Political conservatives have no more of a special relationship with America's national mythologies than any one of the thousands of Christian sects have on the stories of Jesus. Therefore, it would be prudent to read something different now and again about the USA's national folk tales. A case in point, the Boston Tea Party. Here's what Thom Hartmann, progressive radio essayist, and what he has to say:
"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.
"They covered their faces, massed in the streets, and destroyed the property of a giant global corporation. Declaring an end to global trade run by the East India Company that was destroying local economies, this small, masked minority started a revolution with an act of rebellion later called the Boston Tea Party.
"The Boston Tea Party resembled in many ways the growing modern-day protests against transnational corporations and small-town efforts to protect themselves from chain-store retailers or factory farms. The Tea Party's participants thought of themselves as protesters against the actions of the multinational East India Company."
Read the rest of Thom Hartmann's essay and what he has to say about this piece of American history after a study of the Memoir of George R.T. Hewes, a Survivor of the Little Band of Patriots Who Drowned the Tea in Boston Harbor written in 1773.
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