This week Marshall Helmberger fills us in on the Ely company Wintergreen getting invited to the White House, the derailment of the Polymet Land Swap and visitors headed to Ely who have been blindly following their smartphone directions and have ended up stuck on a rough road that ends up in a mudhole.
We also want to send our congratulations to Marshall and Jodi and the staff at the Timberjay newspaper. They were recently sited in the Columbia Journalism Reviews "The Timberjay takes on the nation’s most heated mining battle".
“Minnesota as Trump Country? Don’t bet on it,” Marshall Helmberger, publisher of The Timberjay, headlined his June 27 editorial, which ran a week after President Trump held a rally in the nearby city of Duluth. Like most of Helmberger’s editorials, the piece was expansive, gutsy, thoroughly researched, and left of center. It was also written from the heart of the Iron Range, a taconite and iron-ore mining stronghold President Trump has zeroed-in on. There’s a hotly contested US House seat up for grabs in Minnesota’s Eighth Congressional District, where Trump stumped for Republican candidate Pete Stauber. And the Trump administration is quietly dismantling environmental regulations to pave the way for Twin Metals, a subsidiary owned by Chilean conglomerate Antofagasta, to build a controversial sulfide-ore copper-nickel mine near the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
