Middlebury College, Felix Rohatyn,
And the Green-Brown Cult of Al Gore

by David Dixon, LaRouche Youth Movement

An ongoing investigation by the LaRouche Youth Movement into the apparatus of international speculators, radical environmentalists, and quackademic pseudo-scientists behind the global warming swindle, has turned up a very nasty command center at Vermont's Middlebury College. In effect, over the past five years, Middlebury has been turned into an assembly-line for the manufacture of "grassroots" environmental countergangs—all tied to the Academy Award-winning charlatan-in-chief of the present drive for carbon swaps and other environmentally friendly financial scams, Al Gore.

At the same time, some of the major funding for the Middlebury green social-engineering scheme comes from leading right-wing tax-exempt foundations, including several associated with George Shultz and Richard Mellon Scaife, the latter being the moneybags behind the entire 1990s "Get Bill Clinton" assault on the U.S. Presidency. It should come as no surprise to the former President and First Lady that Al Gore has teamed up with the Richard Mellon Scaife gang in peddling yet another Academy Award-winning political fiction.

While Middlebury has long been in the lead in promoting "environmental studies" and similar academic hoaxes—and was a nexus of late 19th- and early 20th-Century promotion of the "race science" of eugenics—things really turned brown and nasty in the New England woods in January 2002, when one of Wall Street's leading Synarchist bankers, Felix Rohatyn, plunked down several million dollars and literally bought the Middlebury College School of International Relations, renaming it the Rohatyn Center, and turning it into a propaganda hub for such British imperial ideas as the East India Company-modelled privatization of national security and, above all else, the apocalyptic threat of global warming.

One year after Rohatyn's return to his alma mater (Rohatyn graduated from Middlebury in 1949), Richard Fuld, the chief executive officer of Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest brokerage house on Wall Street, was named to the college's board of trustees. Rohatyn himself was soon back on the board, as well; and in August 2006, Rohatyn further teamed up with Fuld when he shut down his own investment bank, Rohatyn Associates, and accepted the appointment as chairman of Lehman Brothers' international advisory board, and became senior advisor to CEO Fuld.

The Rohatyn-Fuld team has turned Lehman Brothers into one of the greenest of the Wall Street speculative funds, creating a climate council, to steer Lehman's investments in the planned future carbon-swaps bubble and other similar green hoaxes still on the drawing board. The Lehman Brothers Climate Council is headed by Theodore Roosevelt IV, a direct descendant of the turn of the 20th-Century U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt—himself an ardent "conservationist" and slavish promoter of the idea of an Anglo-American world empire. TR's great-grandson Teddy IV is an intimate of Al Gore on the Alliance for Climate Protection, one of the well-funded front groups peddling the global warming hoax, and lobbying for the creation of the carbon-swaps speculative bubble.

McKibben and Isham

Two Harvard-trained operatives arrived at Middlebury at around the same time that Rohatyn and Fuld launched their not-so-hostile campus takeover. Bill McKibben, one of the most rabid environmentalists and Malthusians on the scene today, who is actually credited with putting out the first book-length screed about the menace of global warming, is a resident scholar at Middlebury. McKibben's opening salvo in the climate-change swindle, was published in 1989, under the bizarre title The End of Nature. It was based on a series of articles McKibben had originally written for The New Yorker, where he worked after leaving Harvard.

Striking a pessimistic tone that would make Spengler or Nietzsche proud, McKibben had written: "Our comforting sense of the permanence of our natural world, our confidence that it will change gradually and imperceptibly if at all, is the result of a subtly warped perspective. Changes that can affect us can happen in our lifetime in our world—not just changes like wars but bigger and more sweeping events. I believe that without recognizing it we have already stepped over the threshold of such a change, that we are at the end of nature. By the end of nature, I do not mean the end of the world. The rain will still fall and the sun shine, though differently than before. When I say 'nature,' I mean a certain set of human ideas about the world and our place in it."

Further on, in The End of Nature, McKibben elaborated, "The greenhouse effect is a more apt name than those who coined it imagined. The carbon dioxide and trace gases act like the panes of glass on a greenhouse—the analogy is accurate. But it's more than that. We have built a greenhouse, a human creation where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden."

