Dec. 16, 1773, The Boston Tea Party, America’s First Anti-Globalization P

The Boston Tea Party, America’s First Anti-Globalization Protest
By Thom Hartmann

I shall therefore conclude with a proposal that your watchmen be instructed, as they go on their rounds, to call out every night, half-past twelve, “Beware of the East India Company.”

-Pamphlet signed by “Rusticus,” 1773


Conventional wisdom has it that the 1773 Tea Act - a tax law passed in London that led to the Boston Tea Party - was simply an increase in the taxes on tea paid by American colonists. In reality, however, the Tea Act gave the world’s largest transnational corporation - The East India Company - full and unlimited access to the American tea trade, and exempted the Company from having to pay taxes to Britain on tea exported to the American colonies. It even gave the Company a tax refund on millions of pounds of tea they were unable to sell and holding in inventory.

The primary purpose of the Tea Act was to increase the profitability of the East India Company to its stockholders (which included the King and the wealthy elite that kept him secure in power), and to help the Company drive its colonial small-business competitors out of business. Because the Company no longer had to pay high taxes to England and held a monopoly on the tea it sold in the American colonies, it was able to lower its tea prices to undercut the prices of the local importers and the mom-and-pop tea merchants and tea houses in every town in America.

This infuriated the independence-minded American colonists, who were wholly unappreciative of their colonies being used as a profit center for the world’s largest multinational corporation, The East India Company. They resented their small businesses still having to pay the higher, pre-Tea Act taxes without having any say or vote in the matter. (Thus, the cry of “no taxation without representation!”) Even in the official British version of the history, the 1773 Tea Act was a “legislative maneuver by the British ministry of Lord North to make English tea marketable in America” with a goal of helping the East India Company quickly “sell 17 million pounds of tea stored in England…”


...Reading Hewes’ account, I learned that the Boston Tea Party resembled in many ways the growing modern-day protests against transnational corporations and small-town efforts to protect themselves from chain-store retailers or factory farms. With few exceptions, the Tea Party’s participants thought of themselves as protesters against the actions of the multinational East India Company and the government that “unfairly” represented, supported, and served the company while not representing or serving them, the residents.....


Con't-
http://www.thomhartmann.com/teaparty.shtml

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If anything, they were in favor of opening up British American ports and trade systems up for expansions of trade, hence the vigorous smuggling enterprise.

The Tea Act was about national control of local trade.

Heard Thom talking about this today, but I was fighting with a new computer (XP) and a new install of Autocad (Inventor 10) and could not listen. Thom wrote of this first-hand account written by a participant in this most great and noble protest of globalism in his book What Would Jefferson Do. This is an anniversary worthy of celebration, and, ultimately, as inspiration.

:hi:

:toast:

it most appropriate to make note of as well. It IS an anniversary worthy of celebration/inspiration.

:hi: :patriot: :toast:

and today the global justice crazies tread close to the heart of the beast, pounding on the closed doors as the powers ring themselves with armies and decide fates in secret, privatizing our water and spreading terminator seeds.

Those crazy people are on to something.