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Old 04-02-2011, 03:07 PM   #1 (permalink)
Willravel
... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.
 
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The Tea Party (of the Boston variety)

I think the best way to frame this is that I was lied to as a schoolboy about the Boston Tea Party. 'Conventional wisdom' about the incident is that it was about unfair taxes being levied against the American colonists by the British government, in which they had no representation. It was framed the same as 'no taxation without representation', and then we were allowed to go to recess. This, it turns out, is a very dishonest way of framing the historical protest.

The following is a 15 minute video done by radio host Thom Hartman explaining in great detail and with direct citation of relevant historical documents what the Boston Tea Party was all about.

TL;DW: the East India Trading Company (henceforth EIC for brevity) was trying to corner the tea market, which was a huge market in the colonies. Tea had previously been brought in by American entrepreneurs (smugglers), but the EIC decided the best way to beat them was to undercut their prices significantly. The colonists, wanting to support private American workers and not support an attempted monopoly, widely boycotted EIC tea, which led to massive stockpiles. In response the EIC petitioned the king to pass legislation to basically end all taxes for importing tea. This meant the end of private, small tea importing. The smugglers, merchants and Sons of Liberty all decided to fight back with pamphlets and less 2-dimensional methods, and the colonists were on board. EIC ships were turned back at the ports. The EIC, in the eyes of the people, were guilty of monopoly, bribery, and corruption, and the British government impotent to stop them and complicit.

Three small groups of men dressed as Native Americans, symbolically and to hide identity, boarded ships in the Boston Harbor, took them (with strict instructions not to harm anyone or the ships), and threw overboard all the tea (worth about $1,000,000 when adjusted for inflation). After about 3 hours, it was done and everyone went home. The British Parliament immediately passed the Boston Ports Act in response, which closed the port until the EIC was reimbursed by the city of Boston for the destroyed tea. The answer was no.

The Boston Tea Party was, at it's very center, a revolt against corporate corruption and corporate tax cuts.

There's a lot to discuss here, but one point jumps out right away: the original Tea Party aligns politically much more closely with the modern American far-left than it does to anyone on the right, in fact I feel it's totally fair to say that the modern Tea Party is a direct antithesis to the original. Not give give in to a grandiose display of egotism, but had I been alive all those years ago, I imagine myself being a Tea Partier, or at the very least very, very strongly aligned with their politics. On the other hand, the modern American conservative movements would be starkly against the Tea Party, it's attack on corporate power and act of civil disobedience with the destruction of private property.

Another thought that occurs to me is that this kind of drastic action would go a very, very long way in our modern struggles against corporate power. While I would advise against taking over a ship in order to dump Monsanto's Round-Up into the sea, acts of civil disobedience and even what some might consider terrorism against entrenched, corrupt, monopolistic corporate power could ultimately have large and beneficial consequences. Blah, blah, blah, legal disclaimer about breaking the law, and all of that, but can you imagine directly challenging Chevron or Dow Chemical or Lockheed Martin or Pfizer or some other highly corrupt corporation? Even with corporate media, that news would spread like wildfire.

Anyway, I just wanted to share that a bit and see what discussion might come of it.
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