Foxconn fraud - both with Pruitt's EPA, and in its scale. PULL THE PLUG

In a story that absolutely did not shock me, it came out over the weekend that Scott Pruitt, the crooked and disgraced former administrator of the Environmental Protection Administration, decided to change its findings on Wisconsin’s Foxconn project in Racine County, overruling EPA staff members that had done an honest analysis .

Under President Donald Trump, the Environmental Protection Agency initially had recommended labeling Racine County as violating federal air quality standards for ozone in 2017 — a designation that could have required Taiwan-based Foxconn to install expensive state-of-the-art pollution controls at its flat-screen manufacturing plant.

But after appeals by GOP Gov. Scott Walker and at the apparent direction of then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, the EPA reversed course in 2018, ruling Racine was in compliance with the ground-level smog standard. The decision followed weeks of objections from EPA career staff, who said they saw no technical basis to justify it, according to correspondence released under a public records request.

“I am still in disbelief,” one wrote, after citing new directions from Pruitt that clashed with the EPA’s earlier plan to label the region in “nonattainment.” “I do not see a sound technical basis for the area we are being directed to finalize in Wisconsin,” Jenny Liljegren, a scientist in EPA’s Air and Radiation Division, wrote in an April 11, 2018, e-mail.

The documents, obtained by the Sierra Club and Clean Wisconsin under the Freedom of Information Act, show technical experts repeatedly questioned Wisconsin officials’ assertions that the areas should be classified as satisfying federal ozone standards.

And after this information has been revealed as part of a federal lawsuit, the Trump Administration is saying “Our bad.”

Administration officials aren’t admitting they did anything wrong, the lawyers contend. But they can see EPA data showing the region’s smog problems are getting worse, not better, and that polluters in four counties singled out by Pruitt for special treatment are contributing to chronically dirty air breathed by millions of people.

The court shouldn’t rule against the Trump administration, the lawyers pleaded. Rather, they said, it “could benefit from additional explanations” and the EPA could end up revising its designations.

“These federal attorneys looked at the record, relied on their professional judgment and realized there isn’t any evidence to justify Pruitt’s last-minute switcheroo,” said Howard Learner, executive director of the Environmental Law and Policy Center, one of the nonprofit groups that sued to overturn the EPA’s smog designations in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin.

Gee, why would Pruitt have wanted to clear the way for Foxconn in 2018? It couldn’t have had to do with wanting this picture ahead of that November’s elections to try to trick unsuspecting voters on this scam, could it?

It isn’t just the Foxconn-sin region that was allowed to dirty the air around Lake Michigan under Pruitt. A Chicago Tribune story from today tells us that counties in Northern Illinois and Northwest Indiana were also given exemptions from air pollution standards after the DC version of crooked Scotty decided he knew better than the experts.

The corruption randomness of Pruitt’s decisions has led to a major record of the EPA losing in court since Trump took office in 2017.

“Our final (metropolitan) area designation for Chicago is not the result of an analysis with any technical support,” Eric Svingen, an engineer in the EPA’s Chicago office, wrote in an April 24, 2018, email to colleagues who were attempting to draft a report that reflected Pruitt’s wishes.

It remains to be seen if the federal appeals court will give Trump administration officials another chance to revise the Chicago-area smog designations. During President Donald Trump’s first two years in office, his administration prevailed only 6 percent of the time when its anti-regulatory decisions were challenged in the courts, according to a Brookings Institution study.

In another form of Foxconn self-dealing and BS reasoning, the Capital Times’ Dave Zweifel sums up the findings of a recent Wall Street Journal article which shows that the 2017 analysis that WisGOPs used to justify the Fox-con was at best exaggerated if not outright BS.

Zweifel notes that the jobs and investment promised from the Foxconn project had a lot more to do with Foxconn trying to get the best deal, and little to do with reality.

In several respects, the story is troubling because it shows how consultants like Ernst and Young work both sides of the street in helping clients like Foxconn get the best deal. Not only was E&Y working for Foxconn; the Walker administration drew heavily from the same firm to justify the $4 billion in state and local tax subsidies for the plant, which is still in a state of flux.

"In the spring of 2017, Ernst and Young sent Wisconsin and other states a request for proposals for an investment opportunity it identified only as 'Project Flying Eagle.'" the story related. "The document included an explicit request that governments 'provide offsets to all taxes levied at the state and local level' and 'propose potential administrative and/or legislative changes' if they are 'unable to close the cost differential' with the company's existing manufacturing facilities in Asia."

In Wisconsin's case, these last words undoubtedly convinced state officials to include an easing of environmental regulations and water diversion rules to help secure the deal.

Put these two factors together, and you can see how Trump’s EPA and WisGOP were on the same page in giving Foxconn special treatment to give off an image that this boondoggle wasn’t the low-return giveaway many of us said it was.

Zweifel notes that the WSJ article also talks to an economist who mentions that Ernst and Young conveniently left out details that are now central to the Fox-con. Those details are the ones that have resulted in the largest taxpayer costs sunk into it at this time, and are the parts of the Fox-con most at risk as this project flounders.

The Wall Street Journal story quotes economist Timothy Bartik claiming that the E&Y study made wrong assumptions about the plant's impact on southeastern Wisconsin and failed to include the huge local government costs for school and roads to serve an influx of people.

"I think a true fiscal analysis would show that this project will never break even fiscally," Bartik told the paper.

I don’t ever want to hear any GOP trying to sell “13,000 jobs” ever again without the words “HE/SHE’S LYING” immediately after it.

It’s well past time to get out from under the Foxconn albatross and go to court to break the state’s contract with these lowlifes. This contract was constructed and agreed to in bad faith, and it is more clear than ever that the political motivations of desperate GOPs overruled honest consideration of what really might happen with the Foxconn project.

We know better now, and you can bet that Foxconn and the Trumpkins don’t want more information to be discovered in a court case, so they might be fine with getting a one-time check and going away. The sooner the state of Wisconsin can cut the cord on all of these bad-faith actors (both in business and in politics), the better.