By Ben Jervey • Monday,
August 19, 2019 - 16:59
Back in 1996, the president of
the Charles Koch Foundation laid out a blueprint for the Koch network’s goals
of social transformation — a three-tiered integrated strategy to roll back
government regulations, promote free market principles, and, in doing so, to
protect the industries that turned the Koch brothers
into billionaires.
More than two decades later,
that blueprint is still being followed in a broad-scale effort to serve the
Kochs’ free-market libertarian ideology, to prop up the oil and gas industries
that pad their fortunes, and to forestall any political action on climate
change that they believe would threaten their bottom line.
In an article for Philanthropy
Magazine, Richard Fink,
who led the Charles
Koch Foundation and served as executive vice president of Koch Industries,
called the Koch network’s integrated strategy their “Structure of Social
Change,” writing:
“At the higher stages we have
the investment in the intellectual raw materials, that is, the exploration and
production of abstract concepts and theories. These still come primarily
(though not exclusively) from the research done by scholars at our universities …
In the middle stages, ideas
are applied to a relevant context and molded into needed solutions for
real-world problems. This is the work of the think tanks and policy
institutions …
But while the think tanks
excel at developing new policy and articulating its benefits, they are less
able to implement change. Citizen activist or implementation groups are needed
in the final stage to take the policy ideas from the think tanks and translate
them into proposals that citizens can understand and act upon.”
The Kochs’ investments in all
three “stages” are still impacting public policy debates, as evidenced in
documents collected by KochDocs,
a newly launched clearinghouse for “hard to find documents about Charles Koch
and his agenda.”
And these investments are
paying off. Charles Koch told
a gathering of donors in 2018 that “We’ve made more progress in the last five
years than I had in the previous fifty,” as Christopher Leonard reported in the
just-published book Kochland:
The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America.
Perusing the KochDocs archives
with Fink’s “Structure of Social Change” in mind, you can see how this
integrated, multi-tiered strategy actually works, particularly in the context
of energy and environmental policies that could threaten the Kochs’ main
business of refining oil.
The Ground Game: Citizen
Activists and Implementation Groups
David Koch speaking at the 2015 Defending the American Dream Summit at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in Columbus, Ohio. Credit: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0
By almost any measure, the
“final stage” that Fink refers to — the “citizen activist and implementation
groups” — is anchored by Americans for
Prosperity, the Kochs’ sprawling 501(c)4 advocacy group, which Harvard and
Columbia University researchers Theda Skocpol and Alexander
Hertel-Fernandez described in 2016 as “ the 800-pound gorilla of the
reorganized U.S. conservative universe.”
Americans for Prosperity (AFP)
today boasts of having more than 2.3 million members, with operations in 35
states. Though the organization presents itself as grassroots, and reflective
of local members’ interests, Skocpol and Hertel-Fernandez describe how the
national office hand-picks state staffers, and how policy priorities emerge
from the same central fountainhead.
Skocpol and Hertel-Fernandez
write that:
“Overall, AFP exhibits
an ideal combination of autonomy from, and embeddedness within, GOP circles,
a unique situation that helps the Koch network serve as an ideological backbone
and right-wing force for today’s Republican Party. This happens not only
because the Koch network throws a lot of money around, and not even because it
threatens politicians with sanctions if they stray from the Koch agenda…
Rather, the most pervasive and subtle form of leverage by the Koch network on
the Republican Party happens because of the flow of people back and forth
between the two operations.”
In effect, through the
structure of the organization, AFP members and — more importantly
— AFP-affiliated politicians, are exposed to the Koch network’s preferred
political agenda, and receive clear policy direction and talking points from
the national offices.
Frequently, these come in the
form of “Need To Know” briefs from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation,
many of which are available on KochDocs.org.
Consider this 2012 “Need to Know” brief on Renewable Portfolio Standards,
a policy prescription loathed by the Koch network for its free market–busting
mandates, and also certainly because it promotes renewable energy alternatives
to Koch Industries' business interests.
This AFP Foundation
brief helped set up years of state-level GOP opposition to renewable
portfolio standards (RPS), aided by a “model bill” to repeal RPS laws, drafted in 2012
by the Koch-funded American
Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Over the next few years, state legislators in at least a dozen states attempted to
roll back or repeal their states’ respective renewable energy and
portfolio standards.
Translating Ideas: Think Tanks
and Policy Institutions
The “Need To Know” briefs also
show how the Koch network connects the middle and bottom tiers of their
“structure for social change.” Pay close attention to the citations, and you’ll
see the fruits of the Kochs’ investments in the middle stages — the “think
tanks and policy institutions,” which provide reports and analyses to support
the pro-fossil fuel, free market policies.
Seven of the 10 endnotes on
the RPS “Need To Know” brief come from the Institute for
Energy Research, a Koch-funded Washington D.C. think tank that is
run by a former Koch Industries lobbyist. Another citation comes from the Cato Institute, a
libertarian think tank founded by Charles Koch and funded extensively by Koch family
foundations.
Endnotes from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation's 2012 “Need To Know” brief on renewable portfolio standards.
This is
hardly unique.
