Wisconsin Dairy Polluters Get Green Light to Expand and Pollute, as Milk Is Dumped Across Nation

Wisconsin homeowners, businesses and communities are not counted as stakeholders as the Republican-Party pushes to give factory farm owners the legal power to give themselves pollution permits, (Verburg, Wisconsin State Journal).

The audacious move would help transform already-weak state protections of clean and safe water as the Republican project to disempower the Department of Natural Resources, (DNR), continues, (Bergquist, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel), (Verburg, Wisconsin State Journal).

This pollution regime effectively gives decision-making power to industrialized agriculture, CAFOs, and nobody else.

As Donald Ystad of Rome, Wisconsin, in Adams County writes:

The 'social license to operate' is defined by Gunningham, Kagan and Thornton as 'the demands on and expectations for a business enterprise that emerge from neighborhoods, environmental groups, community members, and other elements of the surrounding civil society.' Social license is an element of corporate social responsibility. It is premised on the idea that while regulators grant permits, it is communities that grant permission. It’s that 'handshake' that occurs between an incoming business and the people around it, the agreement that the business proposition is good for everyone (Ystad, Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune).

Under Republican initiatives, Neighborhoods, environmental groups and community members are no longer regarded as possessing status worthy of a handshake, much less consultation and approval.

The Republican and polluter push for more CAFOs, that are given the power to pollute with no public input, comes as the mammoth milk glut continues.

As noted here, even as the corporations' dairy CAFOs become ever more brazen and ambitious to transform America into a colonial entity in which land and air exist legally for the use of corporate power, the ideological demand constraint on many Americans persists.