-As President Biden touted
his infrastructure plan to create jobs
and stimulate the economy, one of the signature scams
of the Trump era, a deal that was also supposed to create jobs
and stimulate the economy, fell apart, revealing yet again that the GOP's new brand of
supposed pro-worker populism is a giant fraud. For more on this, it's time
for "A Closer Look." ♪♪ Let me just say
right off the bat that we are aware that
federal investigators executed search warrants
of Rudy Giuliani's office and apartment this morning, and I promise we will have a lot
more to say about it tomorrow because there is no subject
nearer and dearer to our hearts than Rudy Giuliani
being a giant [bleep] I'm guessing, when they arrived, Rudy tried to flush his phone
down the toilet as the feds were carrying away
the toilet. "Sir, it's a floor model.
It's not attached to anything." "Oh, no, Rudy, ya dope! You're supposed to have pipes." Also, President Biden
delivered his first address to a joint session of Congress
tonight. And we're taping this
beforehand, so we don't know what he said, but something tells me he had
a slightly different energy than the speeches he attended
as President Obama's VP, where he was always doing stuff
like grabbing John Boehner's arm or giving finger guns
to people in the crowd like he was walking around
a villa in Miami Beach making sure everyone at
the pool party was having fun. "Cam, that glass looks empty.
You need a refill? Stacy, I better see you
in the pool later. I got the jets turned on. Brad, throw another dog
on the grill for me. I worked up an appetite kicking
Steve's ass in volleyball. You got to work on your dig,
Steve." One thing we do know
about Biden's speech is that he has very likely
spent some time touting his infrastructure plan,
and as he pitches that plan, he's also dealing with
an intransigent GOP that has its own idea
for infrastructure, a GOP that's also trying to
rebrand itself after decades of subservience
to corporate interests as a populist,
pro-workers party. They've gone from defending
so-called job creators and decrying class warfare to calling corporations
that don't side with them on cultural issues woke. -This past month,
we have seen the rise of the woke corporation. We have seen the rise
of big business enforcing a woke standard. -I think corporate America, by trying to genuflect
to this wokeness, I think they have gone down
a really bad road. They're going to tie themselves
in knots trying to please
the extreme left. -Senator McConnell
says corporations are, quote, behaving like
woke parallel governments and becoming like a vehicle
for far-left mobs to hijack our country. -Let's just cut to the chase. The big tech platforms
are owned and operated by woke capitalists. They're leftists.
They're liberals. -There's no way Mark Zuckerberg
is woke. At most, he's switched on. And none of those Plutocrats
are leftists. I'm pretty sure Jeff Bezos
and Bernie Sanders aren't on the same page when it
comes to most political issues. I doubt Bernie even uses Amazon. "I get everything I need
from the co-op, and when I run out of batteries, I just connect some copper wire
to a potato. Hey, turn down the A/C. Potatoes don't grow on trees." And just because they pulled some Dr. Seuss books
with racist language and put out statements
against voter suppression laws doesn't mean companies
like Amazon and Delta
are suddenly woke. For one thing, they both
tried to bust unions. Amazon put up anti-union posters
in employee bathrooms, and Delta handed out flyers
that said, "Union dues cost
around $700 a year. A new video game system with
the latest hits sounds like fun. Put your money towards that instead of paying dues
to the union." Yeah, exactly. And if you
get sick in real life, all you have to do is
hit a brick with your head
until a mushroom pops out. The point is, these
giant corporations
aren't suddenly woke just because they've done
the bare minimum of, say, coming out against
racist voter suppression laws. But Republicans are still
infuriated by that, so they've tried to co-opt
the anti-corporate language of actual left-wing populists like Bernie, Elizabeth Warren,
and AOC. For example,
Florida Senator Marco Rubio wrote an absolutely ludicrous
screed against supposedly
woke corporations in the "New York Post"
this week, where he said, "No policymaker
would allow a company to dump toxic waste into a river upstream of a thriving town
he is charged with governing. Yet corporate America eagerly
dumps woke, toxic nonsense into our culture, and it's only gotten
more destructive with time. These campaigns will be met
with the same strength that any other polluter
should expect." What any other polluter
should expect? So, basically, total and
complete loyalty from the GOP? Republicans cut so many
environmental regulations, I'm pretty sure
they made it legal to sell toxic sludge
as an energy drink. And do I drink a sludge
every now and then? Yeah. That's only because
I'm up all night writing this week's corrections. These guys are, in many way,
just following in Donald Trump's footsteps. He was not in any serious way
a populist, except that he co-opted
some of the language of populism while doling out trillions
