It’s so pleasing to the ears of any person who doesn’t like the Tea Baggers to hear how the people who fund them act so counter to their beliefs. It’s so pleasing to hear Tea Bag rants against big government and socialism as they are being funded by corporations who engage in it. As if we didn’t have enough reason to think of them pitiful.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Koch family. This familiy invests millions in the Tea Party movement. They’ve handed checks to all kinds of Tea Bag leaders and Sara Palin as well. All of this promotion of limiting government and reducing regulation is being paid for by a family that engages in the opposite.

A New York Observer article by Yasha Levine has detailed 7 ways the Kochs make their money that really doesn’t jibe with the ideology that they pour tens of millions into every year.

1. — “In 1998, Koch Industries entered into a lucrative partnership with two state-owned companies-one Venezuelan, the other Italian-to open a massive $1 billion nitrogen-based fertilizer plant in Venezuela called Fertinitro. … For Koch Industries, whose role in the partnership is to unload half of the 6 million tons of fertilizer produced by Fertinitro every year on the American market, that equals up to $123.6 million in subsidies every year.” Get that? A billion-dollar double partnership with two state-owned companies.

2. – “Two years before founding the influential Cato Institute, Charles Koch bought a supertanker from a communist regime.”

3. — “For the past fifty years, through its Matador Cattle Company subsidiary, Koch Industries has been quietly milking a New Deal program that allows ranchers to use federal land basically for free. Matador … has something in the neighbourhood of 300,000 acres of grazing land for its cows—two-thirds of which belong to American taxpayers, who will never see a penny of profit.”

4. — “In 2006, Koch Industries acquired pulp and paper giant Georgia-Pacific for a $21-billion cash payment, allowing the Koch brothers to tap into a whole new area of government largesse: the ability to log public forests for private gain and have taxpayers cover the operating costs.”

5. — “Just two weeks ago, Koch Industries got into the ethanol business by buying two ethanol plants in Iowa. Other than defence, ethanol is possibly the most subsidized industry in America.”

6. — “As far as libertarians are concerned, eminent domain is a socialist tyranny straight out of the Leninist playbook, as it recognizes the government as the real owner of all land and vests it with the power to expropriate private property for alleged public good. … Charles Koch is clear on this. “Countries that clearly define and protect individual private property rights stimulate investment and grow,” he writes in his book The Science of Success. “Those that threaten and confiscate private property lose capital and decline. .. Koch Industries oil pipeline recently built in Minnesota shows that Charles Koch does not see an is anything wrong with the government confiscating private property, as long as he stands to make a profit. Completed in 2008, the 304-mile line now carries crude oil from the Canadian border to a Koch Industries refinery near the Twin Cities area via a two-foot-wide pipe. …. “1,000-plus landowners who were forced to handover their private property so that Koch Industries could run its pipeline…”

7. — “Before Fredrick Koch suddenly developed a pinko paranoia and helped start up the John Birch Society, he was making piles of cash laying the foundation of Soviet oil infrastructure in the 1920s and early 1930s.”

It’s just so funny to watch the Tea Baggers get mad when information like this is released.