Mommy, How Did The Tea Party Start?

If we were alive back in the 1770s, today's Tea Party activists would probably have been active back then too-- but active on behalf of the British. Conservatives fought against the revolutionaries who wanted to throw off the British imperial yoke and many conservatives would up fighting on the side of the British troops, killing patriots. Today's Tea Partiers would have been those traitors to America.

How do I know? If you think teabaggers only live in backward, theocratic parts of South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Texas, you've never been to California's Inland Empire. I was there yesterday, and the sun was beating down in sweltering Lake Elsinore in the heart of Ken Calvert's blood red 42nd congressional district. Obama had one of his worst results in California there against Romney, a pitiful 41.4%. When I parked the car, I noticed the digital thermometer gage was hovering on the wrong side of 100. I looked in the back seat and found my bright yellow baseball cap emblazoned with the logo "99%." Who would even know what it meant? They knew. And I was soon arguing with a Tea Party fanatic who is convinced that Ken Calvert-- whose ProgressivePunch score is zero this year (and 1.43 for his career; that's 1.43 out of 100)-- is a liberal "Obama-symp." How do you even have a political conversation with someone like that? All his "information" came directly from Glenn Beck-- although I detected a smattering of Alex Jones in there as well. I asked him if he knew where Benghazi (which he was using as a punctuation mark for every statement he made) was, remembering I had just seen a poll that showed that 40% of teabaggers had no idea. He was one of those 40%. "Cuba," he asserted aggressively. Who was I to disabuse him of his cherished ignorance. I asked him if he knows anything about the actual Boston Tea Party. And he did have some vague notions about it-- mostly wrong... although he did know it involved Indians and Boston and tea and taxes. He was right about Boston. When I told him the real story of the Tea Party, he didn't believe me and looked at me in a way that made me think he was wondering if I was armed and if I'd shoot at him if he took a swing at me.

The story of the Boston Tea Party was very fresh in my mind because I just started reading Lee Fang's fascinating new book The Machine and he's got the actual story they gloss over in elementary school American History. It was all about the British East India Company, which was, back them something like Exxon-meets-Enron-- the biggest and most powerful company in the world. And they had well-connected lobbyists too.

Fierce competition from the Dutch and a variety of other factors pushed the British East India Company to near bankruptcy in the mid- to late eighteenth century. Members of Parliament, as well as the king and his family, were large shareholders of the East India Company. So with little hesitation, in 1767 the British government began passing a series of laws called the Townshend Acts to help the East India Company solidify its monopoly over the market in the American colonies as well as in England. American shipping companies competed directly with the East India Company by opening new trading lines, and small American retailers purchased products in bulk from the Dutch. To mitigate the East India Company’s competition, the Townshend laws included harsh measures to give the corporation new powers to search American homes and businesses for smuggled goods. Other Townshend Acts imposed new fees and taxes for various goods, including glass items and paint. Of course, none of these laws were passed with the colonists’ democratic input or consent.

To the colonists, perhaps the most insulting measure was the Tea Act passed in May of 1773. The Tea Act was a tax cut for the East India Company that allowed the corporation to bypass any duties and taxes on tea so it could sell directly to the colonists. The tax loophole applied only to the East India Company and allowed the company to severely undercut the price on tea imported by private American businesses.

Popular disgust at the East India Company rippled through the colonies. As news broke of the Tea Act, the May 27, 1773, edition of the Alarm, an insurgent paper bent on agitation, circulated around the colonies. The newsletter charged that the East India Company, through “Barbarities, Extortions and Monopolies,” had stolen land in Asia and forced famine in colonized countries for the sake of profit. The newsletter, signed by the anonymous “Rusticus,” asked the question: “Are we in like manner to be given to the disposal of the East India Company, who have now the Assurance, to step forth in Aid of the Minister, to execute his Plan, of enslaving America?” The colonial press buzzed with similar furor at the Tea Act, spurring a broad coalition of opposition.

The first shipments of the untaxed East India Company tea met well-organized resistance in November and December of 1773. In Charleston, South Carolina, protesters forced customs officials to keep the tea on the dock, and eventually the East India ship sailed back to England. In Philadelphia, a confrontation with the captain of the East India Company ship arriving there stalled the tea from making delivery. And in Boston, more than one hundred protesters, led by Samuel Adams, boarded the East India Company ship and dumped containers of the company’s tea, worth nearly two million in present-day dollars, into the harbor. The so-called Boston Tea Party faced down employees of the East India Company, many of whom acted as spies for their employer, as well as the military force of the British Empire, which at that time served the interests of the company. As the East India Company demanded repayments for their lost property, a series of escalating confrontations between British soldiers, acting on orders from the East India Company, and American colonists resulted in America’s war for independence.

"You see," I told the Glenn Beck Teatard from Lake Elsinore-- he was actually from Corona up the I-15 and worked at a place doing something with Monster Energy drinks-- "the Boston Tea Party wasn't about reducing taxes, it was about tax loopholes for big companies, which the Tea Party is protecting today. The were angry about the tax cuts that London gave to the British East India Company."

He looked more angry than confused. And he looked dumb as shit and I figured it was time to finish my business at Lake Elsinore and go back to L.A., where it's 20 degrees cooler and... well, you can walk around for a week and never run into a teabagger or a Glenn Beck fan or at someone who will look twice a bright yellow "99%" baseball cap.

As for Ken Calvert, he was caught by police getting a blowjob in a parked car from a heroin addict. He actually tried to drive away when the police interrupted him. (Here's a copy of the official police report.) He was later caught in various crooked real estate deals. His district is so red and so dumb that he keeps getting reelected anyway. Last year he beat his Democratic opponent, Michael Williamson 117,407 (61%) to 74,776 (39%). Unless a teabagger takes him out in a primary, he's there forever.