As you may or may not be aware… There have been protests every weekend and many weekdays at the Capitol building in Madison, WI since the middle of February.
So… Why are there protests?
That’s the interesting thing. It started with collective bargaining rights, and has moved on to a scandal with the Koch brothers, giving direct control over the most liberal state University campus to the governor, potential fraud with supreme court elections, recall elections for both parties, health care and pension scandals, school funding, wind farms, voter ID, child support collection, tax breaks for the rich, and claims of vandalism to the state capitol. Those are just the ones I remember!
I thought I’d share some of the pictures I took of Madison protests during the weekend of March 12th when 100,000 people were there. I have also included pictures of the capitol itself from three weeks later.
I’ve been to a number of the Saturday protests since this started, and went back a few weeks ago (April 2nd) mostly because I wanted to see for myself the7.5 million in damage to the building from protests… supposedly from tape damage to soft stone walls. Of course I didn’t see any at all. The damage estimates have since been lowered to more realistic numbers.
Anyway, I don’t have much to say about the protests, elections, or recalls at this time. Its still too hard to sort the fact from the rhetoric, plus I have to clean spittle off my monitor whenever I start to type about it. For now just enjoy the pictures. Or make fun of them. Or ignore them.
The pictures can be found here.
I’ve also included a few links below in case anyone needs some background:
Interesting article about how the state has become divided.
Article about potential petition fraud
The push to get legislation through before the recall elections (including Voter ID)
The Wisconsin Supreme Court recount disaster.
Breitbart tells Madison to go to Hell
Finally, I just want to say that I wish the best for people in Michigan, Ohio, Florida, and any other state where there has been a major neocon/teaparty power grab to take power away from municipalities and give it to corporations.