Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.

Revelations of a real-life RICO type conspiracy by the Rockefeller family and friends to attack Exxon only begin to illustrate the much bigger story.

Other than the Lincoln assassination, which was but a small one, I’m not much of a believer in conspiracies. They typically aren’t necessary when you have groups of people committed to political groupthink anyway; everyone involved follows the playbook without being told because it’s part of their culture. There is such a thing as organized crime, though, and even a statute designed to combat it. It’s called the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) for short. Criminal prosecutions, as well as civil lawsuits are permitted under RICO. It may well be time for businesses and individuals impacted by what appears to be a clear case of racketeering by the Rockefeller gang to file a civil lawsuit against them.

The “La Jolla Junta,” including their RICO expert, Sharon Eubanks

What I’m talking about, of course, is the recent story in the Wall Street Journal regarding the appalling efforts of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to implement the NRDC agenda through a trumped-up criminal prosecution of Exxon for supposedly hiding knowledge of climate change. I wrote about it here, explaining the NRDC agenda to criminal speech and use RICO to go after the oil and gas industry. As I explained then, the strategy “arose from an expensive confab held in 2012 in LaJolla, California, which was organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists. The conference was financed by, among others, the V. Kahn Rasmussen Foundation, which is one of Bill McKibben’s (of 350.org) major funders. Both it and 350.org are closely associated with the Rockefeller family which. of course, is the force and the money behind the NRDC gang.”

Here’s some of what the Wall Street Journal has now brought to the surface (emphasis added):

A key meeting in the new push unfolded in January behind the closed doors of a Manhattan office building. The session brought together about a dozen people, including Kenny Bruno, a veteran of environmental campaigns, and Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, two activists who helped lead the successful fight to block the Keystone XL pipeline.

The new campaign’s goals include “to establish in public’s mind that Exxon is a corrupt institution that has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos and grave harm,” according to an agenda of the meeting viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

This new legal strategy stems in part from environmentalists’ frustration at what they see as the inadequacy of recent climate deals. Their hope is to encourage state attorneys general and the U.S. Justice Department to launch investigations and lawsuits that ultimately will change Exxon’s behavior, force it to pay big damages and drive public attention to climate change.

“It’s about helping the larger public understand the urgencies of finding climate solutions,” said Lee Wasserman, director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, which hosted the January meeting. “It’s not really about Exxon.”

…A key part of the activists’ strategy is to seek documents that show otherwise: that Exxon, despite knowing the dangers of climate change, has sought to challenge the scientific consensus. Such revelations would help “delegitimize [Exxon] as a political actor,” the January agenda said…

The activists are focusing on internal Exxon documents that have surfaced in news outlets—including in publications or investigative projects that were funded partly by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Rockefeller Family Fund, which favor strong climate action. The media outlets involved—the Los Angeles Times and InsideClimate News—have said the reporting was done without influence by the funding sources.

If you believe that last line – that the reporting was done without influence by the funding sources – you might want to read this story about Inside Climate News, which is nothing more than a Rockefeller outlet. What’s even more interesting is the followup reporting by Energy In Depth and the Washington Free Beacon, which went deeper and provided access to the e-mail invitation that was the focus of the story. Here it is:

There are two aspects to this e-mail that strongly suggest Exxon should be filing a RICO lawsuit against the Rockefeller gang. First, is the overwhelming evidence of intent to damage Exxon’s business or property by what appears to be a racketeering enterprise. The e-mail shows, beyond any doubt, the purpose of this group getting together at Rockefeller headquarters was to destroy Exxon’s reputation, delegitimize the company, force disassociation of others from it and to drive divestment from the business, not to mention making it a political target. Tell me this isn’t racketeering of the highest order – the Mafia style shakedown of a company; for speech no less. The Rockefeller/NRDC gang is engaged in precisely the same kind of activity it strategized alleging against Exxon as part of its 2012 game plan.

The second aspect of this e-mail that bears great attention is the array of players, which exhibits the very sort of conspiracy the Rockefeller/NRDC gang wants to project upon Exxon. It is, moreover, the same set of people involved in fueling fractivism. Here’s a little rundown on each:

