Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Tea Partiers' Historical Fictions

By Jada Thacker
August 18, 2010

Today’s adherents to the Tea Party movement claim to share common cause with American “Sons of Liberty” rowdies who, on Dec. 16, 1773, dumped about 90,000 pounds of tea into Boston Harbor.

Read on.
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5 comments:

James Young said...

Apparently, your author is too historically ignorant or too much of a damn fool to know that the British East India Company was operating a monopoly, and therefore, was operating much AS a government.

"The Company long held a privileged position in relation to the English, and later the British, government. As a result, it was frequently granted special rights and privileges, including trade monopolies and exemptions."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company

Thu Aug 19, 12:47:00 PM 2010
Anonymous said...

May I suggest that the arrival of Europeans was not the beginning of North American civilization? The people who were already there were in fact part of an existing civilization that (foolishly in retrospect?) repeatedly helped the newcomers survive, only to be repaid with genocide and the theft of everything they had.

Other than that, your analysis seems generally accurate, based on my less-than-in-depth reading on this subject.

CambridgeKnitter

Sun Aug 22, 08:49:00 PM 2010
Tyler Lee said...

I hear condemnation of "government" from one side, of corporations from the other. It is the combination of the two that worries me. We are a corporate-fascist state now, with the government a wholly-owned subsidiary of the financial interests. No president since Harry Truman has been able to govern without the consent of those interests...

Tue Aug 24, 07:56:00 AM 2010
Anonymous said...

Anonymous@8:49

I believe the author meant there were no "historical" civilizations (Latin "civitas," implying cities, division of occupational labor, economic class structure and government) in North America at the time of the European invasion. This is not to say there were no Indian societies, or even political confederations -- which there obviously were.

Tue Aug 24, 07:22:00 PM 2010
Anonymous said...

@James Young

The article plainly said that the East India Company was a monopoly. In fact, it was a major point of the piece:


"On the contrary, parliament essentially was acting as an agent on the behalf of a privately-owned corporation by endowing it with a trade monopoly in disregard of the interests of its American subjects. Certainly the obvious analogy cannot be hard to draw in these days of taxpayer-funded bailouts of privately-owned corporations."

Perhaps you need to read more carefully.

Tue Aug 24, 07:32:00 PM 2010

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