in giveaways to corporations that mostly just gave the money
to their wealthy investors. Trump, for example,
said the 2017 tax cuts would be rocket fuel
for the economy, and earlier this month, Senate
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said rolling them back
would destroy jobs. -This tax bill of 2017, undone, would create an extensive loss
of jobs in our country, do exactly the wrong thing, and move us
in the wrong direction. -You hear that,
woke corporations? The Republican party
is on to you. If you don't stop dumping
woke toxic waste into our cultural river, then we are going to punish you
by allowing you to... continue paying zero dollars
in federal income taxes. That can't be right. Wally,
I think the card is wrong. -That's what it said
in the script. -But does it seem right to you? -Hey, Seth, I just write
the cards, baby. -Wally, the only way
you could be cooler is if you wore sunglasses
under your face shield. Anyway, the point is,
this is the scam. Republicans call themselves
pro-worker populists while doling out cash
to giant companies who mostly use it to decrease
their tax liabilities and enrich
their wealthy investors, even though the whole point
was supposed to be to use that money to invest
in the economy and create jobs. And there was a perfect test
case of this scam in Wisconsin at the start
of Trump's presidency. -After months of speculation,
Foxconn promises to build its first American
factory here in Wisconsin. -It's the largest
economic development project in state history and will initially require more
than 16,000 construction jobs sourced from
Wisconsin businesses. The LCD manufacturing campus expected to be operational
in 2020 and the project
expected to have at least a $7 billion annual
economic impact on the state. -And with this project
moving forward, Governor Walker coined
a new term today, the Wisconn Valley, describing our area as a new hub
for technology and innovation. -They wouldn't have done it here
except that I became president, so that's good. Congratulations on truly
one of the eighth wonders. I think we can say this is -- We can say the eighth wonder
of the world. This is the eighth wonder
of the world. -Yeah, it goes great pyramids, the Colossus of Rhodes, and then a factory in Wisconsin. You get the sense Trump has used
"eighth wonder of the world" to describe a lot of his
projects over the years. "Trump Taj Mahal --
It's going to be the eighth wonder of the world. Blackjack tables,
cocktail waitresses, and we're going to
pump in oxygen to keep people gambling longer, just like the guy
who built the real Taj Mahal, the Emperor Shah Jahan. Great guy. Great guy. Met him at Studio 54
back in '86. He was there
with Christie Brinkley. She went on to marry Billy Joel,
Mr. Piano Guy himself. You know, I love the song
'We Didn't Start the Fire,' but I always thought
'Trump' should be in that song. A lot of famous people
in there, but no Trump. What do we think, folks?
Should Trump be -- Should 'Trump' be in
'We Didn't Start the Fire'? Space monkey, Mafia,
Donald Trump -- Has a nice ring to it. You don't want to mess with
the space monkey Mafia. Almost impossible to do
construction on other planets." "Got to kick back
a lot of space bananas. You know, they'll say... they'll say Trump
tried to start the fire, but we know that's not true. We know that's not true." The Foxconn deal was supposed to
be the shining example of Trump's claim that he was
bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States, and it was proof of concept for
the Republican way of doing it, not by investing directly
in infrastructure but by doling out subsidies
to big companies. Trump was even there for
the ground-breaking ceremony with then Wisconsin Governor
Scott Walker, where he picked up some dirt
with a gold shovel and then gently tossed it back
on the ground near the spot where
he dug it up from. "There you go.
I loosened it up for you." For a guy who was supposedly
in construction, he doesn't even know
how to fake it. If you handed him a hammer, he
would talk it into like a phone. "Send me your best nail guy." Under the deal,
Foxconn was promised a stunning $4 billion
in taxpayer subsidies, and, in return, they were
supposed to spend $10 billion employing 13,000 people at a 20-million-square-foot
manufacturing campus in Wisconsin and instantly
establish Wisconsin as a destination
for tech firms. Again, this was supposed to be
proof positive of Trump's ability to magically
bring back manufacturing jobs without actually making any of the real direct
investments in the economy that, say, Joe Biden and the
Democrats are now proposing. It was also a distillation
of the core GOP philosophy, which is that if you
give massive handouts to giant businesses that are
already flush with cash instead of giving the money
directly to workers, those handouts will eventually
trickle down and create jobs. And credit, where it's due,
the plan worked. The project has been
a huge success. What's that? It wasn't. Shoemaker, you got to tell me
this stuff before the show. This is not cool.
Wally, are you cool with this? -I'm cool with everything,
baby. -Rock and roll, Wally.
