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Foxconned: Imaginary Jobs, Bulldozed Homes, and the Sacking of Local Government
Powerful and resonant,
Foxconned
is both the definitive autopsy of the Foxconn fiasco and a dire warning to communities and states nationwide.
When Wisconsin governor Scott Walker stood shoulder to shoulder with President Trump and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan at the White House in July 2017, they painted a glorious picture of his state’s future. Foxconn, the enormous China-based electronics firm, was promising to bring TV manufacturing back to the United States with a $10 billion investment and 13,000 well-paying jobs. They actually were making America great again, they crowed.
Two years later, the project was in shambles. Ten thousand construction workers were supposed to have been building what Trump had promised would be “the eighth wonder of the world.” Instead, land had been seized, homes had been destroyed, and hundreds of millions of municipal dollars had been committed for just a few hundred jobs—nowhere near enough for Foxconn to earn the incentives Walker had shoveled at them. In Foxconned, journalist Lawrence Tabak details the full story of this utter collapse, which was disturbingly inevitable.
As Tabak shows, everything about Foxconn was a disaster. But worse, he reveals how the economic incentive infrastructure across the country is broken, leading to waste, cronyism, and the steady transfer of tax revenue to corporations. Tabak details every kind of financial chicanery, from eminent domain abuse to good old-fashioned looting—all to benefit a coterie of consultants, politicians, and contractors. With compassion and care, he also reports the distressing stories of the many individuals whose lives were upended by Foxconn.
When Wisconsin governor Scott Walker stood shoulder to shoulder with President Trump and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan at the White House in July 2017, they painted a glorious picture of his state’s future. Foxconn, the enormous China-based electronics firm, was promising to bring TV manufacturing back to the United States with a $10 billion investment and 13,000 well-paying jobs. They actually were making America great again, they crowed.
Two years later, the project was in shambles. Ten thousand construction workers were supposed to have been building what Trump had promised would be “the eighth wonder of the world.” Instead, land had been seized, homes had been destroyed, and hundreds of millions of municipal dollars had been committed for just a few hundred jobs—nowhere near enough for Foxconn to earn the incentives Walker had shoveled at them. In Foxconned, journalist Lawrence Tabak details the full story of this utter collapse, which was disturbingly inevitable.
As Tabak shows, everything about Foxconn was a disaster. But worse, he reveals how the economic incentive infrastructure across the country is broken, leading to waste, cronyism, and the steady transfer of tax revenue to corporations. Tabak details every kind of financial chicanery, from eminent domain abuse to good old-fashioned looting—all to benefit a coterie of consultants, politicians, and contractors. With compassion and care, he also reports the distressing stories of the many individuals whose lives were upended by Foxconn.
290 pages, Hardcover
Published November 19, 2021
11 people are currently reading
169 people want to read
About the author
Lawrence Tabak
3 books15 followersLawrence Tabak has been writing for publication since his student days at The University of Iowa where his early work appeared in The Des Moines Register, The Iowan, The Cedar Rapids Gazette and World Tennis Magazine. He has written for numerous regional and national publications including Salon.com, themillions.com, Fast Company, the in-flight magazines for American and United, Forbes.com, The New York Times, Tennis Magazine, Delacorte Review, and The Atlantic Monthly. His Foxconned book began as a series of investigative stories for Belt Magazine, The American Prospect and Madison's Capital Times. The Belt stories received a "Best of 2017" recognition from Longreads.com His 2014 novel IN REAL LIFE told the story of a young computer gaming prodigy and his journey into professional esports. He is the father of two sons. He and his wife Diane live in Madison, Wisconsin.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
November 8, 2021
This book details the huge investment which would create many good blue collar jobs promised by Foxconn, in return for massive incentives from Wisconsin governments. The promises were never kept and the entire project collapsed. Tabak is especially good at tracing who benefited financially from this and who lost.
This is also a warning to state and local governments who are all too willing to lavish tax dollars on corporations in return for a promise of jobs.
This is also a warning to state and local governments who are all too willing to lavish tax dollars on corporations in return for a promise of jobs.
December 20, 2021
Speaking as a taxpaying Wisconsin resident....WE GOT SCREWED!!!! Bigtime!
October 27, 2022
As a resident of the City of Racine, I did not learn a lot of new material, since I follow this story closely, but I appreciate Tabak's exploration and exposure of deeply entrenched cronyism in Wisconsin politics and business. It never quite made sense why Mount Pleasant was paying Claude Lois from Burlington so much money to perform a job he seemed unqualified for. The inclusion in this pyramid scheme of some of our local safety officials from the Sheriff's and Fire departments makes my stomach churn. Tabak's dissected look at the misuse and abuse of TIF districts, public incentives, corporate welfare, the redistribution of wealth, and income inequality is thought provoking how he makes connections with the already wealthiest elite using tax dollars as a seemingly endless piggy bank to make themselves richer. His chapters about the Tea Party's beliefs, faith, and discrediting science are interesting. I often wonder if these assholes truly believe the bullshit they espouse, or if it's just part of the game to win elections and grow their coffers. Tabak suggests it's genuine. I recommend this book to anyone and everyone living in Wisconsin.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 14, 2022
Very informative, very depressing. The Foxconn deal is so much worse than you think it is. Tabak gets kind of bogged down in the weeds of municipal economics at times, but overall I learned a lot.
