Main Street

Interesting Things Around the Internet

• Who’s paying to kill health care reform?
• What happens when a single company buys 4,100 acres of land in a single county—then goes bust?
• I just love Martha Rose Shulman’s Recipes for Health in the New York Times. Here’s one for fried green tomatoes that I’m going to try if I can still find green tomatoes.
• Great comparison between the arguments against health care reform now and against Medicare in the 1960s.
• Mercury Marine is shutting down its unionized Fond du Lac plant. This part shows the magnitude of what’s happening to America’s workers and communities:
  

  If the company moves ahead with its plans, it will mark the fourth closing of a Wisconsin community’s most important employer since last September.

  The private equity firm Cerberus closed the profitable Kimberly Paper mill in Kimberly in September; GM closed its century-long operation in Janesville in December, and Chrysler is ending 109 years of auto manufacturing in Kenosha and moving engine work to a new plant in Saltillo, Mexico.