How can I stay mad? The point is, the Foxconn deal
was a giant scam. It was obvious it was a scam
from the very beginning. For one thing,
they kept missing key goals and failing to deliver
on their promises, cycling from one idea
to the next. This is a real summary of all the different projects
Foxconn considered for the site. The company spent years pivoting
wildly from idea to idea. The enormous
Gen 10.5 LCD factory specified in the contract became a far smaller Gen 6, then was canceled,
then came back. The company announced
it was building something called the AI+8K+5G ecosystem to be developed in a network
of innovation centers, buildings that the company
purchased only to leave empty. It looked into building
fish farms, exporting ice cream,
storing boats. It announced plans to build
coffee kiosks and ventilators that never moved forward. Most recently, it said it would
build electric cars, though maybe,
the company acknowledged, that will happen in Mexico. Man, that sounds like how I plan
a Mother's Day gift for my wife. I'm going to commission
a painting of our family. Nope,
I don't have time for that. I'm going to take a picture
of our family. Nope, ran out of time. I'm going to find an existing
picture of our family and have it framed.
Nope, I don't have time. I'm going find an existing
picture of our family and text it her with
"Happy Mother's Day." Nope, I'm going to forget
entirely, and then I'm gonna wake up
two Sundays from now in an empty bed
while it slowly dawns on me that I am [bleep] "Honey, I built you a place
to store boats." And yet, as this scam
was unfolding, the village where the campus
was supposed to be located was in the process
of buying up properties and building new roads
to make way for this fancy new factory
they were promised. Wisconsin has already spent
at least $400 million on land and infrastructure, and as of 2019, the village
where the plant is located had paid just over $152 million for 132 properties
to make way for Foxconn, plus $7.9 million
in relocation costs. Meanwhile, Foxconn owns a lot of real estate
in southern Wisconsin now, and it has built
an odd collection of buildings, including the
million-square-foot structure it called the LCD Fab and a glass orb. Cool, so now
instead of 13,000 jobs building high-tech
LCD displays, taxpayers ended up spending
hundreds of millions of dollars on a useless glass orb. Although, shout-out
to Donald Trump on being our first
two-orb President. What do you even do with a glass
orb you don't need anymore? Turn it into a community center? "All right, kids,
it's time for recess. Everyone line up
outside the glass orb, and remember,
do not touch the orb. We still don't know what it does
or what its powers are." Or maybe they'll use it as
a Packers training facility. "All right, go long,
but remember, don't run into the glass wall
again." But it gets even crazier
than that because the state
actually demolished homes and built new roads that,
in a metaphor that's almost "two" on the nose,
actually lead to nowhere. Former President Trump announced Foxconn was coming
July 26, 2017. The following June, Trump,
former Congressman Paul Ryan, and former Governor Scott Walker
were among those who broke ground on the plant
in Mount Pleasant. And since then,
roads have been widened, land flattened,
homes demolished, and the plant has not built
anything yet. -I was there. It's the
weirdest thing, Bertha. There's basically
a giant clear dome that I think is some kind
of data center/museum, a couple of big warehouses, and then farms
and some homes down the street. It is --
There's a bunch of new roads that kind of lead to nowhere. -What did they use
for the blueprints, an M.C. Escher dorm room poster? A giant orb and a bunch of roads
that lead to nowhere. This whole thing is starting to
sound like a David Lynch
project. Did they also give them
$4 billion to build
a state-of-the-art red room where a little man in a red suit teaches you how to dance
and talk in reverse? And even now that Foxconn has
mostly abandoned the project, they're still scooping up
taxpayer handouts even as they leave behind
a trail of debt, broken promises, and chaos. Foxconn is still eligible for
$80 million in tax subsidies, and under the revised deal, the state is still paying
a per-job subsidy of about $55,000. $55,000 for each job. Instead of giving that
to a massive foreign company, how about you give that
directly to workers to build useful stuff here, like bridges
and broadband infrastructure, instead of roads to nowhere and a giant glass orb that's
just going to sit there empty and inevitably cause
traffic delays? "Honey, I'm going to go to
Kroger to pick up some milk. I'll be back in about two hou--
The road leads to nowhere. I got to go around
the giant orb. What do you mean,
which giant orb? The Foxconn orb. Turn off the hairdryer if you
want to have this conversation." So as Biden talks up
his infrastructure plan which would raise
corporate taxes in order to make
direct investments in workers to build things
we actually need, the Foxconn scam
is a cautionary tale about what Republicans would have us
do with that money instead. They want to shovel handouts
to giant corporations already flush with cash, and all the while,
they're ludicrously trying to rebrand themselves as a party
of pro-worker populists. Say what you will
about a scam like this, but one thing's for sure. -They wouldn't have done it here
except that I became president. -This has been "A Closer Look." ♪♪ God's Love We Deliver cooks and brings
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The "FoxConn" continues....
Biggest boondoggle in Wisconsin history. Scotty should have just taken the money for highspeed rail. We would have something at least.
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Kaul should sue them for breach of contract. Restructuring is nonsense. Seth Meyers is painfully unfunny.
It’s almost like the Former Guy lied to Wisconsin! What? Nooooo