Lordstown loses (again)

And Tim Ryan once again proves he's a stone-cold loser.

Sad news out of Northeast Ohio. Lordstown Motors and Foxconn, a company that infamously bilked Wisconsin and former Governor Scott Walker, couldn’t work together to revitalize the old Chevy Cruz factory that is so big the curvature of the Earth had to be taken into account when it originally opened in 1966.

From Nathan Bomey of axios.com:

Lordstown Motors, a startup electric vehicle company once heralded as the savior of a former General Motors plant in Ohio, filed for bankruptcy protection on Tuesday and sued its partner Foxconn.

Why it matters: The filing marks the collapse of a company that had ambitions of becoming a major player in the EV industry but ended up making only a handful of pickups before its implosion.

It also marks a bitter outcome to the once-hopeful relationship between Lordstown and Foxconn, which had invested in the EV company and took over production at its plant in Lordstown, Ohio.

Lordstown Motors founder (and former CEO) Stephen Burns sold the rest of his stake in the country for $3.85 million a mere five days before the bankruptcy filing became public.

Hard to believe how that’s not insider trading, but hey, it’s not like guys who sell $3.5 million worth of stock in a single transaction often go to prison in America. It must have been a lucky move!

When major bankruptcies get announced, it’s always worth going back in time and seeing how area politicians talked about the deal before the ink had barely dried.

Here’s then-Congressman Tim Ryan, via Stan Boney of wkbn.com, in 2021:

The news on Wednesday that Foxconn — one of the largest electronics manufacturers in the world — had entered into a definitive asset purchase agreement with Lordstown Motors pleased Youngstown-area Congressman Tim Ryan.

“The prayers we’ve been saying for 40 years about something coming into the community and being transformational, this is it. Our prayers have been answered,” he said.

[…]

“It’s the stuff dreams are made of. So we’re just thrilled with the potential for the workers and the families in our community who have struggled to find really good employment for a long time. This is it. It’s here,” Ryan said.

It’s important to note that this was after Foxconn hustled Wisconsin. The company originally claimed it would invest $10 billion into the state and create 13,000 new jobs; the actual numbers turned out to be $672 million and 1,454 jobs.

Predictably, the negotiated government subsidies went from $3 billion to $8 million.

None of this mattered to Ryan. Not that he was alone. Republican State Senator Michael Rulli (R-Salem) and Republican Congressman Bill Johnson (R-Marietta) also heralded the deal.

State Rep. Mike Loychik (R-Bazetta) and State Senator Rulli tried to change state law to allow Lordstown Motors to sell its electric light-duty Endurance pickup directly to commercial and fleet customers in Ohio.

Cuyahoga Falls mayor Don Walters (and Congressman Ryan) announced they pre-ordered a Lordstown Endurance Electric pickup truck. Cuyahoga Falls earmarked $70,000 for the purchase.

That all came after then-president Donald Trump told area folks not to sell their home in 2017 because the best days of their lives were right around the corner.

By comparison, here’s Democratic U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, who, as best as I can tell, was the only politician to smell the bullshit wafting from the deal, via Gerry Ricciutti of wytv.com in Nov. 2021:

“Too often they make promises to local workers and local businesses in the supply chain, local communities and then don’t follow up on those promises,” Brown said. “I’m very concerned about these kinds of financial instruments.”

Brown says he and his staff will continue to watch over the progress of Lordstown Motors as it begins production.

Heralding these kinds of deals is what you expect from Republican politicians. It’s why I’ll be skeptical of the so-called $20 billion Intel plant until it’s actually built and active.

Because look how Foxconn executives were talking when they bailed out Lordstown Motors, via Justin Dennis in mahoningmatters.com in June 2022 (emphasis mine):

At least two electric vehicle models are expected to begin rolling off the line at Foxconn’s vehicle assembly plant in the village by the end of 2024.

The plant’s new owner, Foxconn Technology Group, is now courting other partners to develop new electric cars on its open EV platform, but Jerry Hsiao, Foxconn’s chief product officer, isn’t yet ready to say who.

An open house Wednesday at the plant spotlighted the Taiwanese mega-manufacturer’s MIH platform — or “Mobility in Harmony” — which it launched in October 2020 as the basis for new electric vehicles to be made at the plant, and showed what the plant is capable of.

They’re looking for the next big thing in EVs, and it could turn the Mahoning Valley into an electric vehicle manufacturing hub, the company said Wednesday.

“It’s Foxconn’s job to create a broader supply chain,” Hsiao said. “We are no ‘king.’ We are no ‘brand.’ But we are the kingmaker.”

And what a kingmaker they were for Lordstown!

Lordstown Motors is now suing its former partner, per Axios, “alleging fraud and saying its Taiwanese partner ‘had no intention of living up to its commitments’ to help develop a new vehicle platform and instead looked ‘to advance its own business interests.’”

If only there were warning signs that might have happened!

But hey, Republican politicians like State Senator Rulli, State Representative Loychik and Congressman Bill Johnson are still in power and will be re-elected at the next chance.

Former Congressman Ryan wasn’t so lucky. He lost his old district in a run for Senate in which his entire campaign was him appealing to Republican voters as not that kind of Democrat.

He lost to J.D. Vance, an uncharismatic coastal private equity vampire who cosplays as an Appalachian hillbilly in his spare time. This was heralded as a “smart campaign” by the well-compensated loser class known as “Democratic consultants.”

But don’t fret for Ryan. Unlike former Chevy Cruz workers in Lordstown, Ryan used his failed Senate campaign to springboard into a lobbyist career for the methane industry.

From Tim Ryan’s guest column in The Columbus Dispatch earlier this week:

Although China is the world’s leader when it comes to producing renewable energy, when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining, it’s burning more coal than the rest of the world combined. And it’s about to get worse.

Nothing like starting the op-ed like he did his Senate campaign: Yellow-baiting on China before regurgitating Boomer Facebook meme tripe like “solar panels don’t work on cloudy days” (they do).

It only got worse from there, where it basically became your drug dealer trying to convince you to kick your cocaine addiction (coal) with methamphetamine (methane).

With self-dealing Democrats like Ryan (and his predecessor, Jim Traficant), it’s not hard to see how the Youngstown area fell into Republican hands in the first place.

The heydays of steel production and manufacturing in the Mahoning Valley are over. Anybody pretending otherwise is most likely a politician or corporate stooge selling a too-good-to-be-true fantasy.

Hopefully, the next time it happens, the media will pushback against these narratives as I did in June 2021:

I feel like I’ve seen this porno before and it always ends with Ohio getting fucked (and not in the good way either). Some corporate hobgoblins realize they can increase their pay and stock options by moving its unionized factory to countries with lax labor laws and an even sleepier labor movement than America.

Then politicians rush in with a bandaid and bandy about tax credits to some huckster that promises us the good days are coming back as the politicians shriek about jobs.

And then nothing ever happens, and in a few years, we forget about it entirely as the memory of a thriving community fades from collective memory. The Lordstown saga is just another chapter in that sad tale.

I wish I had been wrong about this swindle. I would have gladly owned that. Somehow, I doubt we’ll see similar accountability from the politicians who, for whatever reason, didn’t see the sham for what it was from the beginning.

THOSE WMDs. The secretive world of penile enlargement… We’ve given religion too much respect… The man who is trying to make condoms sexy… The unraveling of a $100 million scam… The woman who bought a mountain for God.