Making A Wilderness: The Rockefeller Legacy, Chapter VII
Making A Wilderness: The Rockefeller Legacy, Chapter VII
Chapter VII - The Rockefeller Lackeys and How They’ve Served the Family
One of the most interesting facets of the Rockefeller family and their mission of making a wilderness is the parade of lackeys who’ve helped them do it. There are several. Consider Joe Martens, for example, the man assigned by the Rockefellers to kill fracking in New York because it represented a clear and present danger to their wilderness making schemes.
Something outrageous happened in New York in 2015; something so bold and so careless as to expose the total corruption of the state’s politics by its most famous family, the Rockefellers. Earlier chapters of this book address the role of the Rockefeller family in not only thwarting fracking, but engaging in a strategy of what Vivian Krause calls “strategic parkification,” which is one of attempting to turn much of the rural northeast into their own private park.
It was in 2015 that their lackey, Joe Martens, temporarily assigned by the family to the role of New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Commissioner, was given his reward with a return position at the Open Space Institute (OSI) from which he was drawn, having completed the family assignment.
Joe Martens ‘ resignation as Commissioner of DEC came a matter of hours after he completed the mission he was apparently given by the NRDC gang and Rockefeller family network of which he was part. That mission was to slowly kill fracking in New York as a means of not letting anything get in the way of perpetuating the latter’s schemes to “perkily” or make a wilderness out of Upstate New York and those schemes include astoundingly beneficial land deals; land deals which help pay the huge salary of Christopher “Kim” Elliman, the Rockefeller heir who runs OSI, to which Martens will now comfortably return.
Imagine if an executive of some oil and gas company had been appointed DEC Commissioner after creating special interest organizations to lobby the DEC, which is precisely what Joe Martens did when he helped launch the Catskill Mountainkeeper from his OSI perch. Imagine that this organization was directed and run by family members of other executives from the same oil and gas conglomerate. That’s effectively what Catskill Mountainkeeper was – it was a collection of individuals from other branches of the NRDC gang and Rockefeller family, a combination of descendants and other lackeys – and Joe Martens lobbied for them before going directly into his DEC position.
Now, imagine further that this oil and gas executive created an advisory committee to supposedly guide his efforts on the whole fracking issue and stuffed it with members and associates of the conglomerate from which he just came, including three senior attorneys from his former employer’s firm plus several others closely associated with the firm. That’s, of course, precisely what Joe Martens did at DEC when he put three senior attorneys from NRDC and several NRDC/OSI associates (enough to make a majority) on his hydro-fracking advisory committee. After an outcry about the bias, he enlarged the committee with token representatives of other views but then let it die on the vine with no explanation after the hubbub had settled.
Now, suppose this former oil and executive tired DEC Commissioner, to ensure he got his way and was able to complete his assignment, had asked for a report from the state’s economic development arm, Empire State Development, to document the importance of fracking to the Upstate New York. Suppose he had encouraged them to collect studies funded by his former firm and its associates as a foundation for its opinion, using still other associates and beneficiaries of his firm’s largesse to “peer review” the studies.
Joe Martens did exactly that, of course, by soliciting a report from a hopelessly political Department of Health, which, in turn, relied upon studies the Rockefeller family and friends had funded and used virulently fractivist peer reviewers such as Sandra Steingraber, who were beneficiaries of similar funding. He then issued a Findings Statement that has all the appearances of being written by his former employers and their associates, rather than DEC.
Imagine this former executive’s theoretical boss, during the former’s interregnum from service at his oil and gas company, had to run for re-election as governor and the Chairman of the Board at his former employer donated heavily and did a videoed endorsement of the governor. This is, again, pretty much what happened in this instance as Andrew Cuomo received not only money, but also a video endorsement by Larry Rockefeller, the man at the center of NRDC, OSI, the Catskill Mountainkeeper and all those land deals where the State of New York outrageously overpaid for land sold to it by this gang.
