States and cities across the country continue to give massive handouts to wealthy corporations. These handouts come in many different forms, but politicians on both the Left and Right are willing to fork over cash the billion-dollar industries because those industries promise jobs. Unfortunately, those jobs that are promised rarely become a reality. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: States and cities across the country continue to give massive handouts to wealthy corporations. These handouts come in many different forms, but politicians on both the left and the right are willing to fork over cash by the billions to end industry. Please come to our town, we’re gonna give you jobs. Give us this break and that break and we’re gonna give you jobs. Now we know, as we’ve known for two decades, it’s a lie. How many stories have we done pointing out that this big pitch, let us, Boeing, let us come to your town and we’re gonna make a bunch of new jobs? Nonsense. We have years of experience to show it’s a argument.
Farron Cousins: Amazon, Boeing, Foxconn, the Carrier, you know, air conditioning company, they all make these big promises and what they do, and this is explained at length. You interviewed the author of this book probably 15 years ago. I don’t remember the author, but I remember the name, “The Great American Jobs Scam.”
Mike Papantonio: Yes. Yes. A smart guy.
Farron Cousins: And it is a book that lays all of this out. And I wish I remembered his name. But what they do is these companies will approach multiple different cities and say, all right, listen, I gotta build a factory. Town A, town B, town C, what are y’all gonna give me? And they pit the cities against each other on who’s gonna give me more tax breaks? Who’s gonna give me subsidies? Who’s gonna let me dump my toxins into your waterway? And then they go with the highest bidder and never deliver the number of jobs that they say.
Mike Papantonio: The case I just finished, a $12.5 billion settlement that I made with the folks that make PFAS, everywhere that company would go, they would say, well, let us build here and let us dump into your river or your waterways because you need the jobs. And nobody ever asked, well, is this gonna kill people? And now we know, yeah, it will kill people. But this is the kind of thing we’re willing to do. So some boneheaded politician with a depth of this much can stand up in front of his constituents and say, I really did something for you. But here’s the truth, Wisconsin, they offered Foxconn 4.8, almost $5 billion and they, Foxconn said, well, we’re gonna give you 13,000 jobs. It was one 10th. And that’s not even still solid. You go down the, Washington state, Boeing, 8, almost $9 billion is what is what they offered Boeing. Come here, we’re gonna give you these tax breaks and all this good stuff. And Boeing said, well, gee, we’re gonna give you 24,000, almost 25,000 jobs. It wasn’t even close. Wasn’t even close. Not only that, they’re laying people off. And the entity, the governmental entity doesn’t have the right to go back and say, hey, we want our money back because it’s already spent. And so this, I mean, there’s tons of these stories and all you gotta do is take a look at it. Any intelligent politician could find all this information in 10 minutes.
Farron Cousins: Well, and remember AOC, when she actually fought the Amazon plant.
Mike Papantonio: Yes.
Farron Cousins: On these grounds saying that they’re lying to us. She got dragged, you know, through the ringer on that because everybody said, oh, you’re costing us jobs. Well, it turns out no, Amazon was lying. Just like we see every time. But the local politicians, the mayors, the local reps.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, we’re bringing new jobs.
Farron Cousins: They stand up there, they stand there at the ribbon cutting, and they take all the credit, left and right.
Mike Papantonio: Same thing with the stadiums, right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: They’re gonna come and build a big stadium and our football team’s gonna bring in all this. And the community gets hammered financially most of the time. So what you have, I mean, it’s kind of a perfect storm. You got unsophisticated, woefully uneducated politicians that in a knee-jerk kind of way are saying, this is, wow, this is a good talking point. I brought you 13,000 jobs. They don’t even follow the rest of the sentence. It doesn’t work. And so they’re easy prey. It’s their low, it’s their low information. These politicians that jump on this, low information. They’re easy prey because corporate America knows they don’t know what the hell they’re doing.
Farron Cousins: Corporate America loves stupid local politicians.
Mike Papantonio: Yes. Yes. Exactly. I guess that’s the headline, isn’t it?
