On Apr 17, 11:44*pm, wrote:
We can raise a full glass of your favorite adult beverage to all the
Tea Party participants - and to the one group of Americans the
Zerocrats despise above all others: *our soldiers in the US military.

All of us want to raise our glass the highest this week to the Navy
SEALs who popped those three Somali pirates. *And I'm sure you want to
hear the real story of what happened. * Especially because there is a
revoltingly opportunistic and cowardly side to it. *Guess which side
Zero is on.

Why, for example, did it take SEAL Team Six (aka DEVGRU, Navy Special
Warfare Development Group, the Navy's equivalent of Delta Force) over
36 hours to get to the scene?

Because Zero refused to authorize the SEAL deployment for those 36
hours, during which the OSC - the on scene commander, Cmdr. Frank
Castellano of the USS Bainbridge - repeatedly requested them.

http://www.tothepointnews.com

The Real Boston Tea Party was an Anti-Corporate Revolt: 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


http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/15-10

Published on Wednesday, April 15, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
The Real Boston Tea Party was an Anti-Corporate Revolt
by Thom Hartmann
CNBC Correspondent Rick Santelli called for a "Chicago Tea Party" on
Feb 19th in protesting President Obama's plan to help homeowners in
trouble. Santelli's call was answered by the right-wing group
FreedomWorks, which funds campaigns promoting big business interests,
and is the opposite of what the real Boston Tea Party was.
FreedomWorks was funded in 2004 by Dick Armey (former Republican House
Majority leader & lobbyist); consolidated Citizens for a Sound
Economy, funded by the Koch family; and Empower America, a lobbying
firm, that had fought against healthcare and minimum-wage efforts
while hailing deregulation.
Anti-tax "tea party" organizers are delivering one million tea bags to
a Washington, D.C., park Wednesday morning - to promote protests
across the country by people they say are fed up with high taxes and
excess spending.
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.
On a cold November day in 1773, activists gathered in a coastal town.
The corporation had gone too far, and the two thousand people who'd
jammed into the meeting hall were torn as to what to do about it.
Unemployment was exploding and the economic crisis was deepening;
corporate crime, governmental corruption spawned by corporate cash,
and an ethos of greed were blamed. "Why do we wait?" demanded one at
the meeting, a fisherman named George Hewes. "The more we delay, the
more strength is acquired" by the company and its puppets in the
government. "Now is the time to prove our courage," he said. Soon, the
moment came when the crowd decided for direct action and rushed into
the streets.
That is how I tell the story of the Boston Tea Party, now that I have
read a first-person account of it. While striving to understand my
nation's struggles against corporations, in a rare book store I came
upon a first edition of "Retrospect of the Boston Tea Party with a
Memoir of George R.T. Hewes, a Survivor of the Little Band of Patriots
Who Drowned the Tea in Boston Harbor in 1773," and I jumped at the
chance to buy it. Because the identities of the Boston Tea Party
participants were hidden (other than Samuel Adams) and all were sworn
to secrecy for the next 50 years, this account is the only first-
person account of the event by a participant that exists. As I read, I
began to understand the true causes of the American Revolution.
I learned that 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.
Although schoolchildren are usually taught that the American
Revolution was a rebellion against "taxation without representation,"
akin to modern day conservative taxpayer revolts, in fact what led to
the revolution was rage against a transnational corporation that, by
the 1760s, dominated trade from China to India to the Caribbean, and
controlled nearly all commerce to and from North America, with
subsidies and special dispensation from the British crown.
Hewes notes: "The [East India] Company received permission to
transport tea, free of all duty, from Great Britain to America..."
allowing it to wipe out New England-based tea wholesalers and mom-and-
pop stores and take over the tea business in all of America. "Hence,"
wrote, "it was no longer the small vessels of private merchants, who
went to vend tea for their own account in the ports of the colonies,
but, on the contrary, ships of an enormous burthen, that transported
immense quantities of this commodity ... The colonies were now arrived
at the decisive moment when they must cast the dye, and determine
their course ... "
A pamphlet was circulated through the colonies called The Alarm and
signed by an enigmatic "Rusticus." One issue made clear the feelings
of colonial Americans about England's largest transnational
corporation and its behavior around the world: "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. They have
levied War, excited Rebellions, dethroned lawful Princes, and
sacrificed Millions for the Sake of Gain. The Revenues of Mighty
Kingdoms have entered their Coffers. 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.
Fifteen hundred Thousands, it is said, perished by Famine in one Year,
not because the Earth denied its Fruits; but [because] this Company
and their Servants engulfed all the Necessaries of Life, and set them
at so high a Price that the poor could not purchase them."
After protesters had turned back the Company's ships in Philadelphia
and New York, Hewes writes, "In Boston the general voice declared the
time was come to face the storm."
The citizens of the colonies were preparing to throw off one of the
corporations that for almost 200 years had determined nearly every
aspect of their lives through its economic and political power. They
were planning to destroy the goods of the world's largest
multinational corporation, intimidate its employees, and face down the
guns of the government that supported it.
The queen's corporation
The East India Company's influence had always been pervasive in the
colonies. Indeed, it was not the Puritans but the East India Company
that founded America. The Puritans traveled to America on ships owned
