We all think we know the story of the Boston Tea Party. The tale has an almost fairy-tale quality, told as if it were read from a children’s book. For this author, the memory of the story seems ingrained; The memory goes back as far as any memory concerning our nation’s history. I suspect the story I recall is pretty much the standard version. Early American patriots, aggravated at rising taxes on tea levied against them by the British, dressed up like Native Americans and stormed Boston harbor on one dark night and dumped a bunch of tea into the sea in protest. The story is easy enough to accept. After all, it molds perfectly with so many of the notions we readily come to associate with American patriotism. What could be more fundamentally American than hating taxes? Right?
The standard version of the story is partly true. It was certainly correct that rising taxes were generating tension between the colonies and the British, particularly the taxes issued by the Stamp Act and Townshend Acts (which did, to be fair, include a tax on tea imports). But it wasn’t the taxes themselves that irked the American colonists so much as being taxed without representation. Furthermore, the real catalysis for the Tea Party– the proverbial last straw– was the Tea Act of 1773, which wasn’t a tax increase at all. Rather, it was a monumental tax cut. In fact, it was a monumental corporate tax cut.
I’ll say it again for the sake of resonance: The Boston Tea Party– one of the most fundamental events leading to America’s origin– was really a rebellion against cutting taxes for big business; it wasn’t about a tax increase. More specifically, the Tea Act of 1773 was practically a corporate bail out. The British East India Company was the principle lobby and sole beneficiary of the tax cut, which allowed the Company to transport its cargo of tea so cheaply that local colonial merchants were basically put out of business. The East India Company was a virtual monopoly on the transport of goods to the colonies; and the power of its lobby was at least equivalent to the lobbying power of modern day Big Oil, or the pharmaceutical companies, or other major corporate interests we’re more familiar with today.
Thus, I’m saddened to reveal: most of us don’t know the real story of the Boston Tea Party. As it turns out, what’s really fundamental about being an American is not so much a hatred of taxes (though we don’t have to like them, either) as it is a hatred of corporatism, corporate cronyism in our government, and tax policies which benefit the rich and powerful over the Everyman, or the local American. Early American patriots were inspired toward their exceptional act of independence primarily in resistance to their lack of representation in contrast to the power of a big business lobby.
If the truth about the Boston Tea Party were to properly represent for modern America what it meant to our founding fathers, it ought to be more readily obvious just how shamefully un-American the current political climate has become. The expense on the American taxpayer for corporate welfare, often paid in the form of massive subsidies or grants to giant companies like Enron, Boeing, Halliburton, Mobil Oil, General Motors, IBM, Dow Chemical, or General Electric, now exceeds what we pay for most of our more local needs like housing or health care (not to mention that most of the money for corporate welfare is pilfered directly from the Social Security fund). Which, ultimately, lends to the deepest national debt in our nation’s history, which further confounds the dilemmas faced by middle class Americans, such as the falling value of the dollar and the outsourcing of our jobs.
Subsidies given primarily to large agribusiness farming factories, due to their powerful lobby and cycle of rhetoric and misinformation, are a good example of how America has forgotten what it stands for. Billed to the American public as policy to help the farmer, the truth is that only the few largest agribusinesses get the government-issued financial advantages, leaving local and small-scale farmers– most American farmers– out of business.
Perhaps even scarier is the way the current economic policies and rhetoric of the neo-conservative movement, fostered further by the puppeted, corporate lead of the Bush administration and its predecessors (I primarily mean the multifarious incompetencies of the Reagan administration here), have become the symbolic equivalent of the corrupt British crown, which those Sons of Liberty stood against as they stormed the decks of those East India tea-transporting ships that one dark night long ago in Boston Harbor (it wasn’t that long ago, was it?). Such corporate cronyism is not just un-American. It is fundamentally what Americans fought and died to oppose. It was opposition to these villainous policies (the same policies which we see primarily extolled by cronies on the Right today) which spawned the Boston Tea Party, and our Declaration of Independence.
I’m afraid the truth about the Boston Tea Party has been mostly forgotten or mistold. But it is in the spirit of the Tea Party, its real story, that I have begun this blog. And it is in the spirit of telling the true story of the Tea Party that I intend this blog to be a beacon for weeding through the endless misinformation, maligned propaganda and amnesia that infects the American political climate today. This blog is meant as a finely crafted diction of non-nationalistic, grassroots, progressive dissent. And though not nationalistic, in the true spirit of what America really means.
9 comments
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July 29, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Jack
I don’t know how you feel about the Electoral College, but this is a pretty sight:
http://www.pollster.com/
Indeed, I could gaze at it for hours.
July 31, 2008 at 9:45 am
Dustin
Sir, I must congratulate you on writing a blog that is not painful to read.
