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Fink, Rich

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June 2014: Koch Executive Richard Fink Dismisses Climate Concerns at Koch Donor Summit [KOCH STATEMENT] During a gathering of political donors convened by Charles Koch in June 2014, several surreptitious recordings were made from inside the secretive event and published by The Undercurrent’s Lauren Windsor. Among the many revelations from these recordings were comments made by Richard Fink relating to climate change science:359 “The environmental movement. Occupy Wall Street. These kids are searching for meaning. They're protesting the 1 percent. They are the 1 percent, but they're protesting the 1 percent. The environmental movement and climate change. It's not about climate change. “I studied climate change for six years. I can't figure it out, quite frankly. Charles is ahead of me on this. I'm not a climatologist, but I'm not completely stupid. I can tell you I meet with people, particularly in California, that are convinced the world is going to burn up in, you know, a year or two. They don't know the answer -- they don't even know the question, because it's not about climate change. It's about a cause. It gives their life meaning." In-text reference return: Page 30 It is unclear if Fink produced any internal reports related to his purported investigation into climate change for “six years,” and what kinds of interaction he may have had with Charles Koch about that effort.

At this point in time, Fink was still Charles Koch’s top advisor, a longtime Koch Industries lobbyist, and the head of several Koch foundations that financed policy and campaigning organizations, including those that opposed efforts to mitigate climate change.360 Fink was responsible for developing Koch’s strategy for manufacturing policy outcomes, known as the “Structure of Social Change.”361 Fink’s Structure adapted a manufacturing theory written by the late Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, one of Charles Koch’s collaborators and major ideological influences.362 In Fink’s adapted Structure, rather than manufacturing physical goods to be sold, he sought to manufacture policy victories. The first step of this process was to support the development of intellectual products at universities. Think tanks were then financed to turn the more abstract academic theories into policy models. Finally, advocacy organizations would be funded to pressure politicians to enact the policies—politicians that often could also be incentivized through campaign finance and lobbying efforts.363 This Structure of Social Change is the reason why the development and financing of ideological university centers has long been a priority for Charles Koch, with hundreds of universities receiving

Who is Richard Fink? 

Charles Koch and Richard Fink go back forty years. Fink recently retired as vice president of Koch Industries where for decades he had held a seat on the board of the second largest privately controlled corporation in the U.S. Koch has been the CEO of the family business for more than 50 years. Fink began his career of political influence as an economics professor at Rutgers University and then George Mason University, where he helped launch what became the Mercatus Center with Koch to help operationalize his agenda through training a “cadre” to influence national policymakers in D.C.

In 1979, Koch created a group called Council for a Competitive Economy and Fink testified before the House Subcommittee on Postal Operations and Services calling for Congress to repeal the government “monopoly” on first class mail. In 1984, Charles Koch staked Fink at the successor to that group, dubbed Citizens for a Sound Economy (which is now called Americans for Prosperity), as a vehicle to influence the Reagan administration to advance Koch’s goals on privatization and other libertarian theories...

Alhough Koch had largely abandoned the Libertarian Party around this time in favor of trying to move the GOP toward his wide-reaching agenda, he did not abandon his policy goals. His agenda was to seek radical changes to limit the power of democratic government, using large steps and small steps to carve or chip away at it through any means available. (ITPI Executive Director, Donald Cohen, has documented how privatization as an economic strategy has grown into a political strategy.) Fink was also the Director of the Koch-funded and -created Center for the Study of Market Processes at George Mason University, which started in 1980. It is now known as the Mercatus Center.

Koch began funding his pet projects at that little-known public school in the D.C. suburbs four decades ago. To date, more than $100 million has come from the Koch fortune to the university, its law school, and other entities associated with the campus, like Koch’sInstitute for Humane Studies. In the 1970s, Koch had focused his energies on building up the Libertarian Party (founded by another MIT grad, David Nolan, who joined the fraternity the Kochs had) and creating his own foundation, which became the Cato Institute. Back then, Cato operated almost as an adjunct to the Libertarian Party, with key staff like Ed Crane revolving between the two entities depending on the election season.

Cato also advanced Koch’s privatization ideology and continues to do so to this day, attacking the Postal Service in numerous ways. With Koch also becoming the biggest funder of the Libertarian Party in 1976,  its platform expanded to include a host of items aligned with Koch’s agenda. For the first time that year its platform provided: “We propose the abolition of the governmental Postal Service…. Pending abolition, we call for an end to the monopoly system and for allowing free private competition in all aspects of postal service.” That was also in the party’s 1980 platform. That’s the year David Koch ran for vice president and spent more than $2 million to fund the party’s bid for the White House and to pull Reagan to the right. 

Although it garnered less than 1 percent of the vote, the Libertarian Party’s sentiments were embraced by Reagan in many ways, such as his famous line at his inauguration that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Reagan created the Grace Commission, using the phrase “drain the swamp,” to deputize corporate leaders to identify government functions that could be outsourced or sold off to the private sector. Fink along with Citizens for a Sound Economy used the Grace Commission’s efforts to press for wide privatization. That Commission expressly recommended that the Postal Service outsource thousands of post offices (primarily rural ones) to the private sector to operate as limited service contract stations. That would have been a major step toward privatization, in the early 1980s, while yet another Koch man was pushing to privatize public institutions and functions at all levels of government, at home and abroad...

the  Postal Service was not always the target for privatization or the equivalent by GOP-aligned policymakers. That agenda took hold in the 1980s. But the seed was planted a decade before that. In 1968, the libertarian Reason magazine published one of the first articles in the country asking “Why Not a Laissez Faire Postal System?”

Reason embraced the radical idea of getting rid of this public institution as part of its devotion to the libertarian theory that the free market knows best and can do best. This is rooted in part in Friedrich Hayek’s “Constitution of Liberty” (1960) and Milton Friedman’s “Capitalism and Freedom” (1962), two economists Koch has heavily promoted over the years. This line of attack on the Postal Service was very much against the tide of strong bipartisan public support for the post office. In 1970, Congress reaffirmed that the Postal Service was an essential public institution and public service.

Congress also limited its ability to close post offices, particularly in rural areas, even as the Postal Service changed in 1970 from a cabinet position to a government-owned corporation. (Federal Express [now FedEx] was launched in 1971 to provide private courier services for a premium.) In 1970, Congress affirmed that: “The United States Postal Service shall be operated as a basic and fundamental service provided to the people by the Government of the United States, authorized by the Constitution, created by Act of Congress, and supported by the people.”

Congress also said the Service's mission is “to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities.” In 1970, MIT engineer Robert Poole bought Reason and, with Tibor Machan and Manny Klausner, began operating it as a for-profit under the rubric Reason Enterprises. Reason needed ad revenues to survive, and it turns out Koch supplied a substantial portion of them along with loans.

It was Koch who staked Poole at the fledgling Reason in the early 1970s. In Poole’s history of the magazine marking its 10th anniversary in 1978, he thanked Koch, writing: “In the first few years of Reason’s California existence, one of its important sources of security was the long-term commitment of advertising by the Institute for Humane Studies and the Center for Independent Education. Ken Templeton, George Pearson, and Charles Koch of those institutions have been loyal friends and supporters over the years.” Koch himself founded the Center for Independent Education with Pearson in 1970, and then took over the Institute for Humane Studies after F.A. “Baldy” Harper died in 1973. In his tribute, Poole also singled out Koch as among a handful of individual donors who personally supported Reason in its first decade...

who is poole?

privatization was not even a gimmick let alone a word in the dictionary until a business writer named Peter Drucker predicted “reprivatization” of public functions in Europe in the late 1960s.Robert W. Poole Jr., an MIT engineer and fan of Ayn Rand, took it a step further in 1980 by popularizing the term “privatization.” After Robert Poole took over Reason magazine, Koch and his personal assistant, George Pearson, submitted articles to the magazine from its early days. In 1978, after consulting with Charles Koch, Poole co-founded the Reason Foundation, serving as its president and CEO from then until 2000.

He has advised the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations on privatization and transportation policy. With Koch’s investment in Poole and Reason as his platform, Poole became the national expert on privatization. However—as Mark Ames noted in his profile of how Poole’s fee-based government helped spawn unjust municipalities like Ferguson, Missouri—Poole may have popularized the term but it was Nazi Germany that had coined the word “privatization.” Koch and Poole were aligned in other ways, with both of these MIT-trained engineers seeking to systematically inculcate people with libertarian theories and get those true believers into power.Poole described this goal in his 1971 essay “Leverage Points for Social Change” where he promoted the “permeation” of libertarians into key policy positions, noting that they only accounted for at most 0.05 percent of the U.S. population. 

Koch would later note that permeation, or, in his words, “infiltration,” of government would only be successful if the libertarians who got in “reduce[d] government,” unlike Friedman whom Koch said did not. To help mark Reason’s 10th anniversary, Koch also engaged in a colloquy with Poole and others, about the “radical” nature of their theories and the need to attract followers. Koch noted: “For example, with Social Security, we can be very radical and say, ’Abolish Social Security’ … Or we can say, ’Well, it’s very complicated, and therefore we have to one-percent-a year move out of Social Security.’” That issue of the magazine also reprised one of the attacks on the Postal Service’s “first class mail monopoly.” As Poole recently wrote: “From January 1971 through June 1978 we published every month, like clockwork, but by 1977 it was clear that for Reason to have serious impact, we needed full-time paid staff and a serious budget for growth. Tibor, Manny, and I developed the plan for what became the Reason Foundation.