A 2014 “Need To Know” brief on greenhouse gas regulations quotes
a representative from the American
Council for Capital Formation (ACCF), a Koch-funded free market think
tank. Another on cap and trade cites an ACCF study
and quotes Cato Institute fellows. Yet another
from 2016 on carbon taxes prominently features a study by the National
Association of Manufacturers (NAM), on whose board sits a Koch
Industries lobbyist and in which Koch Industries is likely an influential
member. The carbon taxes brief also promotes an article by Michael Bastasch (who
recently had been in the Koch Internship Program) for the Daily Caller News Foundation, which
is primarily funded by Koch foundations.
These are just a few of the
dozens of obvious examples found among the KochDocs archive which
reveal how the Koch network leverages its investments in think tanks and
policy institutions to maximize the effectiveness of its ground game groups
like Americans for Prosperity.
Intellectual Raw Materials:
Universities and Academics
What about the upstream
investments in academia and universities? Check out the audio and transcript from this 2014 Koch Freedom Partners donor
summit session on “Leveraging Science and the Universities.”
To start the panel, Kevin
Gentry, the Vice President of the Charles Koch Foundation, boasts that the
network’s work with universities is “of significant competitive advantage” and
has “been a great investment for a number of years.” Gentry offers that this
work leveraging academia “predates significantly our investment in the
electoral process, and the product of our work is now seen in 400 colleges
and universities.”
Some of these schools have
produced great yields of the “intellectual raw materials” that Fink originally
described. The
Mercatus Center at George Mason University is the crown jewel of the
Kochs’ academic program, with the “largest collection of free market faculty
that exists anywhere at any university anywhere in the world” and having put
out 1,600 studies “to advance economic freedom,” as then-Executive Director Brian Hooks said
in the 2014 panel discussion. “What that means is that that these guys are
producing research that groups in this network can rely on to advance economic
freedom every single day.”
Hooks added, “[t]hanks in
large part to the investment that this network has made, we have founded new
university research centers around the country. We can take that model and
expand economic freedom [and] the freedom movement.”
A projection of Koch investments at Utah State University on a campus building. Credit: UnKoch My Campus/Greenpeace
Another such center is the
Center for Growth and Opportunity based in the Huntsman School of Business at
Utah State University (USU). The center opened in 2017 with a $25 million gift
from the Charles Koch Foundation. However, the Koch network had been
investing in the school for a decade already, as investigative reporters Alison Berg and Carter Moore recently examined for the school’s
student newspaper, the Utah Statesman.
Randy Simmons, the “Charles G.
Koch Professor” at USU who has received a supplemental salary stipend
from the Koch foundations, is a leading academic opponent of wind and solar
energy. Simmons has published several academic reports attacking renewable
energy and supportive policies, and these reports have been regularly deployed
by Koch-aligned groups in both the think tank and citizen activist tiers of the
Koch’s structure for social change.
In particular, Simmons has led
the publication of a number of reports bashing renewable energy standards,
including ones used by state-based groups fighting the standards (as described
above) in Kansas, Ohio, and North Carolina.
According to Berg and Moore’s
reporting, the $25 million gift in 2017 “supercharged” the Koch influence on
campus, and gave Simmons a team of ideologically aligned colleagues.
“Based on public documents and
interviews with those involved, the university used the money to hire 13 of 19
staff members from a prominent libertarian think tank that was previously
independent of the university, Strata Policy, and place them at the
university’s new think tank, the Center for Growth and Opportunity (CGO).
Strata has backed conservative positions on issues such as fossil fuel
dependence, public land management and signed a letter in support of Donald
Trump’s controversial downsizing of national monuments.”
There are plenty of other
examples. Another program that has benefitted from Koch investment is the
Department of Economics at Florida State University (FSU). The school found
itself in some controversy after an internal memo came to light, revealing that the Koch
foundations money came with plenty of strings attached:
“Constrained hiring: As we all
know, there are no free lunches. Everything comes with costs. In this case, the
money for faculty lines and graduate students is coming from a group of funding
organizations with strong libertarian views. These organizations have an
explicit agenda. They want to expose students to what they believe are vital concepts
about the benefits of the market and the dangers of government failure, and
they want to support and mentor students who share their views. Therefore, they
are trying to convince us to hire faculty who will provide that exposure and
mentoring. If we are not willing to hire such faculty, they are not willing to
fund us.
The fallout led to a
comprehensive internal review at the university, and a very critical report from an Ad Hoc Committee of faculty
members, who expressed concern about the “outside control” and “undue
influence over the academic endeavors of the FSU economics
department.” The memo’s publication has not ended the relationship, however.
The Charles Koch Foundation gave another $800,000 to FSU in
2016, largely to support the L. Charles Hilton Jr. Center for the Study of
Economic Prosperity and Individual Opportunity.
Today, Adam Millsap serves as
Assistant Director of that center. Millsap has risen as an academic
through the Koch-funded higher ed ecosystem, and spoke on that same 2014 panel
on “Leveraging Science and the Universities.” There, Millsap described his role
in cultivating a “new talent pipeline” for all levels of the Koch network, and
how the Koch-funded programs — like the Mercatus Center and the Institute
for Humane Studies — trained him to do so.
Millsap also described how
academics should use all “viable mediums,” including “major Republican blogs,
op-eds, and policy briefs” to spread ideas to a broader, more
popular audience.
Following his own advice,
earlier this year, Millsap published a commentary on Forbes.com, headlined: “Green New Deal's Plan For Planes, Trains, And Automobiles Won't
Work.”
The piece, by
design, was promoted widely from all three tiers of the Koch network.
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