February 24, 2024
In 2017, Trump announced that TV manufacturing would return to the US with the construction of a huge Foxconn factory in Wisconsin. This book tracks the unravelling of that promise, the billions wasted purchasing land and building huge highways and pipelines that would never be needed, and the shadowy "site selection" industry.
As a general review of these kinds of debacles (the drawn out Amazon HQ selection process was another prominent example) this book is great. One particular insight - "winner's curse" from auction theory, which says that auctioning off a resource practically guarantees it will go to a bidder who *overvalues* the resource as they outbid the rational players, and therefore the winner is likely to mismanage the resource and ultimately go bankrupt - seems so obvious once you've learned yet feels like it explains so much about the modern world.
As "the definitive autopsy" of the debacle, it falls obviously short, because there is no real input from any of the decision makers. But I also understand that there is no realistic chance of getting that. There was no way politicians like Trump and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker or Chinese Foxconn executives would ever be interviewed for a book, and even the local council figures were Tea Partiers who wouldn't speak to a critical journalist.
As a general review of these kinds of debacles (the drawn out Amazon HQ selection process was another prominent example) this book is great. One particular insight - "winner's curse" from auction theory, which says that auctioning off a resource practically guarantees it will go to a bidder who *overvalues* the resource as they outbid the rational players, and therefore the winner is likely to mismanage the resource and ultimately go bankrupt - seems so obvious once you've learned yet feels like it explains so much about the modern world.
As "the definitive autopsy" of the debacle, it falls obviously short, because there is no real input from any of the decision makers. But I also understand that there is no realistic chance of getting that. There was no way politicians like Trump and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker or Chinese Foxconn executives would ever be interviewed for a book, and even the local council figures were Tea Partiers who wouldn't speak to a critical journalist.
April 15, 2022
The intended audience of this isn’t people familiar with the project.
October 21, 2022
This book had quite a few typos and misspellings, could use a proofread. The politics are wishy-washy as well.
September 9, 2023
It was supposed to be the biggest economic boon to the state of Wisconsin ever. A Chinese company would create more jobs than ever created by a foreign company. Those were the promises of former President Donald Trump and Former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. Foxconn chose Wisconsin in a competition among many other communities to build their new American plant. That was back in 2017. Trump and Walker are out of office, and the Foxconn dreams never materialized. Lawrence Tabak chronicles what happened and what went wrong in his book, "Foxconned: Imaginary Jobs, Bulldozed Homes and the Sacking of Local Government."
In a White House event, Walker said, "Thi is a great day for America, it is a great day for Wisconsin, and it is a great day for Foxconn. Today, we're announcing the single largest economic development project in the history of the state of Wisconsin and one of the largest in the history of this country."
The company promised to manufacture large-screen TVs in a new plant in which they would invest $10 Billion. For its part, Wisconsin pledged $3 billion in incentives, plus clear land and expand and build new roads to accommodate the new facility. Once word got out that the plant would be built in Racine County (between Milwaukee and the Illinois border), homeowners discovered they would have to sell their homes and move. No one asked those residents (or anyone else) for input on the project. Mount Pleasant, a village of 26,000, spent at least half a billion dollars on roads, water infrastructure, and buying up the properties.
As Tabak writes, "Foxconn owns a thousand acres of Wisconsin property. What they do with it is unknown. They not only own property, they have a pipeline to Lake Michigan, one of the last great resources of clean water in the world. The rest of the property, which is now about 3,900 acres, is basically an empty industrial park waiting for the civic leaders to potentially develop it over time."
As the book chronicles, the Foxconn project was best characterized by big promises but with little follow-up. The company kept downsizing its plans. Local communities made investments they couldn't afford. Most of the family-supporting jobs never materialized.
"Foxconned: Imaginary Jobs, Bulldozed Homes and the Sacking of Local Government." It is well-researched and tells a cautionary tale for politicians and local governments not to fall in love with economic expansion programs without more built-in protections for its citizens and taxpayers.
While this story is about something that happened in Wisconsin, the author says it has lessons for many other communities. "Foxconn in Wisconsin is not only a case study of economic development gone wrong; it is a cautionary tale because it encompasses common foibles that are replicated over and over across the country, in projects large and small. It's a story in its full scope that could add up to the misappropriation of billions of taxpayer dollars for political gain and ambition, the valuing of industrial development over environmental protection, the enriching of a small number of insiders while simultaneously proclaiming that state coffers have nothing left for those in need. And without a second thought, it proceeded to steamroll the property and rights of those unfortunate to have been in the way."