Thanks to an angel investor, we had enough funds to make the transition, and we opened our doors in downtown Santa Barbara in July 1978.” Thanks to research by Nancy MacLean in her book “Democracy in Chains,” we now know who that investor was. None other than Charles Koch—whom Poole didn’t mention in that 2016 retrospective; by that by the time the Koch name had become infamous. I had several visits … to discuss specific ideas the Reagan administration was considering, such as devolving federal functions to state and local government and privatizing the Postal Service. A Think Tank for Liberty (2018), p. 135. inthepublicinterest.org | The 

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“On the tenth anniversary of Reason, in 1978, Poole convened a strategy session. Every man in the room looked to Charles Koch when talk turned to funding an infrastructure of ’professional libertarians,’ for who else could? The Wichita CEO was willing to commit the resources needed, he said, but with one condition: ’that libertarians must remain uncompromisingly radical.’ They had to forswear “the temptation” to “compromise” with those currently in positions of power. Any such conciliation, Koch warned, would ’destroy the movement.’ With Koch’s backing, Poole ’started working full-time for the cause,’ enlisting ’economic reasoning and evidence.’” 

It was that meeting that led to the creation of the Reason Foundation, with Poole at the helm. The foundation became the publisher of the magazine and its own “think tank.” In 1979, Reason Foundation started full-scale operations and Poole devoted time to his opus on privatization, a book that melded his prior consulting work with the mission of Reason magazine. That book, “Cutting Back City Hall,” was published in 1980. Poole’s “catalytic” work on privatization helped spur more calls to privatize an array of public functions, including public schools. In his acknowledgements, Poole thanked “the Reason Foundation for allowing me to use their facilities during much of the time this book was in preparation.” But that sentence elided the reality, which was that Poole was the Reason Foundation and Koch was the angel investor in that enterprise to radically change American government. Poole’s book also contained a forward by William E. Simon, president of the John M. Olin Foundation, which had begun funding chairs for “free market” professors at universities across the country.

Simon suggested that municipal fire departments and tennis courts were “a form of local socialism.” Simon noted that Poole’s objective “is truly to subvert” local government functions by replacing them with private businesses, and he expressed the hope that it would “serve as a wellspring for changes that reach state and federal government as well.” Poole’s Koch-backed strategy and tactics would also reach governments beyond these shores, far exceeding Simon’s wishes. According to a biographer of United Kingdom Prime MinisterMargaret Thatcher, Poole’s book was seminal to her efforts to privatize or contract out key public functions—except that she refused to privatize the Royal Mail:“The intellectual case for ’contracting out’ came from an American MIT-trained policy wonk, Bob Poole, head of the Reason Foundation in Santa Barbara and author of a little book called ’Cutting Back on City Hall’… Everything—literally everything—could be outsourced and he littered his book with examples and figures…” Twenty-five years later, Thatcher would join Poole in celebrating privatization at the 20th anniversary of Reason’s Annual Privatization Report.”

That annual report was launched a few years after Poole’s book. Reason’s 1986 ”report on the status of privatization to date and important developments of that year … garnered enough attention from policymakers that Messrs. Koch and Poole determined that it was worth continuing.” The Koch that Reason was thanking for that publication was not Charles, however: “Reason owes a debt of gratitude to David Koch, and APR would not have flourished without his commitment to market-based tools that enable individuals, institutions, and societies to survive

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and prosper. It is thanks to Mr. Koch’s vision and support that the Annual Privatization Report has become the nation’s foremost publication on privatization, outsourcing, and government reform.”

This report was issued on the eve of the push by Charles Koch’s Citizens for a Sound Economy, by his operative Richard Fink—and by James Miller, the OMB director Fink had helped win confirmation— to launch the Commission on Privatization. That commission, created by President Reagan, would recommend privatizing the Postal Service and other government functions. Koch family-controlled foundations have given the Reason Foundation at least $3 million— that is excluding more than a decade of tax filings that are unavailable. That tally also does not include funding from Koch Industries, if any, or from any personal checks from Charles or David Koch. It does not include the amount Charles Koch’s various groups spent on advertising in Reason over the past 40 years. … 

Conclusion

The Postal Service has withstood more than two hundred years of dramatic changes in our country—until its very existence became a target of a billionaire devoted to the theory of privatizing government’s public functions in every way possible....

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https://www.thenation.com/article/how-charles-koch-is-helping-neo-confederates-teach-college-students/

no many lnx

How Charles Koch Is Helping Neo-Confederates Teach College Students

The Koch Foundation is often praised for its higher-ed funding, but the money is going to some radical professors

By Alex Kotch       MARCH 21, 2018

Billionaire industrialist and conservative political mega-donor Charles Koch first entered the political world through the John Birch Society, a secretive anti-Communist outfit that campaigned against the civil-rights movement. Since then, he and his brother David amassed enormous wealth and put together a powerful conservative political network that rivals either major party in size and funding.

A new report from activist group UnKoch My Campus shows that Charles Koch’s ties to white supremacy have persisted throughout his adult life. The report details an array of instances where Koch has funded neo-Confederate scholars—a largely unnoticed aspect of the Koch Industries CEO’s ambitious project of funding higher education.Most alarming is a collaboration between Florida Atlantic University, the Charles Koch Foundation, and a major private-prison company, which is led by a professor who was a member of the research arm of a white-nationalist hate group.

While raking in corporate profits as the head of the family’s oil-refining business since the mid-1960s, Charles Koch and his top tactician, Richard Fink, developed a “Structure of Social Change,” which they would deploy to pull America as far to the right on taxes and regulations as they could. Koch, a libertarian, had resigned from the John Birch Society after opposing its position on the Vietnam War, and created a regressive sphere of influence. The first step in this strategy was funding higher education, because, as he said at a 1974 gathering of the Institute for Humane Studies, now a George Mason University center that he finances and directs, “educational programs are superior to political action, and support of talented free-market scholars is preferable to mass advertising.”

Koch and his family foundations have donated hundreds of millions of dollars to colleges and universities around the United States. In 2013, the Charles Koch Foundation began donating to Florida Atlantic University, offering $5,000 that year. By 2016, the annual donation had risen to $32,000.

Marshall DeRosa, who runs a prison-education program with financial backing from the Koch Foundation, is a Florida Atlantic University political-science professor who has written extensively on the Confederacy. He also has ties to its modern remnants.

From 2000 until at least 2009, according to archived web pages, DeRosa was a “faculty member” at the League of the South Institute, the “educational arm of the Southern independence movement” where “the South’s finest unreconstructed scholars” taught summer institutes and seminars. The LOS Institute acts as the charitable nonprofit of the League of the South, which the Southern Poverty Law Center considers a neo-Confederate hate group, and supports a second Southern secession in order to form a nation ruled by “Anglo-Celtic” people.

The LOS was co-founded in 1994 by an original member of the Center for Libertarian Studies, which was launched in 1976 with seed money from Charles Koch. Michael Tubbs, a white nationalist who once stockpiled military weapons and planned to target businesses owned by African Americans and Jews, is still the current chairman of the Florida LOS chapter, according to Newsweek, and has appeared at the side of LOS president Michael Hill as recently as January 2018. In 1987, Hill and three accomplices called themselves “guardians of the gene pool.”

The League of the South Institute is “the educational branch of the Mary Noel Kershaw Foundation,” named after the wife of the late Jack Kershaw, longtime leader within the violent White Citizens Council and founding board member of the League of the South. In 1998, Kershaw erected a statue of Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest and declared, “Somebody needs to say a good word for slavery. Where in the world are the Negroes better off today than in America?”

Recently, LOS was a prominent white-nationalist force at the infamous “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Hill, a board member of the Kershey Foundation, had told supporters to prepare for violence. Another LOS member was charged in January for brutally beating a 20-year-old black man at the rally.

Regarding his LOS affiliation, DeRosa told The Nation, “That was a long time ago. I disengaged early on. They’d invite me to things and I’d go to talk about my scholarship, especially the Confederate constitution, but I got an inkling as to some of the characters involved…. I didn’t feel comfortable.”

Experts on hate groups have a different view. “The LOS was different when DeRosa was involved, not as militant, but it still had very, very bad racial views,” said Heidi Beirich, an expert on right-wing extremism and director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “He can’t scurry away from the fact that for a long time he was a member of a group that had white-supremacist view

DeRosa isn’t the only former LOS Institute academic in the Koch higher-ed network. The founder of the institute, Donald Livingston, who served on the Institute for Humane Studies Academic Review Committee—which grants Koch’s “Humane Studies Fellowships” (originally “Claude R. Lambe Fellowships”)—from 1996 to 1999, has stayed in the network’s orbit. Last spring, he lectured at an Institute for Humane Studies seminar at George Mason University.

Thomas DiLorenzo, an “affiliated scholar” of the LOS Institute as recently as 2008, was an economics professor in George Mason University and worked on policy for the Koch-funded, libertarian Cato Institute. In 2005, several years after the Southern Poverty Law Center classified LOS as a hate group, he defended the organization, writing that it “advocates peace and prosperity in the tradition of a George Washington or a Thomas Jefferson.”

DeRosa and DiLorenzo taught a three-day LOS “summer school” together in 2000 on topics including “Why secession was, and is, constitutional” and “How the ‘Fourteenth Amendment’ was never constitutionally passed by Congress nor ratified by the States.”

Not long after SPLC labeled the LOS a hate group in the early 2000s, Livingston left the LOS Institute and founded its successor, the Abbeville Institute, named after the birthplace of fierce slavery advocate John Calhoun, and is still president. (DiLorenzo is currently affiliated with the Abbeville Institute, as well.) In 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education dubbed the Abbeville Institute a place where scholars “nostalgic for the Old South” went to “study the virtues of secession.” The Chronicle reported that Abbeville scholars argued that the Civil War, or “the War of Northern Aggression,” was “not about slavery…and that the antebellum Southern states had every right to secede.”

Beirich said that while Livingston did leave the LOS when it became especially extreme, “he runs his own incredibly neo-Confederate institute…. A question [for the Koch Foundation] is, why are you affiliated with a person like that? His position is not a serious historical position. The South did not just fight for states’ rights—it was about slavery. These are distorted views of history.”

DeRosa remains part of Abbeville as well, and other ex-LOS Institute scholars including DiLorenzo have recently been active with the group.

