Thursday, April 16, 2009

On tea parties

Can't really say much about the tea party stuff at this point since I haven't had any time outside of the major project of the "Title Pending" above, but Thom Hartmann had a good column on the actual event that centered on this fact I hadn't heard of (or had forgotten.)

The real Boston Tea Party was a protest against huge corporate tax cuts for the British East India Company, the largest trans-national corporation then in existence. This corporate tax cut threatened to decimate small Colonial businesses by helping the BEIC pull a Wal-Mart against small entrepreneurial tea shops, and individuals began a revolt that kicked-off a series of events that ended in the creation of The United States of America.
In this sense, it is the G-20 protesters who better represent the spirit of that revolt--making Glenn Beck's attempt at disparaging the latter (by comparing them to Lenin and Stalin) telling. Of course he also compares them to the actual communist revolution, in which case I guess he's right--though I wish the comparison was less unequivocally understood in our culture.

back to it...