• Kenny Bruno: Claims to be a “Campaign Coordinator at Corporate Ethics International,” a vaguely purposed non-profit corporation funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Wallace Global Fund (funder of the CELDF, Sierra Club, Greenpeace and the Rockefeller’s Sustainable Market Foundation (Jay Halfon, the Fractivist Rasputin’s base of operations). Bruno has also had a long association with Greenpeace, which has received numerous grants from the Rockefellers over the years.
• Lee Wasserman: Director of the Rockefeller Family Fund. Previously advisor to The Pew Charitable Trusts (funder of PennFuture and other fractivist enterprises) and former Executive Director of Environmental Advocates of New York where he served as board member (along with Jay Halfon). Also, served with Halfon on board of Rockefeller family’s TechRocks outfit, which later became part of the Network for Good, still another fractivist group.
• Bill McKibben: The disingenuous and somewhat creepy leader of 350.org, the Rockefeller’s divestment campaign, where Jay Halfon sits as a director. While adopting a religious-like tone, McKibben not so subtly encourages violence and does the bidding of Steven Rockefeller to insist others must divest their oil and gas investments, at the same time Steven’s son is recreating Rockefeller Oil and investing in the industry overseas. He is also closely aligned with the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation (managed with the help of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund), which he pretended not to know much about in this video.
• Jamie Henn: Co-founder and Strategy and Communications Director at 350.org, which is funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Rockefeller Family Fund.
• Rob Weissman: President of Public Citizen, which is really two organizations, a 501(c)(3) charity and a 501(c)(4) political group, allowing it to raise money through tax-exempt contributions to fund political activity by transferring the money around. Public Citizen receives Rockefeller money and also got $350,000 in 2014 from the Energy Foundation to “build markets for renewable energy.” Its funder, Nat Simons, is a hedge fund investor in renewable energy and a guy with dark money connections to Russia where Steven Rockefeller, Jr. is investing in oil. Public Citizen also provides some of Vera Scroggins legal help and is mounting a campaign to get FERC to fund fractivism.
• Dan Cantor: The National Director of the Working Families Party, which is about everything but working families, of course (e.g., climate change, green economy). Who is on the Working Families Party legal team? Well, interestingly enough, “The party has been getting informal advice from Jay Halfon…a ‘close friend and regular informal advisor’ of WFP Executive Director Dan Cantor…”
• Bill Lipton: The New York State Director of the Working Families Party and a big backer of Bernie Sanders, the virulent anti-fracking Presidential candidate. Lipton joined with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the NRDC and the Park Foundation to push for public campaign financing in New York.
• John Passacantando: Served eight years as executive director of Greenpeace USA. Prior to Greenpeace, he founded and ran Ozone Action, “the country’s first national non-profit focusing exclusively on global warming.” He also served as the executive director of the Florence and John Schumann Foundation and now runs the Eco-Accountability Project. This project has been financed through the Rockefeller’s (and Jay Halfon’s) Sustainable Markets Foundation, with funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Schmidt Foundation (Google founder Eric Schmidt’s fractivist funding arm), the Park Foundation and Jeff Skoll. Passacantando has also served with the Park Foundation’s snob leader Adelaide Park Gomer, on the Greenpeace Fund board.
• Kert Davies: Claims to be the founder of the “Climate Investigations Center” and the PolluterWatch program at Greenpeace. He further claims to be “the chief architect of the Greenpeace web project ExxonSecrets” and worked at Ozone Action before that. The CIC appears to be an unincorporated joint venture of Greenpeace (which calls it a partner) and The Guardian newspaper (which explains Suzanne Goldenberg’s fractivist bias) but provides no information on the organization or its funding sources on its own website, despite making a name for itself criticizing others for not disclosing their funding sources. It does say, in a legal filing, that it is “a not-for-profit association of writers and advocates that uses research to inform the public, the media, and policy makers on energy and climate change issues” – a propaganda outfit. Their attorney in filing was Sharon Eubanks.
• Sharon Eubanks: A trial lawyer from the firm of Bordas & Bordas, an expert at employing the civil enforcement provisions of RICO; an expert on racketeering. She was one of two trial lawyers who attended the 2012 La Jolla confab where a racketeering scheme was apparently hatched to go after the oil and gas industry for, of all things, racketeering, using RICO. It was at the behest of NRDC/Rockefeller gang member Richard Ayres, best bud of John Adams, who led the NRDC, chaired the Open Space Institute, gave a job before and after DEC to Joe Martens and created the Catskill Mountainkeeper as a place to park his son Ramsay.
• Matthew Pawa: The other trial lawyer who participated in the “La Jolla Junta” (my term) meeting in 2012. Pawa is a global warming tort expert.
• Irene Krarup: Executive Director of the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation, one of the principle funders of 350.org. It share facilities and services with Rockefeller Brothers Fund. It also funds Greenpeace and helped finance the La Jolla Junta war council aimed at using RICO to go after oil and gas.
• Carroll Muffett: President and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law. Muffett previously served as Executive Director of the Climate Law & Policy Project and Deputy Campaigns Director at Greenpeace USA and before that as a trial lawyer. His organization is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
• Bradley Campbell: President of the Conservation Law Foundation. A solar energy legal expert and trial lawyer, Campbell also created Swan Creek Energy, LLC (a renewable energy company), following service in the EPA and New Jersey DEP during Democrat administrations. The Conservation Law Foundation, of course, is funded by the Rockefellers, as well as the Energy Foundation.
• Won Ha: Program Director, Strategic Communications for the Energy Foundation. The Energy Foundation is a major fractivist outfit, about whom we’ve written here numerous times. It is virtually indistinguishable from the Sea Change Foundation, pushes renewables that benefit Nat Simons hedge fund investments, is closely allied with the Rockefellers and funds numerous fractivist initiatives.
• Stephen Kretzmann: Founder and Executive Director of PriceOfOil.org, an anti-oil group. Also served on staff of Greenpeace. His organization is funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation and the Wallace Global Fund, among others.
• Naomi Ages: “Climate liability project lead” at Greenpeace USA. The Greenpeace Fund is financed by, among others, the Park Foundation and has received previous funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

The patterns here couldn’t be more apparent. The recent explosion of news about the effort to target Exxon tell only a small part of what is a huge story; a tight conspiracy of extraordinarily wealthy special interests, among whom the Rockefeller clan is the big gorilla in the room, engaging in a deliberate campaign to impact specific businesses and individuals and shake them down or shut them down. It’s more about fracking than it is about Exxon and the goal is to make a wilderness of the rural Northeast while allowing the Rockefeller family and its friends to develop oil and gas overseas without US competition, while also sucking off the “green energy” teat here at home at the expense of taxpayers and ratepayers.

Look at the list of who’s was involved in this planned meeting at the Rockefeller Family Fund, read the report from the La Jolla Junta war council and tell me this isn’t racketeering; racketeering that ought to stopped by enforcing RICO. It’s time to RICO the Rockefellers.