Larry Rockefeller is one of Joe Martens’ real bosses and another is Elliman (Larry’s second-cousin). If only some eager for fame prosecutor asked for the appraisals and the details on that $25 million of Empire State Development financing these folks secured from the taxpayers to fund their sweetheart deals.
Imagine that, after this oil and gas executive temporarily turned DEC Commissioner had engineered an approval of fracking and go-ahead for his former employer to drill on the tens of thousands of acres of land in which they had interests, if he had, within a matter of hours, announced he was now immediately returning to that firm to benefit from that decision.
This, yet again, is exactly what Joe Martens has done. He knows fracking will eventually come to New York, but his assignment was to delay it as long as possible and then temporarily kill it for several more years with a ban “at this time” – enough time for his former and once again employer to buy more land on the cheap and sell it to the State of New York for three times the money using state jobs program financing or the like to sweeten the deals. Now, he gets his reward of a return job at OSI where, presumably, like Kim Elliman, he, too, can earn megabucks from this phony charity called OSI that is just another special interest.
Finally, imagine what the press would be saying about all this if the scenario I just painted regarding this oil and gas executive turned DEC Commissioner were true. There would a deafening roar of disapproval and “revolving door” accusations leading to calls for legislative action to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Yet, that’s undeniably precisely what has occurred here if you substitute NRDC gang/Rockefeller family for oil and gas company. It’s as outrageous as it gets and this little article and all those which have preceded it only begin to plum the depths of the corruption.
Let me offer just one other point on all this, though, and this is something that ought to wet the appetitive of any prosecutor if he wanted to expose the foundation of New York corruption. I’m talking about the relationship of all these players from the NRDC gang and Rockefeller family to scandal-ridden New York. The arrest of New York State Senate leader Dean Skelos offered insight into one of those scandals, and it seems the then chair of the Waterkeeper Alliance, Glenn Rink, was in on it.
The Waterkeeper Alliance, of course, was Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s organization and he is, in addition to being Cuomo’s former brother-in-law, was one of the three senior NRDC attorneys Joe Martens put on his hydro-fracking advisory committee; the one that quietly and conveniently disappeared after he was forced by public complaints to enlarge it. Kennedy also served on the Catskill Mountainkeeper board along with Larry Rockefeller at one point and John Adams, the father of Catskill Mountainkeeper Ramsay Adams. John Adams is one of the founders, with Rockefeller, of NRDC. He also chairs OSI. The boards of these entities, Joe Martens’ real bosses, are hopelessly intertwined and Adams also served on the board of the Riverkeeper (Hudson Valley) which is the principal entity from which Kennedy ran the Waterkeeper Alliance.
There is, as it turns out, an additional connection to the Waterkeeper Alliance. Another of its directors, in addition to Glenn Rink, was a fellow named Charles Dorego, a real estate executive who apparently tweeted like a songbird to prosecutors. So, we had two prominent Kennedy/Waterkeeper associates involved in the corruption scandals with Kennedy and his associates being deeply involved with the NRDC gang and Rockefeller family network that employed and then once again employed Joe Martens after his work was done in that regard.
What we have is a web of connections between the Rockefeller family and the environmental special interests who set New York State policy. Joe Martens was their lackey. They put him in as DEC Commissioner and then took him back without the slightest embarrassment because they believe they can get away with anything. Joe Martens was their man. They own him and their relationship with New York State DEC is incestuous. They also funded the cover for him and his theoretical boss, Andrew Cuomo, to take down fracking, by funding the opposition through phony charities such as the Sustainable Markets Foundation. They put their man Jay Halfon in charge of coordinating it all.
And, Jay Halfon is another lackey in the world of the Rockefellers, a trust-funder entity called the Park Foundation and other funders and sponsors of opposition to natural gas development; opposition which has been anything but grass roots.