by the East India Company, which had already established the first
colony in North America, at Jamestown, in the Company-owned
Commonwealth of Virginia, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the
Mississippi. The commonwealth was named after the "Virgin Queen,"
Elizabeth, who had chartered the corporation.
Elizabeth was trying to make England a player in the new global trade
sparked by the European "discovery" of the Americas. The wealth Spain
began extracting from the New World caught the attention of the
European powers. In many European countries, particularly Holland and
France, consortiums were put together to finance ships to sail the
seas. In 1580, Queen Elizabeth became the largest shareholder in The
Golden Hind, a ship owned by Sir Francis Drake.
The investment worked out well for Queen Elizabeth. There's no record
of exactly how much she made when Drake paid her share of the Hind's
dividends to her, but it was undoubtedly vast, since Drake himself and
the other minor shareholders all received a 5000 percent return on
their investment. Plus, because the queen placed a maximum loss to the
initial investors of their investment amount only, it was a low-risk
investment (for the investors at least-creditors, such as suppliers of
provisions for the voyages or wood for the ships, or employees, for
example, would be left unpaid if the venture failed, just as in a
modern-day corporation). She was endorsing an investment model that
led to the modern limited-liability corporation.
After making a fortune on Drake's expeditions, Elizabeth started
looking for a more permanent arrangement. She authorized a group of
218 London merchants and noblemen to form a corporation. The East
India Company was born on December 31, 1600.
By the 1760s, the East India Company's power had grown massive and
worldwide. However, this rapid expansion, trying to keep ahead of the
Dutch trading companies, was a mixed blessing, as the company went
deep in debt to support its growth, and by 1770 found itself nearly
bankrupt.
The company turned to a strategy that multinational corporations
follow to this day: They lobbied for laws that would make it easy for
them to put their small-business competitors out of business.
Most of the members of the British government and royalty (including
the king) were stockholders in the East India Company, so it was easy
to get laws passed in its interests. Among the Company's biggest and
most vexing problems were American colonial entrepreneurs, who ran
their own small ships to bring tea and other goods directly into
America without routing them through Britain or through the Company.
Between 1681 and 1773, a series of laws were passed granting the
Company monopoly on tea sold in the American colonies and exempting it
from tea taxes. Thus, the Company was able to lower its tea prices to
undercut the prices of the local importers and the small tea houses in
every town in America. But the colonists were unappreciative of their
colonies being used as a profit center for the multinational
corporation.
Boston's million-dollar tea party
And so, Hewes says, on a cold November evening of 1773, the first of
the East India Company's ships of tax-free tea arrived. The next
morning, a pamphlet was widely circulated calling on patriots to meet
at Faneuil Hall to discuss resistance to the East India Company and
its tea. "Things thus appeared to be hastening to a disastrous issue.
The people of the country arrived in great numbers, the inhabitants of
the town assembled. This assembly, on the 16th of December 1773, was
the most numerous ever known, there being more than 2000 from the
country present," said Hewes.
The group called for a vote on whether to oppose the landing of the
tea. The vote was unanimously affirmative, and it is related by one
historian of that scene "that a person disguised after the manner of
the Indians, who was in the gallery, shouted at this juncture, the cry
of war; and that the meeting dissolved in the twinkling of an eye, and
the multitude rushed in a mass to Griffin's wharf."
That night, Hewes dressed as an Indian, blackening his face with coal
dust, and joined crowds of other men in hacking apart the chests of
tea and throwing them into the harbor. In all, the 342 chests of tea-
over 90,000 pounds-thrown overboard that night were enough to make 24
million cups of tea and were valued by the East India Company at 9,659
Pounds Sterling or, in today's currency, just over $1 million.
In response, the British Parliament immediately passed the Boston Port
Act stating that the port of Boston would be closed until the citizens
of Boston reimbursed the East India Company for the tea they had
destroyed. The colonists refused. A year and a half later, the
colonists would again state their defiance of the East India Company
and Great Britain by taking on British troops in an armed conflict at
Lexington and Concord (the "shots heard 'round the world") on April
19, 1775.
That war-finally triggered by a transnational corporation and its
government patrons trying to deny American colonists a fair and
competitive local marketplace-would end with independence for the
colonies.
The revolutionaries had put the East India Company in its place with
the Boston Tea Party, and that, they thought, was the end of that.
Unfortunately, the Boston Tea Party was not the end; within 150 years,
during the so-called Gilded Age, powerful rail, steel, and oil
interests would rise up to begin a new form of oligarchy, capturing
the newly-formed Republican Party in the 1880s, and have been working
to establish a permanent wealthy and ruling class in this country ever
since.
Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-
winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally
syndicated daily progressive talk program The Thom Hartmann Show.
www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of
Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate
Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To
Take Back America," "What Would Jefferson Do?," "Screwed: The
Undeclared War Against the Middle Class and What We Can Do About It,"
and "Cracking The Code: The Art and Science of Political
Persuasion."*His newest book is Threshold: The Crisis of Western
Culture.