Golf, Sand and Money in Pay-to-Play Game

Golf developer Mike Keiser gives $100,000s to Republicans and Wisconsin Republicans are giving back.

From the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign: "Mike Keiser, who is a frequent, generous contributor to state and federal Republican candidates and committees and conservative causes, contributed $11,100 to Walker between February 2012 and September 2014, and $10,000 to the state Republican Party last October, about two weeks before the November general elections."

In exchange, comes news, that "Two Republican legislators are sponsoring a bill that would allow an Adams County town to give a developer, who has contributed more than $21,000 to GOP Gov. Scott Walker and the state Republican Party in recent years, cash grants or loans to build high-end golf courses. The bill would make a one-time change in state Tax Incremental District requirements to allow the town of Rome to provide direct grants or loans to Chicago businessman Mike Keiser to build up to four golf courses and lodging on about 1,500 acres of land about 15 miles south of Wisconsin Rapids. Tax Incremental Districts are created by local governments through the state Tax Incremental Finance (TIF) program, which uses tax breaks and other incentives to encourage new businesses to locate on blighted land or in economically depressed areas."

See also Golf Course Developers and Walker Contributors Want State Favors.

This explains Keiser's silence about the proposed James Wysocki Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) near Keiser's proposed resort in the Golden Sands in central Wisconsin.

Keiser's resort bombs and Adams County which has the fastest falling property tax valuations in the state would be left to hold the bag.

When Big Ag Comes to Your Community

Clean Air and Water - Fighting the James Wysocki
proposed CAFO in central Wisconsin in Saratoga
as property values plummet, and Wysocki
sucks up the area's fresh water from
high-capacity wells used in Wysocki's
potato-growing operations. Wysocki, the
model of the sociopathic industrialized
CAFO factory owner lives far away from the
devastation he inflicts on central Wisconsin.
I wonder how a sick bastard like James Wysocki
sleeps at night.

Industrial agriculture is making Americans sick and is literally killing us

Update: Big Ag and the Wisconsin DNR have crafted an emergency rule, EmR 1417, secretly sprung onto Wisconsin citizens last year, blocking citizen input into any DNR policymaking across the state. The Emergency rule also has the effect of enabling the DNR to "ignore local (read town and county) ordinances as long as state and federal environmental policies are taken into account," as noted by Protect Wood County and Its Neighbors and Jimmy Parra, Staff Attorney of Midwest Environmental Advocates.

The Wood County Board of Supervisors is considering a resolution challenging Wisconsin Emergency Rule EmR 1417 on Tuesday morning, March 17, 2015.

The Emergency Rule is set to expire March 28, 2015, and citizens are working to voice their concerns that the Rule does not become permanent. Who knew the DNR could block out citizen input with a rule?

It is clear that Scott Walker's proposed budgetary moves to move administrative law judges adjudicating citizen complaints against the DNR (for example) and the DNR itself under the purview of Walker's Department of Administration (DOA), or the Department of All as it is known in the Capitol, is simply a means of blocking Wisconsin citizens and selling out Wisconsin to Big Ag and other Walker contributors.

Any Wisconsin citizen marginally concerned about the health of drinking water and surface water who voted for Scott Walker or sat out the election just might be rethinking that vote or instance of doing nothing.
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The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, NASA, the World Health Organization (WHO), and medical health professionals warn time and again against the health consequences of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), now proliferating in Wisconsin as Scott Walker green-lights the destruction of the regulatory and family health protection agencies.

Public safety will have to move over for Scott Walker's presidential ambitions as Walker dismantles health protections in his quite insane budget proposal.

At the bottom of an ancient glacial lake, Mike Keiser plans a spectacular golf resort in the Golden Sands of Wisconsin in the center of the state.

Tourism, recreational and family health advocates are uniting so this beautiful region of Wisconsin can prosper in Adams, Wood, Juneau and Portage counties.

But a predator is active, a venomous monster destroying the environment and poisoning the waters: Big Ag.

Big Ag has its protectors, Wisconsin State Rep. Scott Krug (R-Nekoosa in Wood County), State Rep. Joel Kitchens (R-Sturgeon Bay), Scott Walker and the Republican Party of Wisconsin dedicated to carrying the poisoned water of Concentrated (Confined) Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) spreading like a virus.