August 1, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Jack
I think what is most frustrating about the current economic climate is that it is relatively obvious that Republican ideas and policies have failed. The only question anymore is how they ever got such a strong hold over a national party (maybe a better question is why the Republican party is a national party). It has always been clear that supply-side economics is at best a con, at worst a crackpot pseudo-theory. It initially appealed to the prejudices of rich men and to those who wanted to shrink the government because they took one Intro to Economics class or read an Ayn Rand book, but in the end Republican rule under the guidance of these ideas just turned into a free for all in which well-connected individuals looted public coffers and manipulated trust to deliver easy money to themselves and their buddies, all done (probably consciously) contrary to free market competition and discipline (no-bid contracting, regressive tax cuts, government bail outs, etc.). “Corruption” is probably too weak a word to capture it.
What’s interesting is that it is well known what needs to be done at this point in what is most likely a recession–greatly increased government spending on infrastructure and healthcare along with further tax rebates to the middle and lower class, financed (though full financing is not a priority) by taxes on the extremely wealthy who have done very, very well as of late. Not only would this provide much needed demand stimulus as well as rationalizing health coverage and transportation (a non car-centric infrastructure is obviously needed at this point), it would also have a desirable equalizing effect on wealth. What is so frustrating is that, right now at least, our political system is so broken that it is highly questionable any of this can be achieved to anywhere near the extent necessary.
Jack
July 7, 2013 at 2:44 pm
E. Browning Bosley (@EBrowningBosley)
I think what is most frustrating about the current economic climate is that it is relatively obvious that Republican ideas and policies have failed.
It seems that we have a public that is oblivious to the fact that the person who currently refers to himself as president policies are failing. We have a flat 7.6% unemployment rate that the public seem indifferent to.
August 5, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Jack
Here’s a nice quote for you.
“Today is the 2008 version of the Boston Tea Party.” Rep. John Shadegg (Ariz.)
This is in reference, of course, to a handful of Republicans remaining in the House after it was adjourned for five weeks and the lights went out. They pulled this stunt to display to the media their heroic resolve to have a vote on off-shore oil drilling, the most important issue facing us as a nation today. If that isn’t in the spirit of the Boston Tea Party as you explained above, I don’t know what is.
April 14, 2010 at 3:35 am
maskull
Your point is well taken that the tea party was a response to corporate tax break, however it is only part of the story. You might ask yourself why was the tea tossed in the harbour rather than confiscated and distributed among the local populus? Afterall there was a supposed shortage of tea in Boston at the time.
The fact is that local colonial tea merchants were hoarding tea in their own warehouses and by restricting supply, they inflated the price their own colonial brethern had to pay. They didn’t want the other company’s tea given away undermining their profit margin. The provocateur disguised as an indian who disrupted the “town hall meeting” was no doubt in the employ of the local merchants as were the other “Indians”, who were given orders not to confiscate the tea but to dump it!
As was often the case during the fomenting of the revolution, it was the interests of the merchant class on both sides superceding the good of the common citizen. The people would pay , the question was to whom.
April 16, 2010 at 10:21 am
Phil
Additionally some of our founding fathers were boot legging untaxed tea for a lessor price. With the tea act their tea suddenly cost more than British tea. Thus by dumping the tea in the harbor they stayed in business, or so it’s told in some circles.
March 12, 2011 at 8:35 pm
Maraya Sonntag
Osiyo,
I am Native American, specifically Tsalagi (Cherokee). Though I like and agree with part of your blog, there is one thing you did not mention: The horrific killings of Natives following the attacks of the revolutionists at Boston Harbor’s Tea Party.
I find it cowardly, as well as pathetic, when a group who considers their “race” to be superior to stoop to hiding their true selves, while endangering the lives of innocent men, women and children. Those “patriots” pretended to be Natives. The men guarding the precious tea cargo did not see “White” men, they saw Natives? What did you think happened? THEY KILLED NATIVES! This is documented, Sir. This is not in dispute.
I have no love for bigotry, racism, ignorance, ill-logic, or anything that resembles a decline human progress. Humans can only be considered superior, if their thinking and humanity is in harmony with these two tenets:
1. Do no harm
2. Do what is right
Wado!
Thank you.
July 7, 2013 at 2:42 pm
E. Browning Bosley (@EBrowningBosley)
This is completely wrong. Some of your facts are correct that a tax on tea did give the east india company and advantage but it was not a tax cut for the tea company but a tax increase on American companies which caused the anger. The east indian tea company was a guild set up of the monarch that was so closely related to each other than an attack on the tea company merchants was seen as an attack on the monarchy hence the anger and rage of the British parliament. This was a protest to defend the right of free-enterprise which the then king’s mercantilism infringed on.
There is not one ounce of evidence to ever suggest that people were wanting to tax the rich more as you seem to suggest and you may be right about subsidies but what party and what political philosophy has always endorsed bailouts?