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We Need A Boston Tea Party For The 21st Century |
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In 1600, Queen Elizabeth chartered the British East India Company, the world’s first mega-corporation. The wealth and the power it wielded puts Wal-Mart to shame. Not just a commercial enterprise, the East India Company kept a standing army of over 250,000 soldiers and exercised territorial rule over roughly one fifth of the world’s population.
Which makes what happened in Boston on December 16, 1773 all the more remarkable. On that night, a group of American patriots dressed up as Mohawks, boarded the ships of the East India Comapny, and dumped 342 chests of tea into the harbor - an event which has famously become known as the “Boston Tea Party.”
The patriots were protesting Parliament’s lowering of the tax on tea - corporate tax breaks, if you will. Parliament’s agenda was to boost the company’s sagging profits, and drive the colonial smugglers out of business. On the surface, it appears that Parliament was merely trying to eliminate the underground, tax-free economy. Interpreted another way, it means that the government was helping the mega-corporation drive the independent little guys out of business. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
However we interpret the Boston Tea Party, it is a clear case of concerned citizens boldly taking a stand against overwhleming corporate power. When the American colonies gained independence a few years laters, the Founding Fathers were careful to place strict restrictions on corporate powers.
Those restrictions, however, have slowly evaporated, and we are now in an era where corporations might once again approach the power and scope of the British East India Company. The larger and more expansive corporations get, the more they tend to disregard the environment, human rights, and the general welfare of the communities in which they operate (although, to be fair, there are many companies that do very well in these areas).
I live in fear of the day when we see a company like ExxonMobil merge with a company like Blackwater, and the transition from the rule of the nation-state to the rule of the corporation becomes complete. In order to get a handle on the expanding power of corporations, we need a Boston Tea Party for the 21st Century. We need a new type of bold action that can once again restore economic power to “We The People.”
How do we become 21st century patriots? How do we go about reclaiming our independence from the tyranny of big business?
Great post, Jim.
Derrick Jensen, author of “A Language Older than Words,” discusses the Boston Tea Party just a little in his latest book, “Endgame.” Jensen is trying to figure out why exactly it is that the environmental movement is such a phenomenal failure when really trying to prevent ongoing problems like deforestation and the contamination of water, air and soil, as well as the inability of modern citizens to prevent the greater expansion of corporate powers over their–and more marginalized, indigenous peoples–lives.
One thing about the Boston Tea Party is that it was patently a violent act. At the WTO meeting in Seattle, 1999, a group led by black and green anarchists set out destroying the property of large corporations like Nike and Starbucks, companies that were set to profit directly from the strict deregulatory regime of the WTO. Not necessarily a tactical approach, because everyone knows Brand-Recognition brings a little bit of nostalgia and self-identification with it. In the end, they were combated not only by police, but by other protesters who were against “violence” (keep in mind nothing living was harmed, and the violence inflicted by these corporations on both the human and natural communities of the “developing” world are large).
We live in an age categorically opposed to violence. One could say in many ways that the State exists to protect private property, including financial and land holdings, far more than the welfare of its citizenry. So any violence against this property–such as throwing a shipment of Nike shoes or Starbucks coffee into the Puget Sound–are going to strike contemporary observers as indiscriminate and unreasonable. A good number of people on the left, and I’d imagine the percentage grows larger the higher up the socio-economic scale one climbs, would denounce such symbolic demonstrations of resistance as much as the corporate-state would be sure to crush it and imprison anyone related to it.
The sad fact is that the State–the police, military, and judicial apparatus–already is an armed force provided to protect the property of private corporations. Exxon Mobil has an army, and it is operating in Iraq and Afghanistan at the cost of about 1 trillion dollars a year (to use Chalmers Johnson’s estimates). The ingenious tactic of global corporations is to get the local government of the countries where they situate their factories to protect them as a private company like Blackwater would have to be paid to do.
The modern State is a corporate-state, funded mostly by corporate profits, that is, funded by the suppression of human rights abroad, the desecration of water, air, and soil, and on the patent disinformation of the American (and European, Japanese, and Third-World) public about the abuse and compulsion required to maintain the hegemony of the current, unsustainable economic system.
That’s why laws like the Patriot Act are passed and that is why governments have a vested interest in seeing people hope that a presidential candidate is going to come someday and whisk this failing system away. One would have to be foolish not to agree that we do need a world-wide democratic revolution, a Boston Tea Party of the 21st Century, but it will take a lot of courage, sacrifice, and honesty about the real nature of our plight if it is going to happen.
You can’t. You’re weak; feeble, even. We all are. We’re Americans, and that’s our hallmark: “Weak, Disorganized Citizens of the Island we Call Ourselves.”
For example: You want to blog about corporate power and start a net-roots campaign - perhaps - of emails, faxes, and phone calls to representatives in your Congress, each and all who have Corporate backers to thank for their incumbencies. I need add nothing more to point out how weak and irrelevant these actions are.
Maybe you’ll up the ante and organize a couple thousand folks to stop buying certain branded goods from certain megalomart resale outlets. W00t!
Hell. Maybe you’ll even get a few protests together and we’ll all see you marching down the street on the evening news… That is between the commercial breaks wherein the corporation you might be protesting will be advertising it’s wares whilst sponsoring the very broadcast that covers your sidewalk-sideshow.
But none of these make a dent, nor do they make any sense when you apply some cold, unromantic logic to them. And since there isn’t an American left who is anything more than weak and self-interested, there isn’t a chance in hell that we’ll see a socially galvanizing criminal act like the Boston Tea Party come out of this generation.
The people who care don’t have the balls to put their freedom on the line, and the rest of the people have central air conditioning: So why give a shit, right?