Communities can fight back.

The citizens of the central Wisconsin region have not connected all the dots yet, but they have made substantial progress in less than three years in fighting James Wysocki's proposed dairy Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO).

In Bayfield and Ashland counties in the far north, communities are more profoundly in touch with protecting the environment and are more successfully working in enacting community ordinances to ultimately halt the operation of a proposed swine factory operation before it begins.

Lake Erie - The future of Lake Michigan and Lake Superior
if Wisconsin Republicans and Big Ag get their way
Image: Tom Archer

In Kewaunee, Brown and Door counties in northeast Wisconsin, once a thriving tourist area, you won't find many people on the beaches of Lake Michigan in the Door Peninsula any more. The 'carrying capacities' of the Green Bay and Fox River Valley watersheds have been exceeded.

You will find nearly one in three aquifers unfit to drink in Kewaunee County, a common state of affairs.

You'll hear stories of children poisoned and hospitalized by Ecoli from local liquid manure runoff from Big Ag operations. People—and this is astonishing that Big Ag's factory owners fail to realize this—do not like their children poisoned and their aquifers and surface waters destroyed as a growing oxygen-deprived Dead Zone in Lake Michigan looms as Spring approaches. At the present rate of CAFO proliferation and pollution, Lake Michigan will rival Lake Erie and its Dead Zone in the future. 

E.coli - The new face of America's Dairy State. From the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Know what billions of tons of liquid manure dumped annually does to water? This summer, take a small glass, fill it up with water from Lake Mendota, Lake Michigan, Lake Winnebago or Nepco Lake and drink up. Just have the location of the nearest poison center on hand because you will need it.

You can find the empirical, scientific case against dumping pathogens, nitrates and phosphorus into the environment via billions of tons of liquid cow manure vectored annually. Reading up is much safer than drinking up.

Mike Keiser's plans for a golf resort in the Golden Sands are going to run head-on into the pathology of Big Ag, and if Keiser is thinking strategically about his golf resort project, his investment syndicate had better join the fight against James Wysocki and proposed giant poisoning operation a few miles north of Keiser's planned resort as Wysocki calls the shots from Custer or Plover or whatever gated community from which he takes refuge from the poison he delivers to his factories' neighbors.

Below, Gordon Stevenson, Wisconsin DNR runoff chief from 2001-11, delivers a Feb. presentation in Bayfield County with scholars, farmers and activists fighting a proposed massive swine Iowa-based Reicks View CAFO:

Wisconsin Environmentalists Punch Through on Protecting Water

Sierra Club-John Muir Chapter

When Wisconsin State Rep. Scott Krug (R-Wisconsin Rapids and ALEC) is so frightened of being exposed as a fraud and avowed enemy of the environment that Krug says he will file a libel suit against MAL Contends for pointing this out, you know the consciousness of the Wisconsin people on protecting our waters has expanded.

As Tribal leaders in northern Wisconsin meet with the EPA this week to stop the proposed "largest open-pit iron ore mine in North America" that would flow directly into the Lake Superior watershed, in central Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Friends of the Central Sands whom Krug and Scott Walker rightly fear politically, has put out a powerful video on declining water levels in Wisconsin (see below).

In south-central Wisconsin, the Center for Investigative Journalism has a new piece out by Kate Golden on the dangers cow manure presents to drinking waters aquifers: Poisoning our waters.

Big Ag, and any operation dumping cow manure into the environment, are poisoning Wisconsin citizens by draining water through the accelerated use of high-capacity water wells, encouraged by the Scott Walker administration's DNR, and sending back liquid cow manure into the environment.

"In Walker’s first year in office he turned the DNR into an 'enterprise agency' with 'increased operating flexibility to enable the agency to improve customer service and business support.' This shifted staff and resources away from monitoring, oversight and compliance with environmental regulations and created the Office of Business Support and Sustainability at a time when two major threats to clean air and water were ramping up: Frac sand mining and massive Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) with thousands of head of livestock," notes Rebecca Kimble in The Progressive Magazine (March 2013).

From Wisconsin Friends of the Central Sands: