When Donald Trump and then-Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker announced a plan to give billions of dollars to the notorious Taiwanese sweatshop operator Foxconn to build a super-factory in Wisconsin, knowledgeable people were alarmed. Read the rest

In 2017, Trump and then-Wisconsin Governor (and Koch darling) Scott Walker announced that they would give Chinese manufacturing giant $3B in taxpayer subsidies to open the only flat panel display factory in the western hemisphere (the figure quickly grew to $4.1B), despite the company's long, documented history of lying to governments, sucking up subsidies, and never delivering the promised facilities or jobs. Read the rest

The Verge's Josh Dzieza continues his outstanding coverage of Foxconn's shell-game in Wisconsin, where the company -- promised billions in subsidies and tax-breaks by former governor Scott Walker, a Koch darling, and by Trump, who used Foxconn's promise of a major new Wisconsin factory to claim his policies were working -- has lived up to its reputation for overpromising and underdelivering by absorbing billions in subsidies but never delivering on promised jobs. Read the rest

Foxconn gave Wisconsin hard-line GOP governor Scott Walker and Donald Trump a great story to tell about the triumph of their ideology: that with enough corporate welfare, high-tech manufacturing jobs could come back to America, in the form of an LCD factory in Wisconsin that would employ 13,000 people. Read the rest

After announcing that, inevitably, it wasn't going to build an LCD factory in Wisconsin, and would instead use its $4.1 billion subsidy to build a modest R&D facility employing out-of-state skilled workers; Foxconn reversed itself and promised that the factory was back on. Read the rest

When GOP darling Scott Walker offered to hand billions in subsidies to Chinese manufacturing giant Foxconn, he was warned: the Foxconn MO is to suck up billions in public money for ambitious megafactories, then scale them back into small, largely irrelevant facilities (or cancel them altogether). Read the rest

When Wisconsin governor Scott Walker announced a $3 billion corporate welfare plan for a new Foxconn plant in his state, Foxconn watchers warned that the company had a long history of breaking its new factory promises after sucking up billions in taxpayer dollars. Read the rest

Last July, Wisconsin's far-right state government declared victory for its "free market" agenda when it announced that it would transfer $3,000,000,000 in taxpayer-funded corporate welfare to Foxconn, in order to tempt the company to open a factory in the state -- despite the company's long history of broken promises and outright lies about the jobs and spending in other places that had welcomed it in. Read the rest

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker -- whose reign has been haunted by scandal and propped up by out-of-state dark money -- has announced that he will not call special elections to fill seats in the Wisconsin legislature, following on from Democratic upsets in state Republican strongholds. Read the rest

The recent trumpist trumpeting about the plans of Chinese manufacturer Foxconn to open a manufacturing facility in Wisconsin omitted a few key details -- like the fact that Foxconn is being given a sweetheart tax-break that's topped up with 15 years' worth of guarantees of up to $200m/year in cash subsidies at taxpayer expense -- a record-setting taxpayer subsidy that exceeds the previous Wisconsin record-holder by a factor of fifty. Read the rest

Prior to the election of the business-worshipping, union-busting, climate denying Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, the state's Department of Natural Resources website was a rich trove of information about climate change -- as you'd expect from a state with a lot of fresh water, where resource extraction played an important part in the economy. Read the rest

Wisconsin Governor and balanced-budget hawk Scott Walker's failed bid for the GOP presidential candidacy left him with $1.2 million in debt. Read the rest

"We Need Brain" is a quotation from Donald Trump at last night's GOP presidential primary debate, and it's the title of the songified version by the Gregory Brothers. Worth watching just for the GIF-able clips like these: Read the rest

Since 1904, the State of Wisconsin and its university system have been governed by the public service mandate of the "Wisconsin Idea" -- until Governor Scott Walker's office leaned on the university to change the Idea to be all about providing workers for the state's businesses, and then lied about it. Read the rest