how stalin funded the tea-party movement

[Sasha]

A People’s History of Koch Industries: How Stalin Funded the Tea Party Movement (http://exiledonline.com/a-peoples-history-of-koch-industries-how-stalin-funded-the-tea-party-movement/)
By Yasha Levine (http://exiledonline.com/?s=Yasha%20Levine)

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This article was first published on Alternet.org (http://www.alternet.org/story/146504/)

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“I would rather live under a bridge than live under socialism”

—tea bagger slogan


Everyone knows that Tea Party revolutionaries fear and hate socialism about as much as the Antichrist. Which is funny, because the Tea Party movement’s dirty little secret is that it owes its existence to the grandaddy of all Antichrists: the godless empire of the USSR.
What few realize is that the secretive oil billionaires of the Koch family, the main supporters of the right-wing groups that orchestrated the Tea Party movement, would not have the means to bankroll their favorite causes had it not been for the pile of money the family made working for the Bolsheviks in the late 1920s and early 1930s, building refineries, training Communist engineers and laying down the foundation of Soviet oil infrastructure.
The comrades were good to the Kochs. Today Koch Industries has grown into the second-largest private company in America. With an annual revenue of $100 billion, the company was just $6.3 billion shy of first place in 2008. Ownership is kept strictly in the family, with the company being split roughly between right-wing brothers Charles and David Koch, who are worth about $20 billion apiece and are infamous as the largest sponsors of right-wing causes. They bankroll scores of free-market and libertarian think tanks, institutes and advocacy groups. Reason magazine, Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute are just a few of Koch-backed free-market operations. Greenpeace estimates that the Koch family shelled out $25 million from 2005 to 2008 funding the “climate denial machine,” which means they outspent Exxon Mobile three to one.
I first learned about the Kochs in February 2009, when Mark Ames and I were looking into the strange origins of the then-nascent Tea Party movement. Our investigation led us again and again to a handful of right-wing organizations and think tanks directly tied to the Kochs (http://exiledonline.com/exposing-the-familiar-rightwing-pr-machine-is-cnbcs-rick-santelli-sucking-koch/). We were the first to connect the dots and debunk the Tea Party movement’s “grassroots” front, exposing it as billionaire-backed astroturf campaign run by free-market advocacy groups FreedomWorks and Americans For Prosperity, both of which are closely linked to the Koch brothers.

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But the Tea Party movement—and Koch family’s obscene wealth—go back more than half a century, all the way to grandpa Fredrick C. Koch, one of the founding members of the far-rightwing John Birch Society (http://www.scribd.com/doc/30065386/Fred-C-Koch-Going-Off-On-A-Bircher-Rant-Newspaper-Clipping-1964)which was convinced that evil socialism was taking over America through unions, colored people, Jews, homosexuals, the Kennedys and even Dwight D. Eisenhower.


read the rest @ http://exiledonline.com/a-peoples-history-of-koch-industries-how-stalin-funded-the-tea-party-movement/

[The Vegan Marxist]

Yeah, I ended up reading this last night on AlterNet. It's a really observant find on how the TeaParty movement came about. But one has to understand that the TeaParty movement isn't what it use to be like as well if one compares the 21st Century TeaPartyism to much earlier occurrences.

[danyboy27]

populism is what it is.

[x371322]

:laugh: Of all the "atrocities" of the USSR, this is by far the worst.

[Red Commissar]

Stalin plays people even after his death. :cool:

[gorillafuck]

What does this have to do with Stalin?

[Red Commissar]

What does this have to do with Stalin?

If what the article is saying is correct, one group of people who are funding the tea baggers are the Koch family. The patriarch of Koch industries was Fred Koch, who in his early years helped the Soviet union construct infrastructure

Obviously in order to do this he received payment for his services. And in the late 1920s Stalin was in a position to make the call as to whether or not to fund these guys.

Of course back then Stalin couldn't have known that Fred Koch would go on to make the rabidly anti-communist John Birch Society and fund capitalist causes. It's just an amusing thing to think of when you think that the Koch family, who are funding against evil socialism through tea baggers, John Birch Society etc, started their fortune in the early USSR.