Iron County Officials Ducking Under Spotlight

Unlicensed, heavily armed mercs
(now gone) can't cover up
Iron County corruption.
Photo by Ron Ganson

The most destructive element impeding corruption is the spotlight.

Thanks to the work of two Native American bands—the Lac Courte Orielles and Bad River Band of Ojibwe—several attorneys and citizens of Wisconsin, a lone photographer, Rob Ganson, the Iron County Board decided "Tuesday night to postpone any directives to its district attorney [Martin Lipske] to seek civil and criminal charges against the Lac Courte Orielles for its harvest camp in Iron County," as media attention has turned to Iron County revealing a politically incestuous, corrupt rural community isolated from most of Wisconsin.

Iron County officials are pulling back, as its decision last night indicates.

Iron County DA Lipske is a real piece of work, corrupt and incompetent, who has gone media-silent now as Wisconsin is finding out just how corrupt this county of 5,900 people in northern Wisconsin really is.

Some Iron County rightwingers, after Republican legislators took $15 million from mining interests and then let Gogebic Taconite write the mining law earlier this year, are suggesting outside agitators, the media and reformist Wisconsin legislators should stay out of Iron County.

Rob Ganson

Forget it. The jig is up.

And keep your eye on District Attorney Martin Lipske, fronting for Gogebic Taconite, though the prospects for this mining operation are dropping fast in the face of barriers protecting the American public and Native Americans from unlawful energy extraction operations.

Writes Rob Ganson, "When oligarchs hire thugs to masquerade as politicians, and those counterfeit 'leaders' employ other thugs to support class warfare, the 99% MUST RISE, because the very machinery of democracy has been compromised."

As Native American law expert, Charles Wilkinson writes:
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This iron mine complex cannot go ahead without a full analysis of the treaty rights of the Lac Courte Oreilles (LCO) band. More than a century and a half ago, the LCO negotiated treaties that guaranteed tribal members the right to hunt and fish on their former lands. The transfer of those lands by the tribes has been of great benefit to the non-Indians of northern Wisconsin but the courts have squarely recognized that, in return, those promises must be honored. Earlier this year a federal judge in Washington State ruled, under similar circumstances, that the treaties require more than just allowing tribal members to hunt and fish—the treaties also require healthy habitat so that the species can thrive.

And, so, the question is: 'Will this mining complex adversely affect the habitat of treaty-protected species?' If so, the proposed mining project will have to be revised or abandoned.

See also the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC).

Who wrote the Wisconsin Mining Bill