When you’re a company that’s very successful and has disposable cash, you feel special. Everyone in your hometown loves you. Or at least you think they do. You hire their relatives and you buy shirts for their kids’ little league team so your name is all over the place.
Fisher Industries is such a company. They know how the system works. They use their success in ways that help them. Ethical or not, they find ways to make cash. That includes politics. They know friends that can influence contracts are friends that can get you by the bidding process. All they need is to have a political friend that feels it’s OK to get around the rules.
In Fisher’s case, they have just that. Senator Kevin Cramer is all in. Not only did Fisher Industries make campaign contributions that force friendships, but they had something even more important. They had the product that the most powerful man in the world wanted. They had the wall.
Fisher builds a prefab wall that just needs to be put in place on our border. They don’t care that Mexico isn’t going to pay for it. They just care that somebody does. And by claiming that it’s the only one of its kind, they got around the bidding process. With that and a United States Senator, it worked. They started building the wall.
But in the end, you have to deliver. You need to do the job no matter what rules you’ve broken. President Trump knows they haven’t. In fact, he feels Fishers Industries deliberately sabotaged the job just to embarrass him.
Imagine that, The President of the United States of America claims you did a terrible job on purpose.
It’s a great loss for North Dakota. Not only do we have a United States Senator that recommended Fisher Industries to the President, but we also have a North Dakota company getting national attention for all the wrong reasons.
They didn’t do the job right.
Good riding with you.
Joel Heitkamp
