"Charles Koch’s Brain" By DANIEL SCHULMAN

[applegrove]

Charles Koch’s Brain

By DANIEL SCHULMAN at Politico

http://www.politico.com/magazine/politico50/2014/charles-kochs-brain.html#.VAkZeRN0wTF

"SNIP..........................


Richard Fink doesn’t want to be profiled. He hates the idea, actually. And he’d really rather not be featured on The Politico 50, 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.



............................SNIP"

[Fred Sanders]

1. The Kocktopus's brain. They always prefer to operate in the dark, the propaganda experts demand it.

[polly7]

3. They've operated in the light here for over 50 years.

It makes me sick to think of the amount of Canadian resources and land they own and exploit..... I've hated them for years.

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20120510/koch-industries-brothers-tar-sands-bitumen-heavy-oil-flint-pipelines-refinery-alberta-canada

[BuelahWitch]

2. Kochroaches scatter when the light's turned on them...n/t

[Gothmog]

4. Interesting article