Papier-mâché puppet Governor Scott Walker looms over Mt. Pleasant village hall, where Shake the Ground! protestors voiced their discontent with local government participation in the Foxconn deal.
A raucous crowd of protesters marched through the usually quiet village streets of Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin last week amid car honks and peace signs from excited commuters eager to show their support.
Wisconsin’s Forward! Radical Marching Band provided the soundtrack for the march. A man sporting a gigantic, papier-mache caricature of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker on his head towered above the other marchers. Combined with the 90-degree heat, the general feeling was carnivalesque.
This was Operation: Shake The Ground!, where more than 200 people representing a broad array of political concerns converged on Mt. Pleasant’s Smolenski Park to voice their opposition to a massive electronics manufacturing plant.
Last summer, President Trump, backed by Walker and House Speaker Paul Ryan, announced that the Taiwan-based electronics manufacturer Foxconn had agreed to build a 20-million-square-feet megafactory in Wisconsin, where the company plans to produce its next line of ultra-high definition flat screens.
All three were at the June 28 groundbreaking for the new facility, along with Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou and Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son. Simultaneous with the protest, Trump declared triumphantly that the new Foxconn facility would be “the 8th wonder of the world” and the beginning of an “exciting story.”
‘Foxconn is not just an environmental threat––it’s an economic threat, a social threat, a political threat.’
In a monumental deal brokered by Walker and the GOP-controlled state Legislature, Foxconn promised to invest $10 billion in the facility in exchange for a $3 billion tax incentive. Walker followed the announcement with optimistic claims that Foxconn would bring 13,000 jobs in the state.
Under scrutiny it was revealed that Wisconsin taxpayers, who were charged with footing the bill for the largest-ever state subsidy to a private corporation, wouldn’t even see a return on their investment for at least twenty-five years.
Despite concerns, on October 4, 2017, Foxconn officially confirmed its factory site in Racine County, in the southwest corner of the Village of Mt. Pleasant.
But acquiring the land has not been a smooth process. The city has gone to extraordinary measures to obtain about 2,800 acres of farmland and several dozen homes. After the village board voted to designate the entire development site as “blighted” in order to seize the land, more than thirty homeowners registered public objections.
These concerns were voiced loudly at Operation: Shake the Ground!
The protest was organized by The Gaia Coalition, a Waukesha student-led organization inspired by the events at Standing Rock surrounding water protection. Several of the Coalition’s founders participated in this earlier struggle.
In addition to the property disputes, the Foxconn project has been challenged by environmentalists for its plan to divert millions of gallons of water a day from Lake Michigan to service its facilities. Many contend that the plan violates the Great Lakes Compact, and sets a dangerous precedent for future private enterprises seeking access to precious lake water.
The Gaia Coalition, co-founded by student activist Lee Stedman, aims to “bridge this gap between social and environmental movements,” Stedman said in an interview. “Foxconn is not just an environmental threat––it’s an economic threat, a social threat, a political threat. And it’s not just the factory itself––it’s that the factory opens the doors for all these economic and environmental regulations to be softened.”
The Foxconn project has been challenged by environmentalists for its plan to divert millions of gallons of water a day from Lake Michigan to service its facilities. Many contend that the plan violates the Great Lakes Compact.
Drawing representatives from political campaigns across the state, indigenous rights activists, and national groups like Fight for 15 and Voces de la Frontera, the crowd at Shake the Ground! reflected this range of political concerns.
But the unifying thread linking all these causes together was the voice of the community itself.
“They stole people’s houses to build TV screens!”
Remarks like these––reflecting anguish, resentment, and disbelief––filled the momentary pauses between speakers’ remarks at the Smolenski Park rally.
Kelly Gallaher, director of operations for A Better Mt. Pleasant, spoke of the government’s use of “shock-and-awe” tactics against Mt. Pleasant residents––an assault strategy that minimizes resistance through speed and disorientation.
“Fifty-seven days after the proposed Foxconn site had been announced, the village board approved the development agreement, conducted completely in closed session and without input from Mt. Pleasant residents,” she said in a speech. “Fifty-seven days to rush through the largest, most expensive development project in the United States. The town’s bakery took longer to approve than that.”
Resident Kim Mahoney spoke on behalf of homeowners whose properties had been wrested from them under the pretense of eminent domain.
“What’s at risk here is private property rights,” said Mahoney. “If the Village of Mt. Pleasant is allowed to bully and intimidate its residents for the benefit of a private, wealthy corporation, then the government could take your property any time it wants.”
Native Americans stood alongside white property owners in a united front against corporate invasion.
After the rally, the protest took to the streets in a mile-long procession from Smolenski Park to the Mt. Pleasant Village Hall. The march was led by three Native American delegates, followed closely by Mt. Pleasant locals bearing a sign: “OUR LAKES FOXCONNED.”
Native Americans stood alongside white property owners in a united front against corporate invasion.
The irony was not lost on Marin Denning, indigenous activist and lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In an impassioned speech at the Village Hall, he said, “You all standing out there have to ask yourselves the same question now that my ancestors did a hundred years ago, when they looked out across these lands that had been taken from them: Who is in charge here?”
The Shake the Ground! protest offers a vision of how deeply social hierarchies are being rattled by Trump’s brand of crony hyper-capitalism, where multibillion dollar deals between elected officials and corporations are no longer conducted under the table but are, instead, openly celebrated.
“The politics of Walker and Ryan and Trump are all cut from the same cloth,” Christine Neumann-Ortíz, a delegate from Voces de la Frontera, said at the Village Hall. “They have built their careers on dividing one group against another, blaming immigrants, blaming refugees, blaming teachers, blaming the unemployed, while they give more money to the rich, and the poor get poorer, and the Wisconsin middle class erodes.”
As for next steps, the residents of Mt. Pleasant intend to build off the momentum of the protests. “We’re continuing what we’re doing in terms of asking questions, keeping the heat on the village board, and looking towards the next election,” Gallaher says. “If we’re not getting accountability and transparency from this board, then we’ll elect people who will give us those things.”