Good citizens of the American heartland — the international socialist revolution has arrived in the fine Midwestern state of Wisconsin.

But these socialists did not come waving red flags and announcing the dictatorship of the proletariat. In fact, their victory was even celebrated by Donald Trump. They came in business suits and carried home profits for the shareholders of Apple and Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, headquartered in Taiwan.

At the surface, the opening of a Foxconn plant in rural Wisconsin seems to play into the familiar rhetoric of the Trump era. Clever deal-making attracted international capital to the forgotten American working class of the Midwest, who will now get back to work after the slow Obama years. To quote America’s internet troll president, the economic progress in Wisconsin shows that “America is open for business”.

But if you dig below the surface, you realize that these celebratory ribbon cuttings are only undermining the public’s last belief in the fairness of the American system. The common, folksy picture of American capitalism praises the industrious virtues of a family-owned hardware store, a child’s lemonade stand, or a successful local restaurant. In decades past, regular people believed, perhaps naively, that they could, through hard-work and discipline, become the next Sam Walton or Steve Jobs.

But where is the economic justice in an America when workers are now told to celebrate low-paying created by a foreign company who has partnered with the state government for economic handouts totaling $4 billion? Nearly a fourth of that money is being used to simply confiscate land from rural residents through eminent domain and turn it over to the factory. Where is the good story of proud American self-sufficiency in that economic picture?

It reads almost like a scene playing out in the nightmare of a paranoid right-winger — an abusive, suicide-inducing international company operated out of communist China buys up rural Wisconsin with the help of Big Government and puts the citizens to work. Yet the spineless Paul Ryan, a noted critic of eminent domain laws, fails to offer even words of support for those threatened by this socialist giant.

American politicians really are quite open to socialism, so long as it benefits the rich and only the rich.

Hard Lens co-host Dan Luepker attacked this right-wing hypocrisy on Episode 57 of the Hard Lens podcast

When you don’t have money, you don’t have power, you have to eat up all the costs the system throws at you, and how dare you insinuate the idea that you should get a little help when it’s needed. But if you’re a major corporation, either foreign or domestic, if you gave money to politicians, how dare you stop them from getting government handouts. It’s a real sense of hypocrisy. There’s no real ideology here. There’s no [sense of] “Well, we’re conservatives in government and we have these conservative values”. It’s consistently been, “We are bought by people with money and we will do their bidding”. These are not government officials in the real sense and idea of the word, they are employees of several companies that are doing things using the power of government as leverage to do so.

As his fellow co-host Paul DuPont concludes,

It’s socialism for the rich and free-market capitalism for everyone else.

You can watch the clip here

Written by George Saad

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