If Fox News commentator, Glenn Beck is right, Joel Rogers may be the man behind Obama and the entire Progressive Movement. Not a far stretch as Progressives got their start in Wisconsin, where Joel teaches law, political science and sociology at the University of Wisconsin. Thursday morning, Joel was a featured speaker at an Earth Day conference in Chicago on public transportation. Needless to say, he’s all for it!

But Beck has connected the dots on his magic blackboards (He needs about three or four now, at least!) as he ties Joel Rogers as the man behind most of the Progressive movement’s organizations. The focus of today’s program was the pending Cap and Trade bill, now in the Senate. Back in the early 1990s, Obama and his close friend and adviser, Valerie Jarrett, arranged for funding Chicago’s Climate Credit Exchange from the Joyce Foundation. The exchange is already trading carbon credits, the core to Cap & Trade. Such an exchange is a must have to institute the program.

Next, Beck relates how Franklin Raines, one of Obama’s principal fund raisers in 2008, had purchased the technology for managing Cap & Trade while the head of Fannie Mae. Why would Fannie Mae, a mortgage lending entity, invest in such software? As a Government Secured Enterprise, it gives Uncle Sugar a piece of a potential $10 TRILLION dollar prize.

Everybody is in on this caper. Beck uses the film “Oceans Eleven” (the crappy remake) as an analogy, but I think “Kelly’s Heroes” may be more to the point. Even the band and grave diggers are in on this scheme. The Apollo Alliance, ACORN, SEIU, AFL-CIO, Goldman Sachs, Al Gore, Vance Jones, Bill Ayers, and a partridge in a pear tree. At the center of them all, keeping everybody in synch, is Joel Rogers. He has his own group, COWS, which focuses on spreading the Progressive message in Wisconsin, Emerald Cities, which is into urban planning for the New World Order, and the Brookings Institute, to keep the egg-heads in line.

Joel Rogers belongs to just about all of them, or has ties through other cross-over groups like The New Party and Change to Win, where Andy Stern is now hanging out in since leaving SEIU. Another key player is Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, who’s name pops up a lot, too. She’s CEO of Green for All, was a bigwig in the AFL-CIO, and works with a host of groups like Working Partnerships, USA, National Alliance for Fair Employment Partnership for Working Families and Emerald Cities. When you check out these groups, you will see people serving on several of them. It’s all one big happy Progressive family. Naturally, all are in favor of Cap and Trade. Is Beck hitting pay-dirt finally? Is Cap & Trade the next step towards a totalitarian state?