Sublime

By the late 1980s, Fink had supplanted Cato’s Ed Crane as Charles Koch’s main political lieutenant. Unlike Crane, who was interested in libertarian ideas but regarded it as “creepy when you have to deal with politicians,” Fink was fascinated by the nuts and bolts of power. After studying the Kochs’ political problems for six months, he drew up a pr

While amassing one of the most lucrative fortunes in the world, the Kochs had also created an ideological assembly line justifying it. Now they had added a powerful political machine to protect it. They had hired top-level operatives, financed their own voter data bank, commissioned state-of-the-art polling, and created a fund-raising operation tha

Charles Koch has acknowledged that he miscalculated earlier, writing in his 2007 book, The Science of Success, “We were caught unprepared by the rapid increase in regulation.” As he explained it, “While business was becoming increasingly regulated, we kept thinking and acting as if we lived in a pure market economy.”

they funneled the money simultaneously through three different kinds of channels. They made political contributions to party committees and candidates, such as Dole. Their business made contributions through its political action committee and exerted influence by lobbying. And they founded numerous nonprofit groups, which they filled with tax-deduc

Charlie detests placer mining, the process of sifting through piles of sand for specks of gold. Instead, he applies his “big ideas from the big disciplines” to find the large, unrecognized nuggets of gold that sometimes lie in plain sight on the ground.

Kert Davies, the director of research at Greenpeace, the liberal environmental group, spent months trying to trace the funds flowing into a web of nonprofit organizations and talking heads, all denying the reality of global warming as if working from the same script. What he discovered was that from 2005 to 2008, a single source, the Kochs, poured

Charles Lewis, who heads the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University and who founded the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, describes the Triad scandal of 1996 as a “historic” moment in American politics. There had of course been many bigger campaign scandals before then. But Triad was a new model. He said it

Oddly enough, the fiercely libertarian Koch family owed part of its fortune to two of history’s most infamous dictators, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. The family patriarch, Fred Chase Koch, founder of the family oil business, developed lucrative business relationships with both of their regimes in the 1930s.