Tea Party Funded by Stalin's Money

I can't make up this stuff. Koch Industries, with its ties to the John Birch Society, climate science denial, and the Tea Party, built its wealth in the Stalinist Soviet Union. Back in the 1920s, grandfather Fred Koch developed some new refining technology that didn't fly in the American market. Koch thus made money selling his technology to the Communists:

In 1929, after hosting a delegation of Soviet planners in Wichita, Kansas, Winkler and Koch signed a $5 million contract to build 15 refineries in the Soviet Union. According to Oil of Russia, a Russian oil industry trade magazine, the deal made Winkler-Koch into Comrade Stalin's number-one refinery builder....

At the time, the Soviet Union's oil industry was a total mess. Equipment built by Western engineering firms was always breaking down or didn't work at all. Western engineers were constantly being accused of espionage or sabotage, real or imagined, and booted out of the country. Soviet workers suspected of colluding with the foreigners were simply taken out back and shot. Winkler-Koch made sure it was running a tight, efficient operation. Unlike his Western competitors, Koch pleased his Soviet clients by ensuring top quality and helping the cause of socialism [Yasha Levine, "The Roots of Stalin in the Tea Party Movement," AlterNet.org, 2010.04.17].

As Levine writes, if Koch harbored anti-communist sentiment, he kept quiet about it for decades, until the late 1950s, after doing lots of business and making his fortune working with Stalin to help the Soviet Union become a great industrial nation.

That explains it: the Russians love tea.