In a very recent article, published in the March/April 2007 issue of Mother Jones magazine, McKibben let it all hang out, exposing himself not only as a rabid Malthusian, but as an explicit follower of the hedonistic philosophy of the British East India Company's 18th Century figure Jeremy Bentham. Paying homage to both Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes, McKibben wrote, in "Reversal of Fortune":

"The formula for human well-being used to be simple: Make money, get happy. So why is the old axiom suddenly turning on us? For most of human history, the two birds More and Better roosted on the same branch.... But the distinguishing feature of our moment is this: Better has flown a few trees over to make her nest. And that changes everything. Now, with the stone of your life or your society gripped in your hand, you have to choose. It's More or Better.

"Which means, according to new research emerging from many quarters, that our continued devotion to growth above all is, on balance, making our lives worse, both collectively and individually. Growth no longer makes most people wealthier, but instead generates inequality and insecurity. Growth is bumping up against physical limits so profound—like climate change and peak oil—that trying to keep expanding the economy may be not just impossible but also dangerous.... On the list of major mistakes we've made as a species, this one seems pretty high up. Our single-minded focus on increasing wealth has succeeded in driving the planet's ecological systems to the brink of failure, even as it's failed to make us happier. How did we screw up?"

Action Anthropology

McKibben's henchman at Middlebury, fellow Harvard grad Jonathan Isham, came to the college, and to the greenhouse gas cause, by a far more circuitous route. Isham currently holds the Luce Professorship of International Environmental Economics at the Rohatyn Center, an appropriate posting, given that the endowment is named after Henry R. Luce, the son of the founding publisher of Time magazine and a leading American Synarchist figure of the mid-20th Century, whose magazine unabashedly promoted the Italian Fascism of Benito Mussolini.

After graduating from Harvard in 1984 with a B.A. in social anthropology, Isham spent four years in the Peace Corps, in his own words, promoting "more fuel-efficient cook stoves." Isham got his M.A. in international economics and social change from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), after which he worked as a full-time consultant to the World Bank, conducting anthropology studies in Africa, India, and Sri Lanka. He then completed his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, and migrated to Middlebury in 1999—by which time he had become a full convert to the Green Revolution.

Beyond his green credentials, Isham is part of a legion of "action anthropologists," largely trained at the University of Chicago, Harvard, and the Sorbonne, who combine cultural profiling with radical political activism, which sometimes shades directly into overt terrorism and violent separatism. Indeed, Isham boasts that, on the basis of his World Bank experiences in Africa, he came to Vermont, and conducted some of the most in-depth social profiling of the state's population, producing "scholarly" studies with titles like, "The Greening of Social Capital: An Examination of Land-Based Groups in Two Vermont Counties," and "Killington Mountain Resort: A Case Study of 'Green' Expansion in Vermont."

Later this Spring, Isham and McKibben will publish a collection of essays by leading climate-change propagandists, Ignition: How the Climate-Change Movement Can Spark a Clean-Energy Revolution and Restore the Power of Community. Isham and Sissel Waage edited the book, which is to be published by Island Press, the publishing arm of the Center for Resource Economics in Washington, which was originally a project of the Tides Foundation, another major source of funding for the global warming hoaxters.

Isham is unabashed about the fact that he and McKibben have targetted the student body of Middlebury for an "action anthropology" experiment: The creation of a string of global warming pseudo-gangs, to be dispatched around the United States, to create a hard-core campus-based apparatus of true-believer student "activists."

The division of labor between Isham and McKibben is that of social engineer and local cult icon, respectively. The ultimate guru of this global warming pseudo-religion is Al Gore, whose favorite nickname is "the Goracle," an explicit reference to the priesthood at the Temple of Delphi, who ruled ancient Greece as a financier oligarchy.

The Middlebury Experiment

From January 25-27, 2005, the Rohatyn Center hosted a conference headlined "What Works? New Strategies for a Melting Planet." The conference promo boasted, "We are thrilled that so many inspiring leaders are here for three days, to share, test and build strategies for the new climate movement." Apart from the Rohatyn Center, the conference was funded by the Mellon Foundation, the Brendon P. Bechtel Foundation, and the Schumann Foundation.

The conference was kicked off by Isham and the closing remarks were delivered by McKibben. Among the speakers at the conference were John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace USA, and Eban Goodstein, founder of the Green House Network, and co-founder with Jon Isham of Focus the Nation. The conference was organized around a series of Tavistockian "small group" sensitivity sessions, and the entire event was videotaped.

Indeed, Isham is a leading proponent of the Tavistockian scheme called "social capital," which aims to map forms of social networking, from "bonding to bridging to linking." "Linking," in Isham's cosmology, refers to having "friends in high places."

