Top 5 Reasons Why The Occupy Wall Street Protests Embody Values Of The Real Boston Tea Party

[Donnachaidh]

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/10/03/333925/top-5-reasons-why-the-occupy-wall-street-protests-embody-values-of-the-real-boston-tea-party/



In recent years, the Boston Tea Party has been associated with a right-wing movement that supports policies favoring powerful corporations and the wealthy. As ThinkProgress has reported, lobbyists and Republican front groups have driven the current manifestation of the Tea Party to push for giveaways to oil companies and big businesses.

However, the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations picking up momentum across the country better embody the values of the original Boston Tea Party. In the late 18th century, the British government became deeply entwined with the interests of the East India Trading Company, a massive conglomerate that counted British aristocracy as shareholders. Americans, upset with a government that used the colonies to enrich the East India Trading Company, donned Native American costumes and boarded the ships belonging to the company and destroyed the company’s tea. In the last two weeks, as protesters have gathered from New York to Los Angeles to protest corporate domination over American politics, a true Tea Party movement may be brewing:

1.) The Original Boston Tea Party Was A Civil Disobedience Action Against A Private Corporation. In 1773, agitators blocked the importation of tea by East India Trading Company ships across the country. In Boston harbor, a band of protesters led by Samuel Adams boarded the corporation’s ships and dumped the tea into the harbor. No East India Trading Company employees were harmed, but the destruction of the company’s tea is estimated to be worth up to $2 million in today’s money. The Occupy Wall Street protests have targeted big banks like Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, as well as multinational corporations like GE with sit-ins and peaceful rallies.

2.) The Original Boston Tea Party Feared That Corporate Greed Would Destroy America. As Professor Benjamin Carp has argued, colonists perceived the East India Trading Company as a “fearsome monopolistic company that was going to rob them blind and pave the way maybe for their enslavement.” A popular pamphlet called The Alarm agitated for a revolt against the East India Trading Company by warning that the British corporation would devastate America just as it had devastated South Asian colonies: “Their Conduct in Asia, for some Years past, has given simple Proof, how little they regard the Laws of Nations, the Rights, Liberties, or Lives of Men. <...> And these not being sufficient to glut their Avarice, they have, by the most unparalleled Barbarities, Extortions, and Monopolies, stripped the miserable Inhabitants of their Property, and reduced whole Provinces to Indigence and Ruin.”

More at the link --

[Cirque du So-What]

1. If truth be told about the so-called 'Tea Party' movement

it would be as if the East India Company hired thugs to disrupt the actual participants in the Boston Tea Party. They have more in common with the brownshirts of the German Nazi era than with revolutionary patriots.

[Donnachaidh]

2. +10000 n/t

[ixion]

3. exactly.

And it's high time for some serious truth tellin'.

[Scuba]

4. I endorse these comments. n/t

[blm]

6. exactly!!!

They even use the Gadsden Flag as wrongly as possible. If they understood the Gadsden they would have hoisted it to protest Bush.

[Tippy]

5. K&R

[Wilms]

7. ^