Jay Robert Halfon has been described as follows by Earthworks, an organization he has served as a Director:
Jay R. Halfon is a practicing attorney and public policy strategist. He represents tax-exempt organizations, including public charities,private foundations, advocacy groups and political entities. He has a broad range of experience influencing public policy in both Congress and state legislatures. Mr. Halfon served as executive director and general counsel of the New York State Trial Lawyers Association from May 1998 to December 2001. Previously he was executive director of the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) for a decade ending in 1997. Jay joined our Board in 1998.
Earthworks has been the home of the Oil & Gas Accountability Project which was actively engaged in fighting fracking in Colorado on behalf of millionaire Congressman and now Governor Jared Polis. Like Halfon’s other clients and the man himself, Earthworks bears a strong resemblance to the mythical Lernaean Hydra. It’s a multi-headed fractivist beast striking out at energy independence, economic opportunity and anything else that might distract from the twin goals of imposing a utopian elitist vision and turning rural America into a wasteland to be bought on the cheap for wilderness.
Earthworks, though, is only the beginning of Jay Halfon’s influence and connections. The organization has been funded by, among others, the Ithaca (NY) based Park Foundation, which has given it several hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years. Jay Halfon has also served as a board member of the Park Foundation (a handsomely paid position). The Park Foundation funds all things fractivist, including not only Earthworks, but also numerous other fractivist outfits.
These include, but are far from limited to, American Rivers (who designated the Delaware River as “most threatened” in a carefully choreographed attempt with the Catskill Mountainkeeper to stop gas drilling in the watershed), CERES, Common Cause (which put out reports accusing the gas industry of doing what Park does), Environment America (the fake pictures people), Truthout, Grist Magazine and 350.org (a Rockefeller front group where Jay Halfon also serves as a director).
There are also Lost Light Projects, Inc. (InsideClimate News, another Rockefeller front group), the Tides Center (which launders grants to others), the Council of Canadians (heavily involved in the fracking war in New Brunswick), the Environmental Integrity Project, the Southern Environmental Law Center, Inc. and Tony Ingraffea’s junk science outfit (Physicians Scientists and Engineers for Sustainable and Healthy Energy) from which many of the Cornell fractivists operated (in a gas heated building).
The reach of Jay Halfon’s tentacles through the Park Foundation has been far indeed. It has gone from having a claw in junk science research, to reporting on it, to ginning up activism based on the reporting, to coordinating the activism, to complaining about the spending of anyone daring to challenge special interest fractivist spending. There is no part of the fractivist continuum that Halfon does not reach out and touch through the Park Foundation, but the Park connections are just one sector of the Halfon web. The following diagram provides the larger perspective.
Notice the role of the Sustainable Markets Foundation, where Halfon has served as Director and General Counsel. It has been heavily funded by the Park Foundation, but was created and is also funded by the Rockefeller family (through the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Rockefeller Family Fund. Park funds it to “coordinate the broad movement of opposition to shale gas drilling in New York” including groups ranging from Artists Against Fracking, to Gas Free Seneca, to Water Defense to Coalition to Protect New York, to the publisher of “The Flowback.”
It has also received money from and collaborated with the Network for Good, Inc., which was an iteration of something called TechRocks, a Rockefeller entity with which Halfon was closely connected at the outset. TechRocks was absorbed into Groundspring.org with the help of Tides and Groundspring later became part of Network for Good. Round and round and round the money goes, but it’s always all the same people funded from the very same large pots of special interest money.
A look at Sustainable Markets Foundation 990 returns also reveal how the money is spent. Walter Hang of Toxics Targeting, for example, received over $1 million for his fractivist advocacy. Walter, like Jay Halfon, came from the New York Public Interest Research Group (NY-PIRG) which has always done rain-making for trial lawyers, with which Halfon, by no coincidence, has also been closely associated. Significantly, one of Halfon’s fellow officers at the Sustainable Markets Foundation has been Elizabeth Hitchcock, who served as Public Health Advocate for the US-PIRG.
