Trump Breaks Ground at Foxconn as Protests Continue

Jun. 29, 2018

11:03 a.m.

Approximately 100 individuals marched to the Mount Pleasant Village Hall to protest Foxconn.

President Donald Trump broke ground on Foxconn’s new manufacturing campus in Mount Pleasant Thursday. Simultaneously, protesters called for transparency and honesty concerning the state’s and village’s handling of the $10 billion factory.

Governor Scott Walker was joined by House Speaker Paul Ryan and many other local and state officials at the campus, which began construction last spring. Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said he is excited for the economic impact, as some say Foxconn will deliver 13,000 new jobs to the area.

“Once the cranes are in the air and thousands of good paying jobs begin to get paid, there will be a lot of people with egg on their face who have been so negative about this whole project,” said Vos. “I’m really optimistic about this project.”

President Trump broke ground at the new Foxconn manufacturing campus in Mount Pleasant Thursday.

Racine Mayor Cory Mason was also excited about the groundbreaking. “Racine is a manufacturing, middle class town... we build things in Racine,” he said. “We lost a lot of manufacturing jobs the last generation, so today gives us the chance to rebuild the middle class for the 21st century.”

‘Blighted’

However, just five miles away at the Mount Pleasant Village Hall, protestors were saying that Foxconn could destroy the environment and cost people their homes. Kim Mahoney lives in Area 1 of the development. She said that her and her family could move, but they believe they are getting low appraisal offers from the village for their home.

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The Village of Mount Pleasant defined the area where Foxconn will be located as “blighted” earlier in June, in order to use eminent domain to acquire any land from holdouts in the area. Mahoney says she and her husband finished work on their new home just months before they found out Foxconn was coming to town.

“We are going to keep attending meetings and try to keep them honest, but that's kind of hard because they do so much behind closed doors,” said Mahoney. “They are just so arrogant about it.”

Kim Mahoney (middle) and her family say the Village of Mount Pleasant is not offering them enough for their property which is located within the Foxconn development area.

Vos said he hopes the village board will not have to use eminent domain to acquire additional holdouts. “I have sympathy for my constituents who are being displaced,” he said. “I would certainly never want to push people off, which is why I said we should do it through the negotiation process, and not use eminent domain when we can.”

Lake Michigan and Foxconn

Another issue protesters focused on was the fact that the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources approved the diversion of 7 million gallons of water per day for Mount Pleasant to use for Foxconn. However, Foxconn announced last week that they would install a $30 million zero liquid discharge system, to ease these concerns.

Mark Denning is a member of the Oneida, Mohican and multiple other Native American tribes. He spoke to a crowd of approximately 100 protesters at the Mount Pleasant Village Hall late Thursday about the importance of protecting Lake Michigan.

“We are a part of this earth. We work for earth and we endeavor to preserve her. We are here to speak for the water because she cannot speak for herself,” said Denning.

Vos also spoke to those concerns at the groundbreaking, mentioning the fact that Chicago can withdraw up to 2.1 billion gallons of water from Lake Michigan per day.

“In Wisconsin, we have already seen Foxconn dramatically reduce the amount of water that they will take from Lake Michigan,” said Vos. “It’s going to go back cleaner than when it came out, so for environmentalists who are concerned, this should be an example of how it can be done in an environmentally friendly way.”

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Comments (1)

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Nothing has changed, "Progress wins, individuals lose"

America has not changed, by beginning as a "democracy of Property Owners", it has always been about business activity over the individual person. That this original system of government put in place by the title-deed landowners eventually gave the right of voting to the working, non-owning class was to shut the worker up by letting them think they had a voice.

Remember that prior to the welfare systems known as Social Security and the ones that gave help to city non-whites, there were no non-owning people alive who were not working in some way. Most people never lived long enough to collect from social security. -- result, if you were still providing value to an owner by agreeing to trade your labor for money, you should be allowed to vote. If you did not agree, you starved, were put into the ground in a pine box, that stopped you from voting.

"Foxconn could destroy the environment and cost people their homes", she was just an individual who stood in the way of "progress for the greater good", just like some rare species of butterfly, bait-fish, or toad.

The "greater good" is that some wealthy private person sets up a business that gets to keep some good-sized portion of the private commerce cash flow after a minimal tax, and he uses the local resources and the local people for his workers. That is the only reasons a business locates where they do.

Note that Foxconn is not locating this in a high-cost of living area like California's "Silicon Valley". The labor there is too costly, the taxes are too high, the environmental rules are too strict. This area is their customers, not their workers. Wisconsin's Pleasant Prairie area is a much more lower paid area, better as a supply of workers with a Midwest work ethic, not too far from a real city like Chicago so the exec class can have a place to live and play, and not too far from people with STEM talent like Madison and Milwaukee, and still plenty of "Laverne & Shirley" or "Lennie & Squiggy" types to be the workers.

TV news does little to show the truth about the work in this plant. Did any of you read the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article last week about the machinery planned in this plant? That layed out the reality, this is a place for making large sheets of very thin glass. They original wanted to do sheets too big for a truck or rail car, as that means making the glass right on the property, and will start smaller. They are still large sheets of glass, and that means big and clean machines, and Wisconsin's displaced workers know how to work on machines like that.

Like I said in other comments, this is not going to be rows of tiny people with tiny fingers like the TV news was showing, it is not going to be a place to hire the farmer's wife and kids while he uses his GPS-steered farm machines out in his spacious flat fields.

If it is going to be large precision machines like the newspaper article mentioned, then it will pay 50K, but using the same kind of people that should make 80K.

SE Wisc. Citizen more than 6 years ago