Here are other takeaways from the book:
2019 January 27 Terry Gou's special assistant Louis Woo reveals that Foxconn's manufacturing plans in Wisconsin have been scaled back and will shift to a research and development focus, hiring mostly engineers and researchers,
April 29 Racine County and the Village of Mount Pleasant have borrowed $350 million to pay for Foxconn infrastructure based on the needs of a Gen 10.5 fabrication facility.
August 27 Foxconn pledges $100 million to the University of Wisconsin for a new research center. A year later the university had received less than 1 percent of promised support and reported "no significant progress" on the remaining sum.
What started with a request for 40 acres of land expanded to 200 acres by May. By mid-June, the agencies had been told major suppliers would trail in after Foxconn and that they should be looking for more than 1,000 acres to accommodate all of them. By mid-July Foxconn had informed site-selection officials that they were also looking to develop a "Smart City," too, and they needed 2,300 acres for that.
One stipulation had been agreed upon early: Foxconn was not going to pay for the land. The host municipality would be responsible for buying up the thousands of acres and then pitching in to expand roads, build out sewers, and make millions of gallons of high-quality Lake Michigan water available each day.
Foxconn also had a history of broken deals. Take Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In 2013 locals were ecstatic when Gou announced he'd be investing $30 million and hiring five hundred workers for a high-tech factory. The deal just dissipated over the years. The company had also reneged on major promises in India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Brazil. These were not secrets. But Mark Hogan, head of Wisconsin's economic development authority, told a reporter that the state team didn't think background research on Foxconn was necessary because "we got to know these people so well."
Walker and his team likely never took the time to even consider cultural issues, such as the fact that contracts in China aren't viewed as holding the binding effect assumed in the US.
One of the most controversial aspects of Wisconsin's agreement with Foxconn was arrangement for massive amounts of Lake Michigan water to come via Racine's water authority to the Foxconn complex. Early estimates placed Foxconn's water usage at approximately equal to the entire city of Racine's daily pull from Lake Michigan—around 17 million gallons a day.
The case of struggling Racine and the false hope that Foxconn would bring back manufacturing jobs only highlights the reality of our modern economy. Although political gain was an essential ingredient to Wisconsin's multibillion-dollar offer to Foxconn, it was exacerbated by the scarcity of reasonably compensated jobs for blue-collar and low-education workers. Scarcity drives the willingness to accept the cost of skyrocketing incentives.
In a White House event, Walker said, "Thi is a great day for America, it is a great day for Wisconsin, and it is a great day for Foxconn. Today, we're announcing the single largest economic development project in the history of the state of Wisconsin and one of the largest in the history of this country."
The company promised to manufacture large-screen TVs in a new plant in which they would invest $10 Billion. For its part, Wisconsin pledged $3 billion in incentives, plus clear land and expand and build new roads to accommodate the new facility. Once word got out that the plant would be built in Racine County (between Milwaukee and the Illinois border), homeowners discovered they would have to sell their homes and move. No one asked those residents (or anyone else) for input on the project. Mount Pleasant, a village of 26,000, spent at least half a billion dollars on roads, water infrastructure, and buying up the properties.
As Tabak writes, "Foxconn owns a thousand acres of Wisconsin property. What they do with it is unknown. They not only own property, they have a pipeline to Lake Michigan, one of the last great resources of clean water in the world. The rest of the property, which is now about 3,900 acres, is basically an empty industrial park waiting for the civic leaders to potentially develop it over time."
As the book chronicles, the Foxconn project was best characterized by big promises but with little follow-up. The company kept downsizing its plans. Local communities made investments they couldn't afford. Most of the family-supporting jobs never materialized.
"Foxconned: Imaginary Jobs, Bulldozed Homes and the Sacking of Local Government." It is well-researched and tells a cautionary tale for politicians and local governments not to fall in love with economic expansion programs without more built-in protections for its citizens and taxpayers.
While this story is about something that happened in Wisconsin, the author says it has lessons for many other communities. "Foxconn in Wisconsin is not only a case study of economic development gone wrong; it is a cautionary tale because it encompasses common foibles that are replicated over and over across the country, in projects large and small. It's a story in its full scope that could add up to the misappropriation of billions of taxpayer dollars for political gain and ambition, the valuing of industrial development over environmental protection, the enriching of a small number of insiders while simultaneously proclaiming that state coffers have nothing left for those in need. And without a second thought, it proceeded to steamroll the property and rights of those unfortunate to have been in the way."