The Sustainable Markets Foundation also funded Fenton Communications, Svengali to Josh Fox and Artists Against Fracking to the tune of $161,965 to do their dirty work. Another $195,000 went to Our Next Economy, LLC, which is really a fellow named John W. Passacantando. He is Bill Moyers’ former son-in-law and the former Executive Director of Greenpeace USA. The Park Foundation gave Moyers $500,000 – another non-coincidence. Still another $112,360 went to The Message Productions, LLC, which funded a documentary inspired by Naomi Klein’s leftist climate change screed “This Changes Everything” with the help of the Ford Foundation. (Isn’t it grand how these capitalist foes rely upon the Fords and Rockefellers?) Finally, $130,000 went to Tigercomm, LLC a PR firm that apparently represented the solar industry.
Jay Halfon has also served as a Director of 350.org, which has been funded by both the Park Foundation and the Sustainable Markets Foundation. It was totally a Rockefeller creation, of course, and has been leading the divestment campaign and supporting radicals and fractivists such as Gas Free Seneca. It is the archetypical radical environmental group, funded by some of the richest people on earth with a phony puppet out front to make it all look like some sort of holy low-budget grass roots mission.
This is the fractivist web Halfon helped spin. It’s paid him well and given him an unparalleled network of connections. He has apparently lived in the snooty Upper West Side of Manhattan in the Merrion Condominium where apartments have sold for an average of $1,765,000 each or $1,715 per square foot and his wife, Marci Halfon, has served as a realtor for the building.
Marci also maintains a Twitter account and had an interesting reaction to Cuomo’s decision to kill fracking in New York in 2014:
Yes, Marci knew precisely who was responsible for that Cuomo decision, the fractivist Rasputin, Jay Halfon, her husband.
Halfon also lives the good life of hobnobbing with the rich and famous who feather his nest and those of his trial lawyer allies. Here are some photos of him palling around with former Court of Appeals Judge John Cherundolo, then State Senator John Bonacic and several other judges and legislators who could do him favors:
Yes, it would hard to find anyone better connected to the fractivist cause than Jay Halfon and he’s done exceedingly well at it. Here’s another picture of him celebrating at a Working Families Party “Gala” with Frack Action’s Renee Vogelsang and the Catskill Mountainkeeper’s Bette Broad. Isn’t it grand how these fractivists have no shame depicting themselves as if they spoke for working families at a trendy “gala”?
But, of course, it’s not so much a fractivist cause as a Park and Rockefeller cause and Halfon has succeeded in manipulating them and everyone else by his master puppeteering on several stages. He is the Rasputin behind the throne wherever fractivism erupts and has gotten away with it for years because it’s such a complex web that no major media sources even recognize it.
Indeed, most fractivists don’t know his name even though he directs them from behind – a true Rasputin who went home to his $1,715 per square foot apartment on the Upper West Side every night while his friend Senator John Bonacic’s constituents in the Upper Delaware region, the real working families, wondered how the hell they were going to pay the taxes to hold into the farm and put bread on the table without the natural gas development he had just helped kill for the time being.
And, then, to complete the trio of Rockefeller lackeys, let’s take a look at Bill McKibben, who was briefly discussed in Chapter V as the head of the Rockefeller project 350.org, the same group referenced above in regard to Jay Halfon. He has served the Rockefellers for decades, including serving in his position as a Middlebury College faculty member when Steven Clark Rockefeller, Nelson’s son, was there and was his obvious patron.
McKibben, of course, has written various popular environmental treatises from his Middlebury and 350.org perches, but he has another side that was revealed in February, 2014 when a group of white-sheeted, face-covered KKK type radicals appeared with torches in Houston outside the home of an oil and gas pipeline executive. This was the scene:
Bill McKibben loved it, Tweeting out this about the event:
And, this wasn’t the only time McKibben hinted affection for violence. Here he is in his own words, which he penned for a Los Angeles Times op-ed:
The small town of Bagley, Minn., looked set to be the scene for one of the nation’s most interesting airings of the climate controversy this week. Three people went on trial there on Monday for shutting down a pipeline from Canada’s tar sands in 2016 — one of them, after warning the company, turned the valve that shut the pipe, and then they sat and waited for the police to arrive. They were arrested and charged with felony destruction of public property.
