Environmentalists vow to make Wisconsin mine owner ‘cower in fear’

MADISON – Gogebic Taconite, LLC can tell you about the cost of doing business in Wisconsin.

The mining company, which has spent more than $350,000 lobbying legislators to ease the state’s mining regulations, recently hired private security guards to patrol the northern Wisconsin site where it hopes to build a projected $1.5 billion iron ore mine.

That added cost of doing business seems to be just what anti-industrialization, environmental group Earth First! intended.

“Making the preliminary stages of this mine as expensive as possible to send a clear message to financiers that this is an extremely risky investment is one strategy that was being pursued in the following action,” a blogger writing under the name ‘some wild coyotes’ wrote on the Earth First! news site.

The blog recounted 15 protesters wearing bandanas for masks, building barricades to block police response to a planned protest. The blogger wrote that protesters jumped “on trucks and the collection tank and threw pieces of equipment like pickaxes, fire extinguishers, and shovels down the hillside into the thick of the woods. Fences were knocked over and broken and personal cigarettes were raided out of one of the company vehicles as workers and the manager stood in awe.”

Welcome to Wisconsin, where court rulings and legislation have taken the backseat to, at times, violent political demonstrations led by protesters who insist “this is what democracy looks like.”

Read more at WisconsinReporter.com