Several former LOS scholars are also part of the Mises Institute, a think tank formed in 1982 that the Southern Poverty Law Center says has “strong neo-Confederate principles.” Its founder, Lewis Rockwell, argued that the Civil War “transformed the American regime from a federalist system based on freedom to a centralized state that circumscribed liberty in the name of public order.”

At least nine Mises Institutes scholars have worked with LOS, according to the UnKoch report, and Mises employs several Koch-funded academics. Mises scholars collectively received $12.5 million in academic funding from the Charles Koch Foundation between 2005 and 2016.

“Through their support for these faculty, the Koch Foundation is subsidizing and strengthening an already booming wave of violent, alt-right anarcho-capitalists,” said Ralph Wilson, the UnKoch report’s author and the group’s co-founder.

When asked for detailed comment about several aspects of this reporting, the Koch Foundation issued a two-sentence reply to The Nation: “The Charles Koch Foundation’s criminal justice reform work is rooted in the principles of human dignity. We do not tolerate racism in any shape or form.”

THE PRISON-TO-WHITE-SUPREMACY PIPELINE

But Florida Atlantic students aren’t the only minds that DeRosa is being paid to shape. After getting commitments from the Koch Foundation and GEO Group, one of the world’s largest private-prison companies, DeRosa got state certification for a pilot program, the Inmate Civics Education Enhancement Project. He taught the first class at a South Bay, Florida, GEO Group prison in 2015.

“It’s disturbing that people of color might be exposed to neo-Confederate ideas in prison,” said Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “If you’re going to find someone to teach in prisons you’d think you could find someone who wasn’t involved with a neo-Confederate hate group.”

Meanwhile, at least four GEO Group executives have served on the Florida Atlantic University board of trustees. GEO Group had an agreement with FAU to donate $6 million to the university in 2013 in exchange for naming rights over the football stadium, but it was withdrawn because it sparked significant controversy. “GEO is very much committed to recidivism. They have a reentry program. They’re amazing,” said DeRosa.

The Koch Foundation offered a one-time grant for the pilot program, said DeRosa, which was extended twice because of the program’s success. The money funded graduate students to teach alongside DeRosa at the prison. What began as one course became four: civics, economics, ethics, and literature. Now the money has run out, said DeRosa, and he’s planning to apply for more.

The ICEEP purports to be an effort to reduce recidivism, which is common among ex-prisoners. But DeRosa suggested in a spring 2017 James Madison Institute journal that an additional goal may be to convert felons in prison, who are more likely to vote for Democrats, to conservatism and then re-enfranchise them. In the article, he noted that “if conservatives were to rally around a practical reform-minded approach that looked to restore rights to those who have completed civics programming while incarcerated, the results would be to expose thousands of new voters to the very constitutional principles which conservatives hold dear.” The James Madison Institute, which received $226,000 from the Koch Foundation in 2016, is a partner of the ICEEP.

DeRosa denied having any partisan agenda, saying his only point was that conservatives “have it all wrong,” and that once inmates have paid their debt to society, they should have the right to vote. “My objective is to reduce recidivism and get them as leaders in their communities,” he said.

Ex-felons are generally not allowed to vote in Florida, but a judge ruled against aspects of the felon-disenfranchisement law on February 1, making re-enfranchisement more of a possibility. Floridians will vote in November on a proposed constitutional amendment that would overturn the state’s disenfranchisement law.

DeRosa says his first prison class was popular, so he applied for additional Koch Foundation money to teach two classes the following year. As of 2016, there were 36 “graduates” of the program, according to GEO Group PR. That year, Koch grant money to Florida Atlantic University quadrupled.

Wilson, the UnKoch report’s author said Koch’s free-market ideology might fit into DeRosa’s federalist and neo-Confederate views. “Koch and DeRosa both subscribe to a fierce version of anarcho-capitalism that views civil rights, and any other government ‘intervention,’ as an overreach of the state,” he said. “DeRosa is simply more honest than Koch about the roots and implications of these beliefs.”

The reality of the situation is staggering: An academic who worked with a neo-Confederate organization is teaching inmates, including many of color, a curriculum he designed, funded by one of the wealthiest conservative political donors in the country and instituted at the facilities of a notorious, predatory private-prison company that is accused of violating federal anti-slavery laws.

In recent years, the Koch brothers hired a public relations firm to help them improve their lagging image as politically polarizing plutocrats. Koch Industries came out with a new motto, “We are Koch,” and the Koch Foundation made a $25 million donation to the United Negro College Fund. The rebrand included shifting their language around cuts to welfare programs, recasting these ideas as the promotion of “well-being.”

While Charles Koch poses as a virtuous billionaire who wants to help ex-felons and welcome immigrants, Koch is funding neo-Confederate academics. Students—whether in prison or a college classroom—should know who their teachers are, and who’s pulling the strings.

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https://www.politico.com/magazine/politico50/2014/charles-kochs-brain.html

Charles Koch’s Brain

By DANIEL SCHULMAN

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2014

Richard Fink doesn’t want to be profiled. He hates the idea, actually. And he’d really rather not be featured on The Politico50, for which he protests he’s not even a “viable” candidate. It doesn’t matter to Fink that you know who he is, or that he has served for decades as chief political adviser to one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful businessmen. He prefers to operate in the background, thinking one move ahead in the ideological chess game that has been his life’s work, as a trusted confidant to billionaire industrialist Charles Koch and an architect of a remarkable political ascent that has earned Charles and his brother David the grudging acceptance of the GOP establishment—and the venom of the left.

The 63-year-old, silver-haired strategist, a man largely unknown outside a small circle of like-minded conservative operatives, has spent more than 30 years overseeing Charles’s multifarious philanthropic, political and public policy endeavors—the “Kochtopus,” to its detractors. He is officially an executive vice president of Koch Industries, where he has spent much of his career overseeing the company’s legal, lobbying and public affairs divisions, and integrating them into a single unit that was eventually dubbed Koch Companies Public Sector. In that role, Fink has become one of the most powerful political players in America—and he’s done it without attracting almost any attention to himself.

“What about skipping the profile,” Fink proposes, “and talking about important things—and I am not one of those in the scheme of things.” He would prefer, he says, to talk big picture and riff on the “vision for humanity” and “belief systems” that guide the Kochs’ public policy agenda.

Prior to our interview in August, he had assigned some light reading: Chapter 1 and the 1984 postscript of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, the autobiography of Frederick Douglass (“one of my top two or three heroes in life”) and Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermon on “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life.” This is on top of the two other tomes he had already suggested to “understand the essence of what we are dedicated to.”

These are not the touchstones of a slick political operator, but of a “fuzzy-headed professor,” as one conservative strategist who has known Fink for years characterized him to me. But it is not his professorial demeanor that made Fink the indispensable man in Charles Koch’s corporate and ideological empire; it is his ability to translate all that theory into practice.

Considering how poorly their first meeting went, Fink still finds it hard to believe that Charles placed his confidence in him. In 1978, Fink was a 27-year-old doctoral student at New York University, which at the time had the country’s lone graduate program focused on Austrian economics, a school of free-market thought that opposes government intrusion into the “spontaneous order” of the economy. Fink had done his undergrad work at Rutgers University, not far from his hometown of Maplewood, New Jersey.

Fink ended up at Rutgers quite literally by accident. As a teenager, he injured his back loading freight cars in Port Elizabeth. He suddenly had to find a new career and applied to a half-dozen colleges. Rutgers accepted him, despite a rabble-rousing background that bordered on juvenile delinquency. “The first 18 years of my life, I would say that if there were trouble anywhere within a 5-square-mile radius of where I was, somehow I would be in the middle of it within a few minutes,” Fink says. He enrolled in an economics course without even knowing what economics was and quickly grew captivated by a libertarian-minded professor named Walter Grinder and his lectures on moral philosophy.

Teaching part-time at Rutgers as he worked toward his Ph.D., Fink began investigating the possibility of founding a program dedicated to Austrian economics. Charles Koch, then developing a reputation as the moneybags bankrolling the libertarian movement, was on Fink’s short list of possible funders. The young economist phoned Koch’s Wichita office obsessively until, one day, the businessman came on the line and invited Fink to Kansas to make his pitch.

For the meeting, Fink purchased what he considered a snazzy suit (he didn’t own one). It was made of black polyester and accented with white piping. Underneath, he wore a checkered shirt and a bright blue tie. With his long hair and unruly beard, Fink looked like he was trying out for the Bee Gees.

When they met, Koch flipped impassively through Fink’s proposal, seemingly unimpressed. Fink returned home assuming the industrialist wasn’t interested. But not long after the meeting, Koch came through with $150,000 to fund Fink’s program.

Years later, Fink asked Koch why. “If a guy came up to me with a black polyester suit, white piping, dressed like that with a beard and hair down to his shoulders, I don’t think I would probably meet with him, let alone give him the equivalent of about $500,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars.”

“Why,” he asked, “did you do that?”

“I like polyester,” Koch deadpanned. “It’s petroleum-based.”

Something had impressed Koch about Fink—and it wasn’t the suit. He wasn’t one of the flaky libertarian activists Koch normally encountered, who had grand notions but little follow-through. “There are a lot of people who have ideas but they don’t know [how] to get it done,” Koch later reflected in an interview with the Weekly Standard. “Rich always had a sense for how to get something done and make it effective.”

Starting with Koch’s seed funding, Fink’s program bloomed into one of the nation’s preeminent centers of free-market scholarship and advocacy. In 1980, Fink moved the operation to the campus of George Mason University in the Virginia suburbs, where he folded the program into a broader research outfit now called the Mercatus Center, after the Latin word for “markets.”

Koch poured millions into Mercatus, and the center became home to such eminent free-market economists as Nobel Prize-winner Vernon Smith and Tyler Cowen, who had moved with Fink from Rutgers. A testament to its clout: In 2001, Mercatus recommended 14 of the 23 federal rules targeted on the new Bush administration’s regulatory “hit list.”

By then, Fink had gone to work directly for Koch Industries. Charles Koch came to rely on him so completely that he was called into action to pacify even the most minor ripples of unrest within Kochworld. In the 1990s, Fink even stepped in as the interim head of the private school Koch’s children attended, after the billionaire’s attempt to foist his Market-Based Management philosophy on the institution sparked the resignation of the headmaster and a parent-teacher rebellion.

“He is almost like a fireman in the sense that he is often called on by the Kochs to address issues that pop up that need attention,” says James Miller III, the White House budget director during the Reagan administration, who has served on the boards of Koch-funded organizations since the late 1980s. More than just a fixer, Miller notes, Fink is also a “grand strategist in the sense of seeing how the pieces fit together, seeing how opportunities for affecting outcomes are emerging.” A former Koch Industries executive calls Fink “one of the best strategic minds I’ve ever been around. Some people see 2-D, some people see 3-D—Rich sees 6-D.”

Based on his plan for lifting their free-market worldview out of the intellectual ghetto, Fink very quickly worked his way into the CEO’s inner circle. “Richie got Charles’s ear big time and convinced Charles that he, Richie, was the strategist that he needed,” says Richard Wilcke, who ran the Council for a Competitive Economy, a short-lived group Koch founded in the late 1970s. “[Fink] convinced [Charles] that he was really the guy who understood the strategy and what needed to be done. And Charles bought it. He was enamored with Fink.”

At the time Fink came on the scene, the Cato Institute’s Ed Crane was Koch’s chief political adviser. But a falling out between Koch and the think-tank president eventually provided an opening for Fink to claim the mantle of ideological consigliere. Fink’s rapid rise also displaced George Pearson, who since 1969 had overseen Koch’s libertarian philanthropy. “Fink is a mover,” says a libertarian activist who knew him well. “And sometimes you have to move people if you’re a mover.”

Today, Fink is one of the few individuals within the Koch empire who unfailingly has Charles’s ear. But he created lasting enmity among the many people—mostly ideological allies—he has tangled with. The late George Mason University economics professor Charles Rowley once wrote that Fink was “a third-rate political hack” and “a man who is very appropriately named.”

But Fink produced results. His three-decade partnership with Charles Koch changed the public image of Koch Industries from a little-known energy conglomerate into a quasi-political corporate entity. Where Koch’s instinct was to steer clear of the political crossfire of Washington and remain tight-lipped at all costs, Fink advised him to “be more aggressive in defining Koch before others defined them,” the former executive says. “It was Rich who was leading the mantra with Charles that ‘we can’t be an ostrich that buries its head in the sand because what invariably happens is we get kicked in the ass.’”

***

In the early 1980s, Koch asked Fink to study a handful of libertarian outfits he supported with a view toward recalibrating his strategy to bring about a free-market revolution. The plan they hatched culminated three decades later in the creation of a powerful political fiefdom that threatened the GOP establishment itself.

“What we needed to do was build the foundations for a spontaneous order for freedom and that included a multifaceted, integrated structure of social change that really comes out of the early work of [Austrian economist Friedrich] Hayek,” Fink recalls. “I took his work and bastardized it, as many Austrians said, which is true. But to me, it was only a tool. It wasn’t something to be worshipped.”

The plan he and Koch eventually set in motion involved a three-tiered model in which the production, packaging and marketing of ideas was akin to the manufacturing of Lycra (one of Koch Industries’ signature products). Their plan for bringing about a free-market epoch and the business model of Koch Industries—gathering raw materials and refining them into more valuable products consumers desire—were basically one and the same.

To facilitate the production of these raw materials, Koch pumped millions of dollars into hundreds of universities. These contributions—which totaled nearly $31 million from 2007 to 2011 alone—have gone to endow professorships, underwrite free-market economics programs and sponsor conferences for libertarian thinkers. (Koch was not a passive investor: When his foundation provided $1.5 million to hire a pair of economics professors at Florida State University, his representatives insisted on a contract with the school that gave them veto power over job candidates.)

Step two of the process, Fink once explained in Philanthropy magazine, entailed taking the intellectual output of these academic programs, ideas “often unintelligible to the layperson and seemingly unrelated to real-world problems,” and refining them into a “useable form.”

This was the domain of the Cato Institute, Mercatus and the dozens of other free-market, antiregulatory policy shops that Charles, David and their foundations have supported. Organizations like these churned out reports, position papers and op-eds arguing for the privatization of Social Security; fingering public employee unions for causing state budget crises; attempting to debunk climate science; and making the case for slashing the welfare system and Medicaid.

The third piece of the master plan was mobilizing citizen-activists—or at least creating the illusion of a grass-roots groundswell. These activists would agitate for the same policies the academics had conceptualized and the think tanks had refined into talking points and policy prescriptions. As David Koch once explained, “What we needed was a sales force.”

Again, Fink was the man with the plan. In 1984, he and the Koch brothers formed Citizens for a Sound Economy. It was in essence the bizarro-world version of Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen. Where Nader fought to expand regulation, Citizens for a Sound Economy worked to eviscerate it. And where Nader battled corporate power, Citizens for a Sound Economy concentrated on harnessing it.

The group, fueled by donations from the Koch brothers, their company and various corporate backers, quickly developed political cachet within the Beltway. Its core mission consisted of promoting lower taxes and less government, for which it solicited large contributions from corporations with a direct financial interest in promoting or thwarting particular agendas. Microsoft donated $380,000—Citizens for a Sound Economy lobbied Congress to cut the Justice Department’s antitrust enforcement budget. Three sugar companies chipped in $700,000—the group mounted a campaign against an Army Corps of Engineers plan that would have encroached on cane-growing acreage in Florida’s Everglades.

One of Citizens for a Sound Economy’s most successful legislative coups was shooting down the Clinton administration’s proposed BTU tax. Clinton had pushed to tax fuels based on their heat content, giving a leg up to sustainable energy sources such as wind and solar power. Koch Industries considered killing the energy tax a matter of vital importance. (“Our belief is that the tax, over time, may have destroyed our business,” Fink later said.) According to a consultant who worked for Citizens for a Sound Economy in the 1990s, Fink approached the leading oil industry lobby and trade group with a plan to deep-six the BTU tax. “Rich walked into the American Petroleum Institute with a lump sum and said, ‘Will you match it?’” he recalls. “API and the oil companies matched it with a very specific targeted campaign aimed just at knocking out the BTU tax from that budget bill.”

Pioneering the kind of tactics it would rely on time and again, the group targeted key districts, launching surgical strikes of print and radio ads. “With his budget vote, your congressman controls your cash and your job,” one radio ad intoned ominously. “In next year’s election, you’ll control his job.”

The strategy, the consultant said, focused almost exclusively on swaying one critical Democratic senator—Oklahoma’s David Boren, a member of the Senate Finance Committee. “It was all geared to making it profoundly uncomfortable for Boren,” he says. Without his support, the tax was dead on arrival. When Boren came out against it, the battle was over.

The victory gave the exuberant freedom fighters at Citizens for a Sound Economy their first real taste of political power and a model for future legislative skirmishes. “They thought, ‘Wow, this is how it works, and it really works,’” the consultant says. “That sort of targeted money at a key senator or congressman, at a pivotal point in time. … They took that initial victory and just made it a thing.”

***

When Obama took office, Democrats controlled the executive and legislative branches, just like at the start of Clinton’s presidency. Barack Obama, like Bill Clinton, had arrived in Washington with ambitious plans to overhaul the health care system and touted energy policies the private sector found loathsome. Fink and the Kochs had been there before. Same fight, different decade.

In late January 2009, as Fink strode into Koch Industries’ imposing dark glass and granite headquarters on the outskirts of Wichita, the nation’s economy was in free fall. The Obama administration, just a few days in office, was pressing forward with plans for a massive outlay of federal cash via a stimulus package of close to a trillion dollars.

Under the new administration, Fink believed, there was no telling how large the bureaucracy might balloon, how expansive and entrenched government programs might grow. The last time a Democrat had sat in the White House, the company had weathered one of the rockiest periods in its history, as environmental regulators and Justice Department lawyers mercilessly besieged Koch Industries.

This time around, Fink had been considering retirement, hoping to play more golf and spend time unwinding at his vacation home in Delaware’s Bethany Beach. But he and the Kochs had spent decades fighting their own kind of culture war to remake America into their free-market, small-government ideal, and now Obama threatened to roll back much of what they had achieved. Retirement could wait.

Obama frightened the Kochs. Charles considered him a “dedicated egalitarian” who had “internalized some Marxist models.” David, the more bombastic of the two, declared him “the most radical president we’ve ever had as a nation,” a leader steeped in the “hard-core economic socialist” politics of his Kenyan father.

The Obama administration, Fink told the brothers when they met that day in Wichita, was poised to push the country over the precipice. Labor unions, social programs, regulation, tax hikes—nearly everything the administration stood for, they stood against. The brothers had two choices, Fink said. They could keep their heads down and watch the country slide into oblivion, or they could come out swinging. Fink counseled jihad.

“If we are going to do this, we should do it right or not at all,” Fink told the brothers. “But if we don’t do it right, or if we don’t do it at all, we will be insignificant and we will just waste a lot of time, and I would rather play golf.” Fink warned the brothers that they would be placing not just their company but their legacies on the line. “If we do it right,” Fink cautioned, “then it is going to get very, very ugly.”

***

By this time, Citizens for a Sound Economy was no more. Internal disagreements had divided the group, with one faction going on to form FreedomWorks, and the Kochs and their allies founding Americans for Prosperity. As the Obama presidency began, AFP positioned itself at the vanguard of the Tea Party rebellion.

During the health care reform fight, the Koch brothers’ advocacy group began targeting vulnerable congressional Democrats with brutal attack ads. The spots, featuring a breast-cancer survivor, suggested that Democrats could end up costing Americans their lives by denying mammograms to women under the age of 50. These ads were rife with falsehoods—but they didn’t have to be true to be effective.

Eventually, Obama’s aides grew concerned by the AFP onslaught and settled on a simple strategy in response, which they would deploy repeatedly in the years ahead: Show voters that Americans for Prosperity was not the grass-roots group it claimed to be, but a vehicle for a shadowy corporate agenda.

One of the first shots came from David Axelrod, the president’s chief political strategist. In a September 2010 op-ed in the Washington Post, Axelrod singled out the Koch brothers by name as he detailed the “audacious stealth campaign being mounted by powerful corporate special interests that are vying to put their Republican allies in control of Congress.” Later, when Obama’s reelection team loosed its first ad of the presidential race, it targeted the “secretive oil billionaires attacking President Obama”—a.k.a., the Koch brothers. As the campaign unfolded, the Koch brothers took on the image of cartoonish robber barons. Protesters massed outside Koch Industries’ Wichita headquarters and marched up Park Avenue to David Koch’s apartment building.

Although the Kochs unquestionably made common cause with Republicans, Fink still considers it odd that the brothers have become so closely associated with the GOP since their politics don’t neatly fit that label. “I view them as classical liberals,” Fink says, arguing that increasingly Democrats have pushed them into the Republican orbit. (The fusillade of Koch network-financed political ads targeting Democrats surely didn’t help their standing with the party.) He finds some irony in the fact that the vaunted Koch seminars, whose roster of wealthy attendees fueled the anti-Obama uprising via AFP and a web of allied groups, originally came into being in 2003 out of concern with the policies of the Bush administration. “Between the Fed policy and government spending and the aggressive foreign policy … they were putting America on a path of decline,” Fink says. “We are concerned, equally concerned, about the direction of the country from both parties and don’t have tremendous confidence in either party.”

But the 2012 campaign, into which the Kochs and their allies poured some $400 million, cemented their image as Republican bogeymen. At Fink’s urging, Charles and David Koch had mounted an unprecedented political effort—Charles dubbed it “the mother of all wars”—that left the balance of power unchanged but colored the way the country perceived them.

Fink brushes off the 2012 loss, telling me, “I believe the tradition we’re in goes through the patriots fighting the English, through the abolitionists fighting for freedom, through women’s suffrage, through people fighting for freedom in America. And in that tradition, you take lumps, you have successes, you have failures, but you need to keep up the struggle. Without the struggle, there can be no progress.”

The Koch network, retrenching after the failure of 2012, is expected to channel some $300 million into the midterm elections, more than $100 million of that through AFP. But Fink says he plans to focus more on disseminating ideas than doing political battle: “I don’t like the political arena. It’s not my view of a civil society. I don’t like the incentives. I don’t like what it does to people.”

When we talk, Fink is vacationing at his beach house. He had recently bought a La-Z-Boy and promptly parked himself in it: “I’ve just been reading foreign policy, philosophy. I’ve been reading the abolitionists. I’ve been reading some of the patriots of the Civil War.” He was mining these texts “for clues and ideas to apply to our programs.” Fink tells me he has relinquished day-to-day control of Koch Industries’ legal, lobbying and public affairs efforts, stepping down as CEO of Koch Companies Public Sector, though he remains a Koch executive and board member, in addition to serving as the president of the Charles Koch Institute. “I’m really working on this, what I call social change strategy,” he says. “I’m loving what I’m doing. I’m living the American dream.”

Daniel Schulman, senior editor in the Washington bureau ofMother Jones, is author ofSons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty, from which this article is adapted.

==

A free-market strategy

University funding is part of a multi-pronged approach to social change that Charles Koch and his close ally Richard Fink devised decades ago.

Fink, the Koch brothers' "grand strategist," is currently executive vice president of Koch Industries, president of the Charles Koch Foundation, and chair and CEO of Koch Companies Public Sector LLC, which coordinates Koch Industries' lobbying. Starting in the 1970s, Fink worked with Charles Koch to devise a three-part strategy of influence based on ideas from Austrian economist and free-market proponent Friedrich Hayek to spread their laissez-faire ideology as widely as possible.

The first step in Fink's "Structure of Social Change" involved pouring millions of dollars into universities to produce what he called "intellectual raw materials" to support their political agenda.But these materials had to be packaged in a way that non-academics could understand, and that's where thesecond step in the strategy came in: Think tanks such as the libertarian Cato Institute, co-founded by Charles Koch and heavily funded by the Koch foundations, produce reports, policy proposals, and opinion pieces that turn academic work into political fodder.

Next, what Fink calls "citizen activist" groups put the think tanks' ideas into action by advocating for the recommended policy changes. The Koch network includes a vast array of such groups, including the "social welfare" nonprofit Americans for Prosperity, which David Koch founded with Fink and North Carolina political mega-donor Art Pope, and the closely linked nonprofit Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which bankrolled the beginnings of the Tea Party. AFP spends millions on federal, state and local elections, often buying attack adstargeting opponents of their favored candidates. The Kochs and their companies' political action committees also donate directly to the politicians they hope will usher their policy preferences into law.

While the Kochs are prolific donors to higher education in the South, they are by no means alone. Their close ally Art Pope, for example, has given six- and sometimes seven-figure donations to mainly Southern universities, much of it going towards free-market programs. The foundation of the North Carolina-based bank BB&T has given at least 63 "Moral Foundation"grants to universities that require the schools to offer a course centered on "Atlas Shrugged" by libertarian favorite Ayn Rand.

==

http://business.time.com/2009/01/02/tyler-cowen-statist-anti-rothbardian-agent-of-the-kochtopus/

==

https://www.desmogblog.com/richard-fink

Bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees in economics from Rutgers, UCLA and New York University, respectively. [1]

Background

Richard H. Fink is the executive vice president and a member of the board of directors at Koch Industries, Inc. He has been involved in public policy lobbying for almost 30 years. Since the 1980s, Fink has advocated using “ideological entrepreneurship” or “political marketing” methods to advertise free-market ideology to the public. The Koch family has donated over $25 million to front groups that promote skepticism of man-made climate change. [2]

Fink takes his ideas on influencing public policy from FredrichHayek's models of the production process. Fink describes a process in which one must first develop the intellectual raw materials, then develop these materials into policy products, and finally market and distribute them to consumers. Fink advocates that conservative foundations should invest in university programs, think tanks, and implementation groups. Each of these areas provide the “raw minds,” a place to “develop these minds,” and a marketable outlet to disseminate “these trained minds.”

Fink has been involved with conservative think tanks and free-market university programs. He founded the Center for Market Processes, which later became the Mercatus Center in 1980. Fink also served as the first president of David Koch's Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), which is now FreedomWorks. After working for CSE, Fink became the president of the Charles G. Koch and Claude R. Lambe Foundations. These groups have advocated for and received funding from the tobacco industry.

Richard Fink has been a board member for several organizations at George Mason University including the George Mason University Foundation, the Institute for Humane Studies, and the Center for the Study of Public Choice—which received $795,902 in funding from conservative foundations between 1986 and 2005.

Stance on Climate Change

[Pending further investigation]

Key Quotes

“Tea parties reflect a spontaneous recognition by people that if they do not act, the government will bankrupt their families and their country. They're absolutely right about that.” [3]

“[The U.S. Tobacco Program] is unbefitting a society that holds such values as free enterprise, equal opportunity, and individual liberty.” [14]

Key Deeds

2012

Richard Fink urged the Koch brothers to do everything in their power to influence the outcome of the 2012 election. Fink, who is described as their long-time political strategist, said “If we are going to do this, we should do it right or not at all.”[5]

2009 

Americans for Prosperity, of which Richard Fink is President, campaigned against a smoking ban in Virginia by hiring a company to pressure Virginia state legislatures to vote against the ban with tens of thousands of phone calls. AFP framed it as a “consumer rights issue.”[4]

2006

Americans for Prosperity (previously Citizens for a Sound Economy) campaigned against increases in tobacco taxes in the states of South Dakota, Texas, Kansas and Indiana. During this time AFP received funding from US Smokeless Tobacco, Retail Tobacco Dealers of America, and Tobacco Warehouse of Rapid City for their work in South Dakota. Richard Fink was president of AFP at this time. [6]

2004

When Citizens for a Sound Economy split into the two groups of Americans for Prosperity (AFP) and FreedomWorks, Richard Fink continued to work as President of AFP where he continued lobbying activities for the tobacco industry. Fink worked with AFP when it recently campaigned against Proposition 29, legislation that would have increased tobacco taxes and directed this money towards cancer research. Together, AFP and the tobacco industry contributed more than $40 millionin order to combat Proposition 29. [7], [8]

1990s

During the 1990s, at a time that major tobacco companies were accused of a conspiracy to mislead the public about the dangers of smoking, the Mercatus Centerand Citizens for a Sound Economy (both created by Richard Fink) acted in defense of the tobacco companies. Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) was part of the “Coalition for Fiscal Restraint” that partnered with Phillip Morris and Koch Industries. In 1994,CSE supported “Get Government Off Our Back,” a group created by RJReynolds Tobaccoto oppose regulation of the tobacco industry. During this period of time, CSE received over $400,000 in funding from the tobacco industry.[9],[10], [7]

The Mercatus Center and Citizens for a Sound Economy had also supported Phillip Morris in 1991, listed in an “Industry Affairs Portfolio of Organizations” (PDF) during a federal suit. [11]

1984 

Richard Fink and the Koch brothers created Citizens for a Sound Economy, with approximately $1.5 million in seed money directly from David Koch. Their group originally focused on privatizing government and introducing a flat tax. [5]

1980s

Richard Fink has a long history of acting on behalf of tobacco industry organizations. In 1985 he urged federal representatives to eliminate the U.S. tobacco program, citing “enormous benefits to consumers and taxpayers” that would result. The following is a brief excerpt of his full, hand-signed letter. A PDF of the full letter is available here.

“On behalf of the 220,000 members of Citizens for a Sound Economy, I urge you to consider the heavy costs of the U.S.Tobacco program, and the enormous benefits to consumers and taxpayers which would result from the elimination of that program. Congressman Tom Petri, who is sponsoring an amendment to the farm bill that would eliminate the program, has correctly characterized the program as 'feudalistic.' It is unbefitting a society that holds such values as free enterprise, equal opportunity, and individual liberty.”  [14]

In 1988, Finktestified on behalf of Citizens for a Sound Economy (PDF)in front of the National Economic Commission in order to lobby against tax increases that had the potential to impact the profits of a number of large tobacco companies. [12]

When asking for the Tobacco Institute for funding, Roger Ream of Citizens for a Sound Economy promoted Richard Fink as a selling point for the organization. The following is from a letter from Ream to the Tobacco Institute (PDF available here):

“Recently, our president, Richard H. Fink, was appointed to the Consumer Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve and to the Department of Transportation's Amtrak Privatization Commission. This further enhances CSE's credibility and effectiveness on these issues.”

Affiliations

​Source:[1]

Publications

According to a search of Google Scholar, Richard Fink has published a small number of articles in the area of economics. His articles tend to be published by conservative think-tanks including the Lavoiser Group, and theLudwig Von Mises Institute. His publications include:

==

The political operation created by the billionaire conservative mega-donors Charles and David Koch is quietly investing millions of dollars in programs to win over an unlikely demographic target for their brand of small-government conservatism ― poor people.

The outreach includes everything from turkey giveaways, GED training and English-language instruction for Hispanic immigrants to community holiday meals and healthy living classes for predominantly African American groups to vocational training and couponing classes for the under-employed. The strategy, according to sources familiar with it and documents reviewed by POLITICO, calls for presenting a more compassionate side of the brothers’ politics to new audiences, while fighting the perception that their groups are merely fronts for rich Republicans seeking to game the political process for personal gain.

The efforts include a healthy dose of proselytizing about free enterprise and how it can do more than government to lift people out of poverty.

“We want people to know that they can earn their own success. They don’t need the government to give it to them,” Koch network official Jennifer Stefano told activists and donors duringan August rally in Columbus, Ohio, at which she introduced one such project, Bridge to Wellbeing.

Housed within the foundation arm of Americans for Prosperity, the Koch network’s largest group, the program represents “the new way to advance freedom,” Stefano boasted. “And so that’s why, today, you’ll see Americans for Prosperity Foundation reaching out to new communities offering not just classes on the Constitution, and knowing your rights, but on couponing and how to turn your passion into profit by helping other people be successful, to not just tell them about the economy and economic freedom, but to show them that we want them to economically thrive, and how to do it.”

Bridge to Wellbeing last week served hot dinners to crowds of dozens of primarily African American attendees at a church in Miami and a community center in Orlando. A chef offered tips on how to prepare “dinner on a dime,” while attendees were guided into “learning about freedom,” according to the Twitter feed of one AFP staffer.

The Koch efforts can seem at times almost like a post-Citizens United version of turn-of-the-century political machines like Tammany Hall ― part privatized social-service agency, part voter mobilization. But liberal critics see it as a craven and patronizing gambit to bribe the disadvantaged into supporting a de-regulatory agenda that helps the haves at the expense of the have-nots.

"It won't work. They can't hide their agenda of lower wages, no unions and no health care, which would be devastating to these communities, merely by trying to 'help' them with a food coupon," said David Brock, who founded a liberal non-profit group that tracks the Koch network. He added, "It's also creepy. It sounds like something Hezbollah would do to get recruits."

Like most else in the Kochs’ expansive network, which plans to spend as much as $889 million from the industrialist Koch brothers and hundreds of allied mega-donors in the run-up to the 2016 election, the so-called well-being efforts, as they are known within the network, are only partly about electing Republicans.

Charles Koch has long argued ― mostly privately until recently ― that government welfare and regulation actually hold back many of its ostensible beneficiaries. His network's goal, he told hundreds of ultra-rich conservatives he had summoned to a tony Southern California resort this summer, “is to remove the shackles preventing all Americans, especially the disadvantaged, from pursuing their dreams. That’s what’s happening in this country. We are crushing ― these policies are crushing peoples’ dreams,” including by making "it nearly impossible for the poor to start a small business or, in many cases, even work.”

Koch went on to call his network "the most effective movement in history for helping people improve their lives and making the world a better place."

In addition to Bridge to Wellbeing, Koch-backed wellness efforts include the Hispanic-focused LIBRE Initiative, which has given away holiday turkeys and toys, as well as Spanish-language training for drivers’ licensing, GED exams and tax-preparation. Another network group,Concerned Veterans for America, is expected to begin offering similar well-being programs for veterans, according to sources. There are also initiatives aimed at the homeless, developmentally disabled and mentally ill. And there’s a new group called Stand Together for America focused partly on using well-being-related outreach to appeal to what network officials call “the middle third” ― persuadable voters who are mostly disengaged. And the Charles Koch Institute in 2013 launched a “Well-Being Initiative” to provideintellectual firepower for the overall network effort.

“Sometimes, we have not been as good at explaining the virtues of economic freedom and individual liberty to people who are struggling,” said Americans for Prosperity’s president Tim Phillips. He also conceded that well-being initiatives could help AFP’s main arm satisfy an Internal Revenue Service requirement that the group spend most of its money on educational or charitable purposes, not political or policy advocacy. “Part of it is we are a social welfare organization. And, so, yes, we do try to help folks live more prosperous lives. That’s not related to direct policy.”

“Could come off as not being genuine”

The well-being push includes causes that defy easy partisan typecasting ― such as a major criminal justice reform push and a fledgling fight to reduce occupational licensing ― on which Koch allies have worked with liberal groups and even lately with President Barack Obama’s administration. But messages about reining in government and empowering the private sector undergird all of the efforts ― even pitching in to help emergency victims.

After a chemical spill polluted the water supply in nine West Virginia counties last year, AFP Foundation gave away more than 100,000 gallons of bottled water to affected residents. Some environmentalists bristled, pointing out that Koch-backed groups have fought against stricter environmental regulations. But sources say that Stefano, the Bridge to Wellbeing leader, in a presentation to AFP staff, argued that charitable efforts like the one in West Virginia “allow us to demonstrate our values of individual responsibility and the private sector stepping up in times of need, instead of waiting for government.”

Inside the network, the well-being initiatives are viewed as a legacy project for Charles Koch and his longtime lieutenant Rich Fink. An executive at the brothers' multinational industrial conglomerate Koch Industries, Fink advocated for the creation of Stand Together for America, and has sat on the boards of Charles Koch Institute and Americans for Prosperity Foundation, though he left the AFPF board at the end of last month. Sources familiar with the network tell POLITICO that, in weekly meetings of top officials from across the expanding network, groups are urged to pursue outreach to disadvantaged groups.

“They’re trying to reshape the country, and they realize they can’t do that without changing the perception of conservatism,” said one operative who works with Koch-backed groups, who requested anonymity. In an internal network memo reviewed by POLITICO, though, in which AFP sought additional program funds, it predicted that the Bridge to Wellbeing initiative would allow the group and its foundation to “go on the offense against the current suggestions that AFPF is extreme, an arm of a political party or the front group for wealthy donors.”

Still, there’s a fair amount of concern inside the network that the efforts could be a costly boondoggle that is unlikely to yield any progress towards the Kochs' goals, and more likely risks backlash.

Stefano privately addressed those concerns during Bridge to Wellbeing's formative stages, according to sources familiar with the discussions, who said she warned network officials on multiple occasions that “capitalizing on these types of events could come off as not being genuine.”

And one former network executive said, “There are a lot of high-up lieutenants who roll their eyes when they talk about this and question whether it’s getting any bang for the buck. How does teaching people how to clip coupons or giving them free turkeys translate into convincing them that conservatives or Republicans have the best interests of the disadvantaged at heart? Is this really changing people's minds or are they just showing up for the free turkeys?”

The calculation, according to AFP spokesman Levi Russell, is that new audiences might be more receptive to the message if it’s presented in a less-political context. “If we're only engaging people on the latest piece of legislation being debated, we're starting too late in the process,” Russell said.

‘Care and intent’

After spending more than $400 million boosting conservative candidates and causes in the run-up to the 2012 election, only to see Democrats retain the White House and the Senate, the Koch network commissioned a forensic analysis to determine where their efforts had fallen short.

It identified a number of needed tactical and strategic adjustments. But it also concluded that its efforts were hampered by the widespread perception that conservatives don’t care about the plight of regular folks struggling to make ends meet ― let alone the underprivileged.

Sources tell POLITICO that, in post-election strategy sessions, Charles Koch and his inner circle fixated on an exit poll finding that highlighted a so-called “empathy gap” that plagued GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Among voters seeking a candidate who “cares about people like me”, Obama clobbered Romney 81 percent to 18 percent ― by far the widest gap among the four traits commonly measured (the others are vision for the future, shares my values and strong leader).

“All we talked about post-2012 was that statistic,” said a former executive with one network group. “How Romney won on economics or national defense but lost like 80 to 20 on who cares about you. It spoke to a larger problem with the conservative movement. Romney just embodied that.”

Koch and Fink concluded that winning over empathy-seeking voters could help them tilt the electoral map in their favor.

“If we are successful, there will be enough … support to not only drive state policies, but also to elect a majority of freedom advocates in the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and we need 317 electoral votes to elect a president who will advance” economic freedom, Fink argued to donors at a closed-door 2014 session. In his remarks, which were secretly recorded and posted online by a liberal blogger, he stressed that “intent matters to this middle third,” and pointed out “Mitt Romney won on leadership. He won on the economy. He won on experience. What did he lose on? He lost on care and intent.”

He conceded that the Koch network’s efforts to reach the coveted middle third have been clumsy.The focus has been on “telling them what’s important — what we think is important should be important to them. And they’re not responding and don’t like it, okay? Well, we get business — what do we do? We want to find out what the customer wants, right, not what we want them to buy.”

The network commissioned focus groups done by veteran GOP pollster Frank Luntz, a Koch favorite, to assess the concerns of the middle third, and determine how best to reach them, sources told POLITICO. On top of that, Fink told the donors the network gathered “20 years of objective research of left, right, middle scientists, and we’ve looked at 170,000 surveys of people around the world, in the United States — they were all people in the middle — and what they think is important.”

The result was an index of “six dimensions demonstrated to be key factors of well-being,” according to documents from the Charles Koch Institute. Among them were increasing the standard of living by providing for basic necessities, offering opportunity through strong job markets and entrepreneurship, bolstering personal freedom, encouraging family and community bonds, promoting physical and mental health and providing safety from war and crime.

It’s difficult to assess how much of the network’s $889-million budget for the 2016 cycle is slated for well-being initiatives, both because the efforts are spread across multiple groups and because the groups aren’t required to disclose detailed financial information.

But sources tell POLITICO that Fink has directed that a greater percentage of AFP’s overall budget be allocated to its foundation, which runs Bridge to Wellbeing and which tax filings show had a 2014 budget of $23 million (as compared to $82 million for AFP's main arm). And leaked documents reveal that the Koch network has pitched donors on well-being projects and concepts since at least last year.

At a June 2014 network gathering, donors were given the option of attending breakout sessions entitled “Well-Being: What It Is and Why It’s Important” and “Value-Added Events: Engaging the Middle Third.” The latter session, which refers to the precursor program to Bridge to Wellbeing, featured presentations by Stefano and Fink’s daughter Justine Fink, who helps run Bridge to Wellbeing. Stefano was listed as the “VP of Value Added Events” on AFP’s 2014 tax filings, which show she received an annual salary of $184,000.

“Not politics”

The Bridge to Wellbeing pilot program was launched in key swing states like Colorado, Florida, North Carolina and Virginia. And insiders profess that the hope is that some of those helped by the network’s social services will embrace free-enterprise conservatism and possibly even join the ground troops that Koch-backed groups deploy to get out the vote.

Yet, publicly, the Kochs and their allies downplay political motivations.

In a promotional video shot at a Bridge to Wellbeing turkey giveaway, an "instructor" named Nicole Thorton, who previously worked as a high school history teacher and now teaches courses for AFP Foundation about the Constitution and individual rights, explained that the purpose “is not politics. It’s to help citizens to have a better quality of life and that is something that everybody wants, regardless of your political affiliation.”

There’s an almost evangelical undercurrent to the group’s efforts, which came across during Stefano’s speech in Columbus this summer.

“We have to go out and we have to embrace people for who they are. We have to meet them where they’re at. We must personalize freedom so that it’s meaningful to them and not just to us,” Stefano said, after taking the stage to the Rocky theme song. “There is no community, no group of people, no barrier that the six states that have agreed to a test of this model would not overcome to advance this new way of introducing Americans again to freedom,” she said. “We have gone in to shelters, rescue missions. We have gone and taken our message to people with intellectual disabilities, those with mental illness.”

Bridge seeks to cultivate relationships with potential activists by holding smaller-group events that bring in “aligned but unengaged” people, according to sources familiar with the planning. A particular focus is women. An AFP survey found women would be more likely to attend events if childcare or child-friendly entertainment is offered, sources said. It also found that events using words like “everyday affordability” were popular with “aligned but unengaged women.”

Bridge’s events are typically held at churches or community centers. They offer “coaches” in areas including “budgeting and finance” and “health and lifestyle, nutrition” and “constitutional and personal rights.” Free workshops are geared towards teaching “how to save money and have economic freedom.” Specific skills have included couponing, healthy and affordable eating and tips for answering the question “Is My Child’s School Any Good?”

It held a “Business, Budgeting and Money Saving Tips” event at a conservative church in Richmond, Va., and a healthcare event in Phoenix, Ariz., where a local doctor discussed how women can lead healthier lives while also criticizing Obamacare as hindering healthcare delivery and medical advances.

One event attendee explained in a promotional video he’s “learned how to flip furniture” and use coupons, as well as better time management.

During the turkey giveaway featured in the video, a participant identified as Alyssa thanked Bridge to Wellbeing for helping her family recover from her husband's lay-off.

“If it wasn’t for you guys, I don’t know how we would have made it the past few months, if you guys hadn’t offered that couponing class, because I didn’t even know how I was going to put groceries in my cabinet,” she said. “And I am incredibly grateful and I really appreciate all the hard work that you guys do and you put into it.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/charles-david-koch-poverty-charity-216631

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http://littlesis.org/person/41346/Rich_Fink

Business Positions

Koch Industries, Inc.   Second-largest private company in the US, involved in...

Georgia-Pacific   Koch Industries paper and formaldehyde subsidiary

Other Positions & Memberships

Claude R. Lambe Foundation

Americans for Prosperity Foundation   Koch political advocacy group c(3) arm

Mercatus Center   Koch-powered deregulatory think tank.

Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation   One of the Koch family foundations

Fred C and Mary R Koch Foundation   First of the Koch family foundations

Citizens for a Sound Economy

Freedom Partners   501(c)6 led by Koch Brothers

Americans for Prosperity   Conservative political advocacy group

Education

Rutgers University   The State University of New Jersey

UCLA

New York University

Family

Chris Fink   VP of Development, Americans for Prosperity

Donation/Grant Recipients

1-10 of 23 :: see all

Koch Industries Inc Political Action Committee (Kochpac)

George Allen   US Representative and Senator from Virginia

Todd Tiahrt   US Representative from Kansas

Pat Roberts   US Senator and Representative from Kansas

Republican Party of Virginia Inc

Good Government for America Committee

Keith S Fimian

Sam Dale Brownback   Governor of Kansas

David McIntosh   US Representative from Indiana

Elizabeth Hanford Dole   Former US Senator from North Carolina

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http://www.alternet.org/environment/charles-koch-admits-climate-change-happening-then-denies-problem

As the nation warily watches every Republican presidential candidate kiss the ring of billionaire donor Charles Koch [3] for a shot at his network's $300,000,000 pool of presidential cash, Charles Koch did something unusual. Last week's USA Today interview with :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}::{Charles Koch [4] noted his shifting opinion on what he calls climate change “hysteria:”

For the record, Koch says this of climate change: “You can plausibly say that CO2 has contributed” to the planet's warming, but he sees “no evidence” to support “this theory that it's going to be catastrophic.”

Wait…Charles Koch just accepted that the planet is warming? Hold your applause.

Clearly, Mr. Koch still denies that there's a problem - which means he's missing the entire point of discussing climate change. But any movement from Charles on the 5 Stages of Climate Denial–from #1 down to #3 [5]–is a big deal. This is the same guy who has poured $80 million [6] into organizations that have misrepresented climate change science to the public and advocated against any viable solutions to the problem.

Koch's Right-Hand-Man: “Charles is ahead of me on this.”

Last June, leaked [7] recordings surfaced [8] from Koch's regular meeting [9] of millionaires and billionaires who are coordinating $889 million in spending around the 2016 election. Charles's Koch top strategist Richard Fink indicated that we may see a shift in Koch's rhetoric on climate change. Fink, aka “Charles Koch's Brain [10],” told attending prospective donors what they wanted to hear: donate to us, and we'll fight the crazy commie hippies and their pesky science. From the Undercurrent [11]:

“The environmental movement. Occupy Wall Street. These kids are searching for meaning. They're protesting the 1 percent. They are the 1 percent, but they're protesting the 1 percent. The environmental movement and climate change. It's not about climate change. I studied climate change for six years. I can't figure it out, quite frankly. Charles is ahead of me on this. I'm not a climatologist, but I'm not completely stupid. I can tell you I meet with people, particularly in California, that are convinced the world is going to burn up in you know, a year or two. They don't know the answer – they don't even know the question, because it's not about climate change. It's about a cause. It gives their life meaning.”

For context, you should probably know that Fink told the room's billionaires that the minimum wage would lead to fascism, comparing today's low-income Americans to pre-Nazi Germany citizenry. Not exactly a room full of academics. And since one of the people that Mr. Fink 'meets with' was a scientist that he funded to study global temperature data, you have to wonder how much experience Rich Fink has with willful ignorance.

When Charles Koch Accidentally Proved Global Warming

Charles Koch cannot deny is that he's seen the global temperature record data. In 2011, through the Charles Koch Foundation (CKF), CKF president Richard Fink funded a high-profile study on global surface temperature data. This dataset, which was an unnecessarily redundant [12] reproduction of several other similar studies, was constructed by a scientist who at the time was a climate change denier.

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crypto:There is a long and storied tradition of corporate, right-wing interests seeking to shape the economic policies of the Democratic Party. The DLC, another Third Way–style group that folded in 2011, was funded by none other than Koch Industries. Richard Fink, a strategist to the Koch brothers who helped found what is now known as Americans for Prosperity, was on the DLC’s board. fang

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Richard Fink has long been one of the Koch Brothers’ inner circle, playing the role of both political strategist and close confidante.

Some say the Koch Empire wouldn’t have been nearly as successful without Fink. Without him and his ideas, what is now pejoratively known as the “Kochtopus” probably would not have branched so far into research or political advocacy.

But relatively few people have heard of Richard Fink. And even fewer know of his connections to Big Tobacco – connections which may have influenced the creation and actions of Koch-funded front groups for decades to come.

With the Kochs’ support, Fink established the Mercatus Center in 1980, and then co-founded Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) in 1984, where he served as President and CEO. Later, Fink helped found Americans for Prosperityto succeed CSE in 2004.

Fink sits on the board of the Institute for Humane Studies and is the former President of two Koch Family Foundations. Further, he has served as the Executive Vice-President of Koch Industries since 1989.

The Koch Brothers are best known as a key funder behind the climate denial machine and for their political attacks on President Barack Obama, as Jane Mayer exposed in her must-read New Yorker article.

The Kochs have donated over $25 million to front groups that attack climate science, create doubt and confusion among the public, and otherwise delay accountability for polluters.

