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Everyone Failed the Rust Belt [U.S. News & World Report]
No candidate, Republican or Democrat, has a serious plan for adapting to the inevitable changes in the global economy. Where are the specific plans for “upskilling” the workers who made the old mousetraps? What is the strategy for integrating American workers into a richer and more connected world? Instead, we are seeing new flavors of the same policies that have been failing since the 1970s.

EPA Battered By Lawmakers For Flint Water Crisis [POLITICO]
“According to the EPA’s website, its mission is ‘to protect human health and the environment.’ They failed at every single level.”

A Human Study of the American Rust Belt in Decline During the 1980s [Flavorwire]
The waterways, roads, and rails of the Rust Belt once channeled steel and coal through the region, the former industrial heartland of America. A manufacturing decline saw the once thriving area fall into economic decay, leaving the new underclass, largely European immigrants and African-Americans who weren’t able to migrate to the Sun Belt and the West, to fend for themselves. This social landscape is the subject of photographer Jack D. Teemer, Jr., who captured the Rust Belt’s working class in the 1980s, packed between the heaving blast furnaces along the hills.

Old Homes Build New Biz: Material From Detroit House Demolitions Finds New Life As Furniture, Guitars, Eyewear [Crain’s Detroit Business]
“We encourage those relationships formed at the contractor level. The more we work together, the more synergy that can develop and the more material that can be captured and diverted from the landfills.”

Waves Of Criticism, Compliments Hit Design For New Bucks Arena [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]
“We should get away from the Rust Belt look. We have moved beyond that. Let it be unabashedly modern and crisp — moving forward not backwards.”

Lake Erie Wind Would Energize Cleveland [Plain Dealer]
…if the wind farm is successful, the payoff could be so much more than clean energy. It could spur job creation and show the world how a Rust Belt city like Cleveland can think progressively.

Drought For Ohio Presidents At 93 Years [The Blade]
The lack of relevant presidential candidates from Ohio has coincided with the Rust Belt and Midwest’s diminished prestige. Eight of the past nine presidents have hailed from the South or West.

Is Buffalo Really The Most Homophobic City In America? [Advocate]
Statistics and demographics are important components for accurate storytelling. However, providing context about the culture of Buffalo, in addition to other attributing factors that affect the gay people there, is better for telling Buffalo’s story.

Banner photo by Kim Hansen, via Wikimedia Commons.

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