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Americans have been watching the Teabaggers for almost two years now, and as it turns out, unbridled, spittle-producing rage isn’t very popular. 52 percent of Americans now hold unfavorable views of the tea party, a new high. Nearly three-quarters of Democrats – including as many moderate and conservative as liberal members of the party – have negative views of the political movement, as do half of all independents.
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The city of Chicago reports that the Mayor’s Dumpster Task Force shut down a Starbucks Coffee Wednesday on the corner of Madison and Morgan. In a statement, the Dumpster Task Force said there was no running hot water
Tag: Socialism
Ultimate Tea Party Irony
All the Tea Party’s accusations of Obama being Marxist have to be viewed in a different light now that the truth of their origins comes out1…
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 Fred 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.
[Click to continue reading Yasha Levine: Tea Party Financiers Owe Their Fortune to Josef Stalin – Truthdig]
Too funny. Well, not really. I think the Tea Party Republicans2 should leave America since they hate it so much.
Footnotes:George Washington was a socialist
If you use the same reasoning the Rethuglicans are using against implementing the individual insurance mandate, then George Washington was a socialist too
Joe Conason writes:
One of the favorite complaints against the healthcare reform bill is that the founding document doesn’t permit the federal government to order anyone to buy a product or service. That supposedly renders illegitimate the individual insurance mandate that is part of the bill.
As every fervent advocate of gun rights ought to know, however, that argument suffers from a glaring historical flaw. Only a few years after the nation’s Founding Fathers ratified the Constitution, Congress approved the Militia Act of 1792, which was duly signed by George Washington, then the president and commander in chief.
Establishing state militias and a national standard for their operation, the Militia Act explicitly required every “free able-bodied white male citizen” between the ages of 18 and 45, with a few occupational exceptions, to “provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch with a box therein to contain not less than twenty-four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball; or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch and powder horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder..”
Within six months, every citizen enrolled and notified of his required militia service had to equip himself as specified above. There was spirited debate in Congress as to whether the state ought to subsidize the purchase of arms for men too poor to afford their own, so that everyone could serve his country. Subsidized or not, however, the founders saw no constitutional barrier to a law ordering every citizen to buy a gun and ammo.
[Click to continue reading So George Washington was a socialist, too! – Joe Conason – Salon.com]
Ru-oh! Better warn the Texas Board of Education so they can scrub mention of George Washington from any textbooks…