The REAL Nature of the First Tea Party

Here is a fascinating treatise from Thom Hartmann about how the original Boston Tea Party was in fact a protest against a multinational corporation. As he found out from a 200-year old book written by one of the survivors of the actual Tea Party in Boston Harbor, the British East India Company at the time was exercising undue influence over the legislative process of the British government. THAT is what angered the Colonists. In essence, buying legislators to write laws (sound familiar?) that favored their corporation over their smaller independent business competitors in America.

Indeed, it seems that the Tea Party protest of old more resembled the anti-globalist protesters of Seattle, and Genoa, and Miami, than that wackjob, barely-cloaked Klan rally that Glenn Beck and the lunatic fringe held this weekend.

Funny how corporate hacks in the supposed "mainstream media" seem to leave that bit out, eh? Well as Orwell warned us, "He who writes the past, writes the future."

By actively seeking to rewrite the real history of those events to suit their own ends, Corporate Republican "leaders" of today (who don't bear any resemblance to true Conservatives like Teddy Roosevelt or even Barry Goldwater) now seek to warp the meaning of those anti-corporate protests, and turn them into anti-government protests.

The truth is, the reason why the Colonists were pissed off in the first place, was because they resented "taxation without representation" while the giant, globalist, mega-corp East India Company bought favorable legislation with bribes.

Because the matter has been so purposely confused by a slack news media drowning in its own share of corporate hacks, average Republicans, ignorant of history, now vote for the kind of people who appoint Justices to the Supreme Court, who in essence enshrine into law the very kind of corporate, monied influence over government, that their ancestors first rebelled against.

This is why Franklin Roosevelt warned us:

It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property.... The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor — these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small-businessmen, the investments set aside for old age — other people's money — these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in. Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities. Throughout the nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became PRIVILEGED enterprise, not free enterprise.

And it is why Thomas Jefferson wrote:

I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength and to bid defiance to the laws of our country.

I agree with Glenn Beck about one thing -- we DO need to get back to our American ideals. Our REAL ideals. And we need to understand our ACTUAL history. Not the silly crap made up by Beck's fevered imagination.