out at all.
1:20.9	The recognition that that has not worked out I think has increasingly dawned on both political
1:26.2	coalitions and there's an effort to think about what the post consensus ideology looks like. And one
1:31.6	one place that you see a lot of focus is on manufacturing, right? I mean the old consensus idea was
1:37.9	like sorry manufacturers of America, manufacturing is not going to really live in the new globalized
1:43.0	world because it's cheaper to do other places. Those jobs will go to Mexico or they'll go to China
1:48.3	and you're going to, you know, to use the cliche, you're going to learn to code. And it turned out
1:52.4	like well, it's not awesome for a connocia-wiss constant trade-away car factories that are unionized
2:00.4	good jobs for a big Amazon warehouse that are not unionized and pay half or a third of the wages.
	...

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