Wondering if the places that "still look like Indiana" can survive.

So, what about Martinsville? The southern Virginia (former) textile town (see map above) has an unemployment rate of over 20 percent now, the highest in the state. It is not that different from other rural towns down through the Piedmont through North and South Carolina. Martinsville got a lot of attention during the last presidential campaign, which hasn't seemed to help much during this recession, according to the Washington Post's Fredrick Kunkle. "What remains unclear to residents of Martinsville and similar textile towns across the industrial South is whether there is much of anything the politicians can do after the campaigns have passed by," Kunkle wrote. "Even President Obama, who toured Patrick Henry Community College's innovative motor sports training program in the fall with Gov. Timothy M. Kaine at his side, has not produced a prescription for the town's troubles."

Kunkle tells the story of how southern cities lured New England textile mills early last century with cheap labor and low taxes — and how now the South is losing these factories to lower priced countries elsewhere. The state has tried to recruit companies, and has been successful at times. But mostly nothing has happened.

"It would help, several officials said, if politicians stopped trying to recreate the Martinsville of yore," Kunkle wrote. "I think people realize now we can't duplicate what the last hundred years was like," said Allyson K. Rothrock, executive director of the Harvest Foundation in Martinsville. "I really look at this as an opportunity for rebirth."

Recently, the president of Iowa State University announced that he will lay off 77 county extension directors and consolidate county offices into 20 regions. Jay Howe, with the Adair County Free Press wrote about what this loss would mean to rural Iowa: 

"Adair County, for example, will see its resources for office staff and programming reduced significantly. It now will be without a home-based professional to help leverage tax funds to secure grant dollars to address local needs. And it will become dependent upon outsourcing program expertise and searching for ways to pay for much of it if it wishes to maintain current service levels to our people and communities."

Extension services have proved their worth over the last century. (Above is a picture of the old "Negro Extension Service" in Alabama, the service for black rural residents before the service was integrated in the 1960s.) And in Iowa, these services are being cut. Meanwhile, however, we see that the old tax incentive game of development is still being played — and still isn't working. The Des Moines Register reported that a "state-run incentive program that uses public money to cover job training costs for new businesses put millions of dollars into projects that failed to deliver on the promise of new jobs, state auditors said Tuesday." Community colleges borrowed $38.5 million on behalf of businesses that promised to move to Iowa. "Instead, the businesses closed, went bankrupt or otherwise failed to create 15,627 planned jobs," according to an audit of the program. 

Missouri's overdue for infrastructure repairs. With stimulus funding, there will be major work on the big bridge into (and out of) Atchison County.