Tag: upper Midwest
America’s Climate Boomtowns Are Waiting
As my airplane flew low over the flatlands of western Michigan on a dreary December afternoon, sunbursts splintered the soot-toned clouds and made mirrors out of the flooded fields below. There was plenty of rain in this part of the Rust Belt—sometimes too much. Past the endless acres, I could make out the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, then soon, in the other direction, the Detroit River, Lakes Huron and Erie, and southern Canada. In a world running short on
Is Ben Wikler the Most Important Democrat in America?
The man who has been hailed as “the best state chair in the country” is not a national household name. He’s not even a household name in his own state. But on a recent afternoon in the small village of Grafton, Wisconsin, Ben Wikler might as well have been Bono.
Two dozen middle-aged and retired volunteers stood in line to clutch the hand of the chair of the Wisconsin Democrats. “Thank you for everything you do,” they said, beaming
America Needs a New Way to Measure Poverty
When President Lyndon B. Johnson declared an “unconditional war on poverty” in 1964, the nation didn’t have any method of counting the poor, or even a firm notion of how poverty should be defined. His administration scrambled to come up with a measure to chart progress. The gauge, it was later decided, would be the minimum income needed for a family of three or more to put food on the table multiplied by three (at the time, food constituted