Nothing’s going to happen. You don’t intend anything by posting this article. It isn’t a battle cry or the beginning of anything real, is it? You’re just shouting into the wind; Making sure that you’re part of the cool crowd - the in-crowd - that’s obligated to point out the stunningly obvious danger of the ever increasing corporate influence in our world.
What a waste of effort writing this article. The only act that could be more meaningless and foolish would be if someone were to go out of their way to point out the stunningly obvious meaninglessness of the whole thing in some overly drawn out, self-serving, narcissistic, thousand-word comment.
Am I right or am I right?
You have no idea who I am, what I do, who I’m involved with, or what I really stand for. All you know if what I’ve chosen to reveal on this blog.
Comments like this reveal more about yourself than anything else.
Boston Tea Party for the 21st century indeed. My rowdy friends and I will be right over. Just tell us when and where!!
Just make some noise in your own community - today! Do whatever you can to undermine the strangehold that corps have on this nation. Turn off the television. Write a letter to the editor. Go to a city or a county council meeting and speak out against companies that bully their way into whatever they want. Start a blog. Write a book. Produce a documentary.
Buy local produce at a roadside stand. Refuse to shop at Wal-Mart and other big box retailers. Pay attention to the companies you buy from and what they’re doing in the world. Support companies that go green and have transparency on overseas factories. Etc. Etc. Etc. Tell your friends and family and starngers on the street. You might even want to engaage in some old school civil disobedience like the patriots did in 1773.
(I wouldn’t suggest actually dumping tea into the Boston Harbor, although it might improve the smell.)
I agree with the substance of your article, but I wonder about this:
Can you give an example of this?
For starters:
1) Corporate charters were granted for fixed pewriods of time, usually between 10 and 40 years.
2) Corporate charters could be promptly revoked for violations of law or for causing public harm.
3) Corporations could engage only in activities necessary to fulfill their chartered purpose.
4) Corporations could not own property that was not essential to the fulfilling of their chartered purpose.
5) Corporations could not own stock in other corporations.
6) The personal assets of corporate shareholders were not protected from the consequences of corpoate behavior.
In addition - in 1881 or so(don’t quote me on the date), corporations were granted the same legal rights as individuals.
quite right Jim–the Supreme Court ruled in 1886 that corporations are “person” under the 14th Amendment and therefore entitled to constitutional rights like free speech, equal protection, etc. An interesting decision if you’re a strict constructionist–I wonder how a strict constructionist defends this decision (or do they?)
To me, the terms “strict constructionist” is about as useful as “activist judge.” It’s just a way to make the people that disagree with you look like they’re using the Constitution and our legal system to further their own agenda. But honestly, isn’t everybody doing that?
The Tea is already on for the 21st Century.. We have brewed. we shall prevail…
Check it out at 21stcenturyteaparty.us
We shall combined get results.
Just lettin u know.. we already in the process with our cause.. You may wish to google and find a great name that will be yours….
Much respect for enlightenment,determination and a cause worth fightin for.
P.S. Enjoyed your site. Very informative. TY
21st century patriotism starts with getting involved with local politics. In itself this seems like a feeble answer but is a step in the right direction. With the merging of politics into one global view into a homogeny of thought with only slight differences to separate us from our small differences they are winning by taking our view off of the larger picture, our freedom.
We have traded our freedoms for a false sense of security, for the release of our own responsibility for the hope that big government will take our best interests to heart and do the right thing. Our fore founders wanted to limit the governments ability to control, not increase its ability to govern. There needs to be a new awakening amongst our local communities to become involved in our best interests and not leave those decisions to someone who was elected. The election process in this century has been tainted by incumbents and those who have the monetary ability to out spend the new candidate who wants to look out for the best interest of its constituents.
History is repeating itself in the form of the once great Roman Empire. The Roman Senate was transformed over time into a small minority that stayed in power by appeasing the masses to unfold their own agenda, its own secure of power and self servitude. In Roman times, this was accomplished through mass entertainment to preoccupy the common thought away from the true issues that mattered to the survival of the empire. Gladiators, Olympic Games and the such were all distractions from an individuals conscious to look out for its families best interests. Today, we are cube dwellers who get the same distractions from our modern day games. Football, basketball, and the most prominent baseball. The fact that the US Senate would hold hearings on a privately owned sport on its ability to govern performance enhancing drugs rather than focus on matters that would strengthen out union is an insult to those who gave their lives for our freedoms. Take this into account with the mind numbing box that resides in each home that we call a TV and you have the perfect distractor from the real issues that affect our daily lives.
So where does one start? Change politics from within, we need to have two things to start a cultural and thought revolution.
The first is there needs to be mandatory term limits for both the House and the Senate. A Senator or Representatives only job once they are are elected is; to get reelected! If they knew they only had 8 years to make a change, perhaps then, they would start voting on issues the way their constituents wanted them to vote.
The second is the boycott of television programing that is strictly entertainment in value. Force the “news” channels to report on the news, and not “what Brittany Spears is up to”. Have local channels talk about the issues that are up for vote in your state and where your politicians stand on the issue and then how the vote played out.
The bottom line is we need to take a greater vested interest in what is happening, before a foreign force (could be domestic), fully invades our thought process and breeds a more passive public.
It is nice to see others out there are starting to have a cultural awakening on the degradation of the greatest nation from within.
I watched the backslapping of the efforts by the House and Senate on this “just occurring” financial crisis with utter disbelief. This mockery of the politicians who supposedly represent us should add another straw to the burden of proof that the time for a 2nd Boston Tea Party is now if not somewhat overdue! And neither of the Presidential candidates will change any of what exists in Washington, no matter what they say!