Friday, April 23, 2010

Stalin Is The Root Of Teabagger Funds?! Say It Ain't So, Joe!


Try to imagine Glenn Beck pulling out his chalkboard and detailing a conspiracy theory the way you see above. Only this time, it's not too convoluted, it utilizes two arrows to illustrate the conspiracy, only this time the focus of the conspiracy is not the funding machine behind The Great Liberal-Socialist-Communist-Fascist-Satanist Conspiracy, it's the funding machine behind the group that pretty much appointed Glenn Beck as their pied piper - the Teabaggers. It's pretty simple:

Tea Party>Koch Family>Joe Stalin

Here are the details:



The Roots of Stalin in the Tea Party Movement


The Koch family, America's biggest financial backers of the Tea Party, would not be the billionaires they are today were it not for the godless empire of the USSR.


The Tea Party movement's dirty little secret is that its chief financial backers owe their family fortune to the granddaddy of all their hatred: Stalin's godless empire of the USSR. 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 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. 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 my colleague 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 advocacy groups directly tied to the Kochs. 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.
But the Tea Party movement -- and the 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-right John Birch Society which was convinced that socialism was taking over America through unions, colored people, Jews, homosexuals, the Kennedys and even Dwight D. Eisenhower.
more...

http://www.alternet.org/economy/146504/the_roots_of_stalin_in_the_tea_party_movement?page=entire





So this was Uncle Joe's master plan? The destruction of our culture through funding xenophobic wing-nut paranoia? Damn, it's working!

Seriously, the link in the third paragraph of the article above is a brilliant expose of just how "grassroots" the Teabagging organization really is. I'll write more about that next week.

4 comments:

Julia Riber Pitt said...

Completely ironic, I know.

The right-wingers owe their funding to the USSR. Just amazing.

Tanya @ TeenAutism said...

This is pretty fascinating, and - I agree - ironic.

Robert Paulsen said...

Thank you Julia and Tanya for your responses and pointing out the inherent irony. I also posted this on my facebook page and got into an interesting discussion with my friend Matt that I'd like to repost here:

Matt: Wow! I react to this on many levels. First, I don't know which is sadder: that the Tea Party movement is bizarrely hypocritical or that none of them considered or were aware of this irony. Second, I just read in today's paper that the 'movement' seems to be fizzling anyway...
http://www.nctimes.com/news/opinion/columnists/riehl/article_a02eea4d-... See Morehttp://www.nctimes.com/news/opinion/columnists/riehl/article_a02eea4d-d42c-5deb-a351-a8b933bfb900.html
Third, I was immediately reminded of where John and the rest of the Kenneys made their millions. Does bootlegging undermine the integrity of a president? And Fourth, I wonder about the integrity of whites versus minorities... I'm not inclined to feel guilty for what my ancestors did to the dark-skinned (I wasn't there) but their actions affect my status today. Marx said "History weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living". Is the Communist money trail to the Tea Party really significant? Either way, I enjoy anyone and anything that ridicules Glenn Beck. He's just a clown, and I want to squeak his big red nose and watch him cry :)

Robert Paulsen said...

Here's my reply to Matt:

Me: Hey Matt, thanks for a thought-provoking response. There is an obliviousness driving this movement (off a cliff? That's my audacious hope.) that is so profound it transcends hypocrisy. Signs reading "Keep the government out of Medicare" illustrate these oblivious tendencies the best. Thanks for the link; good to know it's fading in some areas... See More. Though it's not fading fast enough for some, Chomsky recently spoke about he believes the crazies are poised to be victors in the next election...
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/noam_chomsky_has_never_seen_anything_like_this_20100419/
As far as Kennedy money goes, there's no denying that patriarch Joe became king of the hill by any and every means necessary regardless of legality. But I guess whether or not that undermines the integrity of the presidency ties in with your fourth point. How responsible is the son for the sins of the father? I don't believe that we are responsible for the actions of our ancestors, but we do have a responsibility to mitigate the collateral damage of those actions if it is within our power. As a worker of modest means, I can only take responsibility for my own actions and treat everyone with equal respect. (My Eastern European relatives came over about 100 years ago and were looked down on as "Hunkies" & "Polacks", so while I am white, I don't believe my ancestors really oppressed minorities in any significant way.) But a President does have significant power, and with it the ability to mitigate the collateral damage of the past, if that President's conscience is so inclined. It's interesting that both the Kennedy family and the Bush family have a patriarch with Nazi sympathies (Prescott Bush sympathies went beyond Kennedy's support & extended to financial support for the Nazi Party through Brown Brother Harriman both before and DURING WWII...)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar
and very interesting to compare the response of the sons regarding the respective sins of their father. There are dirty money trails throughout history whose connections intertwine like octopus tentacles. The significance, whether it's bootlegging, Commies or Nazis, lies in whether the money is utilized to serve the interests of the people or the Elite. The irony is that regarding the subject of my blog post, both the Stalinists and Teabaggers are the same in that they ostensibly advocate on behalf of the common interests of the people (the Russian proletariat for Stalin, or Joe Sixpack for the Baggers) yet behind their backs serve the interests of the Elite (the Communist Party in USSR for Stalin, the GOP and their corporate sponsors for the Baggers). The complexity of the hypocrisy would just make Glenn Beck's head explode, or make him collapse in a fit of uncontrollable sobbing. Now that's an episode I wish that clown would air!