The judge had originally signaled that they would be allowed to mount a full “necessity defense,” and argue that climate change presented such a severe threat that they had little choice but to break the law. On Friday, however, he decided not to allow the team of expert witnesses — including me — to testify about the main points at issue: the danger of global warming, the lack of alternatives to civil disobedience and the effectiveness of direct action. Then on Tuesday, after a jury had been selected, the judge dismissed the case, announcing that the activists’ actions didn’t meet the seriousness of the charges.
I’m glad the protesters in Minnesota aren’t facing 10 years in prison, but it’s almost too bad. The case for climate activism needs to be made….
Protest helps overcome the inertia that is slowing our transition to cheaper solar and wind power. If normal politics ever does work on the issue of climate change, it will be in part because it’s been prodded by the unconventional kind.
These points are logical, I think. Necessity of the most desperate kind motivated the three activists who were on trial in Bagley, and they were right to turn the pipeline valve…
The valve turner and her compatriots should have been judged not guilty in Minnesota. But the system under which we live is still on trial, and the verdict is all too clear.
This is the real Bill McKibben, the Rockefeller bat boy, even though he tries to deny he has that much to do with the family.
Ask yourself, if you were a director of an outfit such as 350.org that is virtually synonymous with your name, that was started with the help of someone who continued to give you over half a million dollars annually, could you credibly claim not to know it? No, of course not. But, watch this video and watch how McKibben, beforehe was forced to admit the Rockefeller role, says he thought the Rasmussen Foundation, out of Sweden, might be 350.org’s biggest funder!
Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t true. The V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation is located in New York City, not Sweden, and it donated $75,000 to 350.org in 2011 (latest year at the time of the video), less than 15% of the Rockefeller funding he couldn’t recall. Some memory. Perhaps he was confused, though, as the Rasmussen Foundation hired the Rockefeller Brothers Fund that year to help manage its own program. It’s all so hard to keep straight but here’s an excerpt from a Financial Post article that may help:
350.org has the look and feel of an amateur, grassroots operation, but in reality, it is a multi-million dollar campaign run by staff earning six-digit salaries.
By my analysis of information from the U.S. Foundation Center and the tax filings of American charitable foundations, McKibben’s campaigns have received more than 100 grants since 2005 for a total of US$10-million from 50 charitable foundations. Six of those grants were for roughly US$1-million each.
In the interest of fairness and transparency, McKibben should fully disclose 350.org’s funding and the Rockefellers and other charitable foundations that have been bankrolling the anti-Keystone campaign should come out from the shadows.
Since 2006, McKibben has led three campaigns: Step it Up, 1Sky and 350.org. Each campaign built on the previous one. In the summer of 2006, Step it Up organized a protest walk across Vermont to push for a moratorium on coal-fired power plants and other federal actions. Created in 2007, 1Sky began a national movement to jump-start a clean energy economy. 350.org built on 1Sky and in April of 2011, the two campaigns officially merged.
More than half of the US$10-million came from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF), the Rockefeller Family Fund and the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, where McKibben, a trustee, was paid US$25,000 per year (2001-09). Since 2007, the Rockefellers have paid US$4-million towards 1Sky and 350.org, tax returns say. The Schumann Center provided US$1.5-million to McKibben’s three campaigns as well as US$2.7-million to fund the Environmental Journalism Program at Middlebury College, in Vermont, where McKibben is on staff.
What more does one need to know about Bill McKibben’s work as a Rockefeller lackey? There isn’t much. He, Joe Martens and Jay Halfon, along with several others, have served as the point of the spear in advancing the family’s wilderness making objectives.