The Real Boston Tea Party was Staged by Merchants who Smuggled Tea

[Elmore Furth]

In the original Tea Party, Bostonians weren't angry about any taxes being imposed on them, they were angry about a huge corporation using its powerful lobby in the halls of government to crush the small businessman via corporate welfare in the form of tax loopholes. The Americans were big tea drinkers, so a brisk trade in smuggled Dutch tea was rampant throughout the colonies. British tea was nowhere to be purchased. The Crown decided to be clever, they repealed the tax on tea coming into Britain, and put a very small tax on tea coming into the colonies. The result was that the British tea would undersell the smuggled Dutch tea. American housewives would then buy the British tea causing economic ruin to those American merchants caught up in the tea smuggling trade. To make matters even more outrageous, the low-priced British tea was only sold to loyal British merchants. This was the last straw, so to speak.

The notorious tea tax, which had so inflamed the people of Massachusetts, was only one-fourth of what the English paid at home; even Benjamin Franklin labeled the Boston Tea Party an act of piracy.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/12/30/820461/-Tea-parties-and-the-whitewashing-of-the-American-Revolution

Peace on the continent after the Seven Years War removed the stimulus of a war economy and brought about a recession in the colonies. Debtors in both urban and agricultural sectors experienced the credit squeeze. The British National Debt almost doubled from £75 million in 1754 to £133 million in 1763. It appears to have been the underground smuggling economy that the Founding Fathers were trying to protect when they objected to new british tax policy, monitary policy and placement of troops in the colonies. It appears that the sudden manifestation of an organization like the Sons of Liberty reflected the particularly intense urban resistance were a reaction to British policies embodied in the Sugar Act, Currency Act, and Stamp Act targeted city-based products, industry, trade, and financial activity. They threatened the underground economy. In other words, they were astroturf for colonial corporate interests. Sound familiar?

http://www.tax.org/museum/1756-1776.htm

I know this is hard to believe, but the current Tea Party is being funded by large corporate lobbyists.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-hamsher/the-corporate-lobbyists-b_b_186367.html

Colonial merchants, some of them smugglers, played a significant role in the protests. Because the Tea Act made legally imported tea cheaper, it threatened to put smugglers of Dutch tea out of business.<42> Legitimate tea importers who had not been named as consignees by the East India Company were also threatened with financial ruin by the Tea Act.<43> Another major concern for merchants was that the Tea Act gave the East India Company a monopoly on the tea trade, and it was feared that this government-created monopoly might be extended in the future to include other goods.<44>


Boston Tea Party

[Bitwit1234]

1. This is one of the reason I am so outraged at the tea bags

the fact that they besmirched the name Tea Party. The original Tea Party was nothing like what these racist, crooked stupid people are saying and doing. And I hope they gag on the tea.

[ashling]

2. Astroturf ahead of its time

[RandomThoughts]

3. Smugglers have always been a push back against corruption in the status quo.

Any time a market economy is corrupted to just serve a few people, and supported by laws, an opening appears for the smuggler.

Mostly because of some unjust set of circumstances that sets up an opportunity. Many might do it just for money, but their is the smuggler that disagrees with some circumstances and is technically illegal while doing something for a moral or just purpose.

In India during colonial times their were many laws to send profit back to England, they were not based on making India better, nor a fair ideal, but for profit of companies in textile industry. So many people made their own cloths, a form of civil disobedience akin to smuggling.

The underground railroad that brought the slaves north, also was a form of smuggling.

And many resistance movements in WW2 were also illegal, but were moral, since they apposed the wrongness of the occupier that did for its own benefit not for benefit of all.

So the concept of the smuggler that goes against an established system is an old concept, but as in most things it also has to do with what the reason for the actions are. Is it only for personal gain, or for the gain of many people.

For instance Han Solo returned to help Luke destroy the Death Star.
http://www.swtor.com/info/holonet/classes/smuggler

[K8-EEE]

4. I always get pissed off when I hear that "mad about taxes" story

Republican history rewrite....

[mojowork_n]

5. You're absolutely right. After the Seven Years War,

which we call the "French and Indian," the British government needed to refill the coffers of the national treasury. It turned out that very few of the troops that had been sent over here to defend the colonials had been volunteers, who'd paid their own way. Armies cost money, and the Seven Years War was one of the very first global conflicts. (In fact, it's been called the very first "World War," since there was fighting from the America's, all the way to India. The Brit's, Prussians and Portugese fought everybody else, the usual imperial rivalries...)

Afterward, when the "no taxation without representation" clamor erupted, the British replied, "sure, send us your representatives." There were already members of Parliament representing Jamaica, the richest colony in the New World.