The "What Works?" conference coincided with a Winter semester course by Isham, called "What Works? Building the New Climate Change Movement." Soon after the Rohatyn Center conference, a number of Isham's students "decided" to form a campus climate-change activist group, which they dubbed the Sunday Night Group. McKibben became the faculty consultant to the group, which had no official campus standing, but soon grew to include over 100 students.

Between Isham's class curriculum and the activities of the Sunday Night Group, the Middlebury students recruited by the Isham-McKibben team were soon deployed around the state on a series of political deployments—now conducted in league with well-funded national greenie outfits like Environmental Defense, the Energy Action Coalition, and the Green House Network. A Spring 2005 issue of Environmental News, the newsletter of the "environmental programs at Middlebury College," reported on some of those activities, including a lobbying campaign, aimed at forcing Sen. John Sununu (R-N.H.) to cosponsor legislation for mandatory carbon emission caps with sponsors Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.); and marketing research internships with Ben & Jerry's ice cream.

The first major out-of-state venture by Isham and McKibben's Sunday Night Group was "The Road to Detroit." In the Summer of 2003, the Environmental Studies Department students at Middlebury built a bus that was fueled by recycled vegetable oil and diesel. It was replaced a year later by a bus fueled by biodiesel, which was donated to the Sunday Night Group, when they proposed to conduct a bus trip to Detroit, to promote alternative fuels. "The Road to Detroit" was bankrolled by some of the biggest national environmental groups, including the Rainforest Action Network and the Energy Action Network. Rainforest Action Network is a project of the Tides Foundation, already mentioned above as one of the largest sources of tax-exempt funding for the greenhouse gas hoax.

One of the founders of the Sunday Night Group, May Boeve, an advisor to Focus the Nation, is now conducting postgraduate work, on a project to vilify the Big Three U.S. auto companies.

On Labor Day 2005, 1,000 people, led by McKibben, marched from Middlebury to Montpelier, the state capital, demanding that all candidates in the 2006 midterm elections adopt the agenda of global warming radicals.

Within days of the election, a meeting took place at Middlebury, between McKibben and two leaders of the Sunday Night Group, Jeremy Osborne and Jon Warnow. The purpose was to expand the "Middlebury experience" nationally, by setting an April 14, 2007 date, for a series of nationwide demonstrations and direct actions. The effort was to be coordinated with Energy Action's project, Campus Climate Challenge, a group run by Billy Parish, who co-authored "The Road to Detroit" with the Middlebury Sunday Night Group.

Out of the November 2006 meeting came the launching of the nationwide organization, Step It Up, whose website states that the goal of the group is to achieve an 80% cut in carbon emissions by the year 2050—precisely the deindustrialization and genocidal scheme presented by Al Gore to a credulous U.S. Congress on March 21.

In coordination with McKibben's Step it Up project, a second Middlebury-sponsored nationwide effort was launched on Oct. 2, 2006. According to an official press release issued by Middlebury College, "A nationwide initiative to educate the country about global climate change got its official start, Saturday, Sept. 30, at Middlebury College. The effort, called 'Focus the Nation,' seeks to coordinate teams of faculty, students and staff at more than a thousand colleges and high schools in the United States, jump-starting a national discussion on the goal of 'stabilizing the climate in the 21st century.' The project is designed to culminate on Jan. 31, 2008—in the middle of the presidential primary season—with one-day, national symposia held simultaneously on campuses across the country.... Middlebury's Isham believes that Focus the Nation might well 'become the Earth Day 1970s' catalyzing event that turns the national conversation about global warming from fatalism toward determination."

Focus the Nation is co-directed by Isham and Eban Goodstein, a professor at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon, who spent a period of time as a guest lecturer at Middlebury as the project was being launched.

At the beginning of January 2007, both Isham and Goodstein travelled to Knoxville, Tennessee, to participate in the global warming training session directed by Al Gore. Since that time, Isham has been a direct operative for Gore's Climate Project.

An Inconvenient Truth

Middlebury College boasts that it is the most ecology-friendly campus in the country. Soon after Rohatyn and Fuld joined the board of trustees in 2005, the school voted to spend $11 million to construct a biomass plant to provide energy for the campus, using woodchips, grass pellets, etc.

However, no where in the college literature is it mentioned that the state of Vermont gets over 76% of all of its electricity from nuclear power, making Vermont the number one state in the U.S.A. in nuclear power usage. One nuclear power plant alone, the Vermont Yankee facility, provides more than a third of the state's electical power. On its website, is the statement that the electricity generated at Vermont Yankee produces "zero greenhouse gas emissions."