They say you learn something new every day, but it shocked me that this has never come to my attention before. I trust you’ve seen me expound and document many times how the Bush family fortune is tied up in a relationship with Adolf Hitler. I guess goose-stepping must be a Republican disease, because the Koch family fortune is even more tied up in a relationship with right-wing dictator Joseph Stalin.
Josef Stalin, the ruthless Communist dictator of the Soviet Union, was the godfather of the Tea Party. Let me show you how that happened.
We first have to visit Texas around 1900, when a Dutch immigrant had a son named Fredrick C. Koch. Fred got a degree in chemical engineering from MIT and formed a company named Winkler-Koch with a classmate. They developed a new method of cracking (refining) petroleum to get more gasoline out of it. Fred Koch was ready to roll into the American dream with his invention.
Texas oilmen tied up his refining methods in litigation in the 1920s so he was unable to market them.
Meanwhile, in the new Soviet Union, Stalin had embarked on his first 5-Year Plan, which included developing petroleum resources around the Black Sea. He needed refineries. Papa Fred contacted Stalin, who immediately hired him on to help with the 5-Year Plan.
In 1929, Winkler-Koch signed a $5 million contract with Stalin to build refineries, the beginnings of the Koch fortune. He continued to work with the Soviets well into the 1950s, but is alleged to have become disillusioned. So after making an immense income from a totalitarian Communist State, going out of his way to please them with his work, he had some kind of epiphany and suddenly became a fierce anti-Communist, bankrolling the John Birch Society, which saw Commies under every rock and carpet.
Fred had two sons, Charles and David, who parlayed their Commie fortune into one of the largest energy companies in the country.
With their staggering wealth, they now have unparalleled influence over American politics, founding (or funding) "think tanks" that preach Koch messages. They include the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute, as well as Americans for Prosperity, a Koch Family PAC, and a number of climate denial groups and "researchers."
They are opposed to unions, regulations, taxes, Social Security, and of course, pro free enterprise. Tea baggers love them because they carry Koch-funded signs, and ride on Koch-funded buses to their "grassroots" events…
Inserted from <Danbury News Times>
Photo credit: Radioman’s Kansas City
No wonder the Kochs, the Bushes, and their Republican lackeys hate freedom so much. They know from experience, that great wealth is most easily built on the denial of freedom that allows them to exploit others.