Here are other takeaways from the book:
2019 January 27 Terry Gou's special assistant Louis Woo reveals that Foxconn's manufacturing plans in Wisconsin have been scaled back and will shift to a research and development focus, hiring mostly engineers and researchers,
April 29 Racine County and the Village of Mount Pleasant have borrowed $350 million to pay for Foxconn infrastructure based on the needs of a Gen 10.5 fabrication facility.
August 27 Foxconn pledges $100 million to the University of Wisconsin for a new research center. A year later the university had received less than 1 percent of promised support and reported "no significant progress" on the remaining sum.
What started with a request for 40 acres of land expanded to 200 acres by May. By mid-June, the agencies had been told major suppliers would trail in after Foxconn and that they should be looking for more than 1,000 acres to accommodate all of them. By mid-July Foxconn had informed site-selection officials that they were also looking to develop a "Smart City," too, and they needed 2,300 acres for that.
One stipulation had been agreed upon early: Foxconn was not going to pay for the land. The host municipality would be responsible for buying up the thousands of acres and then pitching in to expand roads, build out sewers, and make millions of gallons of high-quality Lake Michigan water available each day.
Foxconn also had a history of broken deals. Take Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In 2013 locals were ecstatic when Gou announced he'd be investing $30 million and hiring five hundred workers for a high-tech factory. The deal just dissipated over the years. The company had also reneged on major promises in India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Brazil. These were not secrets. But Mark Hogan, head of Wisconsin's economic development authority, told a reporter that the state team didn't think background research on Foxconn was necessary because "we got to know these people so well."
Walker and his team likely never took the time to even consider cultural issues, such as the fact that contracts in China aren't viewed as holding the binding effect assumed in the US.
One of the most controversial aspects of Wisconsin's agreement with Foxconn was arrangement for massive amounts of Lake Michigan water to come via Racine's water authority to the Foxconn complex. Early estimates placed Foxconn's water usage at approximately equal to the entire city of Racine's daily pull from Lake Michigan—around 17 million gallons a day.
The case of struggling Racine and the false hope that Foxconn would bring back manufacturing jobs only highlights the reality of our modern economy. Although political gain was an essential ingredient to Wisconsin's multibillion-dollar offer to Foxconn, it was exacerbated by the scarcity of reasonably compensated jobs for blue-collar and low-education workers. Scarcity drives the willingness to accept the cost of skyrocketing incentives.
February 23, 2023
Full disclosure: I already despised Scott Walker and his hateful, underhanded, self-interested governance of Wisconsin before I read this book. That feeling tripled after reading Foxconned. Walker, a man who claimed to reject all government interference in society, used every available government loophole and policy to fund enormous, taxpayer-fueled paychecks for himself and a whole circus train of cronies via the financial dumpster fire that is the Foxconn deal. Walker's ignorance was glaring in the total lack of due diligence he and his posse did prior to signing the Foxconn deal, a deal the author calls "nothing but a long con." While taxpayers had their new houses razed because they were "blighted", fertile farmland was plowed under, and environmental protections were circumvented, Scott Walker, his political sycophant toadies, and slimy businessmen -- mostly from China -- all stood aside and watched the millions roll into their personal and business coffers.
The author does an excellent job of providing specific details of how the Foxconn deal happened as well as making it clear that the Foxconn scam is not unique in government deal-making; taxpayers are left on the hook for these kinds of business deals all of the time. The book ends with pages of notes and works cited supporting the claims of the text.
If you live in the Milwaukee-Chicago corridor, you are most impacted by this deal, and this book is a must-read for you to understand what is happening literally in your backyard.
The author does an excellent job of providing specific details of how the Foxconn deal happened as well as making it clear that the Foxconn scam is not unique in government deal-making; taxpayers are left on the hook for these kinds of business deals all of the time. The book ends with pages of notes and works cited supporting the claims of the text.
If you live in the Milwaukee-Chicago corridor, you are most impacted by this deal, and this book is a must-read for you to understand what is happening literally in your backyard.
February 26, 2023
An excellent deep dive into the Wisconsin Foxconn development deal touted by former governor scott walker. Part con job, part wishful thinking, part unstoppable money train, this book shows how many states and cities pursue development in a way that ends up mainly leaving the taxpayer holding the bag for the expense.
May 5, 2024
I learned a lot about the Foxconn debacle which I didn't know much about. This is a pretty quick read and well told. It also makes a very strong case that it is probably never the best way to invest public resources to direct them to private commercial incentives.
February 10, 2022
I appreciated the range of topics covered. However, it did repeat itself like it was created from several original articles.
September 16, 2022
I had some issues with his take on TIF usage but can't argue with the fact that it isn't always used correctly. Plus the additional information he provided about the Foxconn fiasco was fascinating.
November 27, 2022
Infuriating! More people need to read this report, rather than ignore the events that lead up to this disaster and the promises made by short-sighted politicians. (Rant over)
March 26, 2023
This book is a must read for everyone.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews