Kochtopus: primary political operative, Richard Fink; origin of term Kochtopus; political strategy of Kochs:
Kochtopus: primary political operative, Richard Fink; origin of term Kochtopus; political strategy of Kochs:
After suffering humiliating losses in the courts and Congress [in 1999-2001, see Chapter 4] the Kochs began to retool their approach not just to business but also to politics. They began to engage far more strategically, funneling money into the pursuit of power in a whole new way. More than anyone else, the man behind the Kochs' political transformation was Richard Fink, nicknamed the Pirate by detractors within their sphere for the handsome living he made on their payroll.
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Fink had become a devotee of Austrian free-market theory. He hoped Charles would fund a program in it at Rutgers in New Jersey, where he was teaching part-time while pursuing a graduate degree at NYU...Charles pleged $150,000 for the program.
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By the late 1980's, Fink had supplanted Cato's Ed Crane as Charles Koch's main political lieutenant .
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After studying the Kochs' political problems for a few months, he drew up a practical blueprint, ostensibly inspired by Hayek's model of production, that impressed Charles by going beyond where his own 1976 paper on the subject had left off. Called "The Structure of Social Change," it approached the manufacture of political change like any other product. As Fink later described it in a talk, it laid out a three-phase takeover of American politics. The first phase required an "investment" in intellectuals whose ideas would serve as the "raw products." The second required an investment in think tanks that would turn the ideas into marketable policies. And the third phase required the subsidization of "citizens" groups that would, along with "special interests," pressure elected officials to implement the policies. It was in essence a libertarian production line, waiting only to be bought, assembled, and switched on.
Fink's plan was tailor-made for Charles Koch, who deeply admired Hayek and approached both business and politics with the systematic mind-set of an engineer. While some might find it disturbing to regard the democratic process as a factory, Charles soon adopted the approach as his own. As he told Brian Doherty, the libertarian writer, "To bring about social change requires a strategy that is vertically and horizontally integrated." It must span, he said, from "idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to political action." Before long, libertarian wags had dubbed the Kochs' publicity-shy, multiarmed assembly line the Kochtopus, a name that stuck. (172-173)