Americans for Prosperity has campaigned against efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and amplified the “Climategate” attack on scientists, calling global warming the “biggest hoax the world has ever seen.”

But the Koch front groups’ involvement in the tobacco industry has gone largely unreported.

In 1999, the major tobacco companies were accused of a mass conspiracy to deceive the public about the dangers of smoking. The United States Department of Justice filed a racketeering lawsuit against major cigarette manufacturers, and sought $280 billion in penalties.

To combat this, Big Tobacco called on its allies for support – including the Mercatus Center and Citizens for a Sound Economy – both created by Richard Fink.

THE MOBILIZATION UNIVERSE

In a document called “Mobilization Universe,” as seen on the Tobacco Archives, Philip Morris laid out a plan to call on its allies. The goal: avert White House filing of the federal suit.

Its plan was to leverage third-party relationships to “oppose DOJ appropriations request for federal suit task force, oppose federal legislation enabling cause of action against the industry, and persuade the Administration and Senate and House Democrats of the political liability in a federal suit.”

Philip Morris laid out its key targets and key message points, examples of which include “Assumption of risk,” “Money grab,” and “Bad for Gore and Senate and House Democrats in 2000.” The document calls for third-party surrogates to write op-eds, LTEs and editorials, give speeches or testimonies, create policy reports, join coalitions, and provide access to policymakers, to name several.

CSE and the Mercatus Center were documented as allies several years before that, as well. In 1991, both CSE and Mercatus were part of aportfolio of organizations Philip Morris had cultivated to support its interests during a federal suit. Many other Koch-funded organizations were also included in this list, including the Cato Institute and theHeritage Foundation.

A HISTORY OF ALLIANCE

For several years, Fink acted on behalf of Big Tobacco using tactics laid out in their mobilization strategy – dating back from 1985, when he wrote federal representatives urging them to eliminate the US Tobacco Program. In a hand-signed letter, hewrote:

“Dear Representative: On behalf of the 220,000 members of Citizens for a Sound Economy, I urge you to consider the heavy costs of the U.S. tobacco program, and the enormous benefits to consumers and taxpayers which would result from the elimination of that program.”

The elimination of the tobacco tax bill would have lined the pockets of Big Tobacco CEOs, with less taxes and easier access for farmers to grow tobacco. Fink aligned not only himself but the entire membership of CSE with the interests of Big Tobacco.

In 1988, Finkwrote to the Surgeon General to express concern about the Interagency Committee on Smoking and Health’s inquiries into the subject of tobacco and U.S. trade policy. He warned that it would be unwise to suggest any foreign trade barriers, ending, “we hope that you will keep these thoughts in mind as your department discusses U.S. trade policy toward tobacco.” This letter was tracked down by the Checks & Balances Project in the Tobacco Archives, with an addendum from Samuel Chilcote – President of The Tobacco Institute – urging others to follow Fink’s lead and support.

For Fink’s efforts, Chilcote thanked Fink ina hand-signed letter on behalf of the tobacco industry, writing, “When an advisory body such as the Interagency Committee on Smoking and Health ventures into the field of U.S. trade policy, it is vitally important that the public record be balanced by the sound economic views and sensible business judgments that you provided.”

A LEGACY OF LOBBYING

In 1988, Finktestified on behalf of CSE to the National Economic Commission, urging them to avoid tax increases – increases that would have negatively impacted Big Tobacco’s profits.

Under Fink’s guidance, CSE participated in coalitions and partnered with other tobacco front groups, honing the dirty public relations tactics employed today by the Kochtopus Empire to delay action on combatting climate change.

CSE joined the “Coalition for Fiscal Restraint” (COFIRE) in 1988, along with Koch Industries and Philip Morris. This is the only coalition in which Koch Industries represented itself as a corporation, rather than through its myriad front groups.

CSE also took part in “Get Government Off Our Back,” the front group created in 1994 by RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company to fight federal regulation of the tobacco industry. Its involvement in this group was kept in strict confidence until eventually made public via the Tobacco Archives. During this time, CSE was funded to the tune of at least $400,000 by the tobacco industry for its efforts to limit government regulation.

In 1998, CSE lobbied against California’s Proposition 10, an amendment to raise tobacco taxes in the Sunshine State. Members of CSE wrote letters to legislators and put forth a pledge to vote no. Ultimately, the effort “went up in smoke” and Prop 10 passed.

In 2004, Citizens for a Sound Economy split into two groups, Americans for Prosperity (AFP) and Freedomworks.

Richard Fink continued to lead Americans for Prosperity as President, and the tobacco lobbying efforts continue under the smoke of a new banner.

The most recent AFP pro-tobacco effort occurred this past summer, when it campaigned to oppose CA’s Proposition 29. If Prop 29 had passed, it would have increased tobacco taxes and directed the money raised from taxes towards cancer research – insidious given the Koch Brothers’ support for cancer research at places like MIT.

AFP, along with the tobacco industry,spent around $40 millionto defeat Prop 29, mostly on anti-Prop 29 television ads.  During that campaign, AFP was also part of a broader coalition of tobacco and anti-tax groups. According to maplight.com, Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds bankrolled almost the entire campaign.

The arguments made against Prop 29 were very similar to those made by Citizens for a Sound Economy in 1998 when it unsuccessfully campaigned against CA Prop 10.

This was not AFP’s first attempt to shill for Big Tobacco.

In 2006 AFP campaigned to oppose tobacco tax increases in several different states – South Dakota, Texas, Kansas, and Indiana. For their work in South Dakota, AFP received money from US Smokeless Tobacco, Retail Tobacco Dealers of America, and Tobacco Warehouse of Rapid City. It also opposed taxes inTexas,Kansas, andIndiana. The following year, in 2007, AFP campaigned to oppose Texas’smoking ban in indoor workplaces.

Finally, in 2009, AFP and Philip Morris were both asked to react to Virginia’s smoking ban, in an email from Karen Corriere of Altria Group, Inc. (the parent company of Philip Morris). Unsurprisingly, both voiced their opposition quickly. Americans for Prosperity reacted in full, hiring a company to make tens of thousands of calls to the offices of Virginia legislators, pressuring them to vote against the ban.

FISCAL TIES TO BIG TOBACCO

Throughout the years, the alliances were tied together in one of the most politically influential ways – money. The following is just a sample Big Tobacco’s money trail:

HOW DOES FINK TIE INTO ALL THIS?

Richard Fink first formed his alliance with Big Tobacco in 1985 when he urged legislators to eliminate the Tobacco program. But his value to the tobacco industry only increased with time, much like Dick Armey’s did atFreedomworks.

As Fink gained more influence and power, his relationship with the tobacco industry tightened. When asking the Tobacco Institute for funding, Roger Ream of CSE wrote: “Recently, our president, Richard H. Fink, was appointed to the Consumer Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve and to the Department of Transportation’s Amtrak Privatization Commission. This further enhances CSE’s credibility and effectiveness on these issues.”

From the beginning, Fink’s position in the government was used as a selling point to earn funding support from Big Tobacco, exemplifying CSE’s ability to reduce taxes and fight government regulation.

Richard Fink came to the Koch brothers in 1977 to urge them to turn their libertarian ideals and love of “free markets” into political advocacy. In 2009, he advised them to do everything in their power to change the course of the 2012 election.

The Koch Brothers and their allies have funded attacks on climate science, attacked clean energy and stifled the green debate via an army of front groups. Lo and behold, they also worked with Big Tobacco to stop common-sense regulations and public health measures on smoking. In fact, fighting the tobacco file helped them to hone the playbook they would continue to use to fight against accountability for polluting the atmosphere, harming their workers and fenceline communities, and subverting participatory democracy.

Just as the severe health risks of tobacco are no longer up for debate, neither should be the reality of climate change, though the “Merchants of Doubt” shilling for a killing have – in a self-serving manner – maintained a façade of “controversy” over the issue for decades.

http://checksandbalancesproject.org/category/profiles/

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Rich Fink is executive vice president and a member of the board of directors of Koch Industries, Inc. (since at least 1989), in Washington, D.C. Through his involvement in Koch, its free-market foundations, and various associated free-market think tanks, Fink is an influential, background player in free-market policy lobbying.

Since the 1980s, Fink has advocated a theory of "Ideological Entrepeneurship", or "Political Marketing", for selling free-market ideology to the public. Using Friedrich Hayek's models of the production process, he shows that to influence policy, you must first develop the intellectual "raw materials"; then develop these into policy "products"; and finally "market" and "distribute" them to "consumers". On this basis, Fink argues that conservative grantmakers should invest in three areas: university programs, think tanks, and implementation groups. Specifically through this line of argument, Fink has been credited with a major influence over the grant-making strategies of conservative foundations since the 1990s. [1]

During his time as an academic at Rutgers University (where he instigated an undergraduate program in Austrian economics), Fink was on the editorial board of the Austrian Economics Newsletter. For this involvement, he has been also been credited with a role in the revival of Austrian Economics during the 1970s. [2] While at Rutgers, Fink also founded the Center for Market Processes.

In 1981 he moved to become assistant professor of economics at George Mason University, where he started another undergraduate program in Austrian economics (with Karen Vaughn). He took the Center for Market Processes with him (the CMP subsequently went on to become the heavily Koch-funded Mercatus Center, of which Fink is Director).

Fink left George Mason in 1984 to become president and CEO of the new, Koch-funded think-tank, Citizens for a Sound Economy, but returned in an executive role to head a capital campaign feasibility study, as executive vice president of University Advancement and Planning. [3]

In 1993 Citizens for a Sound Economy spearheaded a campaign to stop President Clinton's proposed energy tax: "Our belief is that the tax, over time, may have destroyed our business," Fink, who had now left CSE, told The Wichita Eagle. While the Koch Foundations could not legally lobby against the tax, Citizens for a Sound Economy rallied public opposition, especially in Oklahoma, where then-Senator David Boren agreed to help kill it. [4]

Positions held

References

References

Attachments