Of Tea Parties, Then and Now

There is something about the so-called "Tea Party" anti-tax movement of late that truly irks me. I think I have narrowed it down to historical inaccuracy. If you look at the Tea Party faction of American society today, what you see is a hodge podge of angry citizens yelling and hollering incoherently about how much they hate President Obama, Democrats, liberals, and government in general. They claim to be mad about "the direction our country is going in" (which is obviously socialism), but they don't seem to pick out a particular policy they disagree with, or give any justification as to why they are upset with it. They are just pissed off, and they don't want to take it anymore (even though progressives "took it" for the better part of the last 30 years and Democrats have only been in full control of government for less than a year with barely anything to show for it).

When the Boston Tea Party happened in 1773, the colonists were protesting the policies of a foreign government, not just government or taxes in general. The one glaring similarity between the modern Tea Party movement and original colonial protesters, however, is that in both cases they were acting largely against their own best interest. Specifically, allowing the East India Company to export tea directly to the colonies would have had the effect of cheaper tea for the colonists. This would have been good for most colonists, but particularly bad for the wealthier Northern merchants, who were basically the ruling elite class of the time (in the North). These Northern merchants also happened to be the driving force behind the Boston Tea Party.

Then and now, what we see is a ruling class of wealthy elites trying to start a revolution but also making damned sure that it doesn't get too revolutionary. Alternatively phrased, they didn't want the revolution to become a threat to their own power in society: no social change, no liberation for the urban lower classes - simply independence. The British government was only their enemy because they saw it as an obstacle to their own interests. In today's case, the wealthy elites aren't even the ones you see on TV for the most part. They are the ones behind the scenes, pulling the strings. Conservative corporate-funded groups like FreedomWorks as well as multi-millionaire Glenn Beck have brought out the Fox News crowd in hordes to protest, well, something.

Thom Hartmann offers a radically different perspective on the Boston Tea Party, and though it seems contradictory to some of what I have read, it certainly seems plausible. He contends that these Northern merchants were actually the equivalent of the mom-and-pop small business owners of today, protesting against the Wal-Mart of their era, the East India Company. While this contradicts what I have just written, it actually helps to serve the argument that these colonists were not simply opposed to government and taxes. They were opposed specifically to economic regulation by their mother country that was crafted with only Great Britain's interests in mind, heavily unbalanced against the colonist's burgeoning economy. Indeed, at this point, the American economy had outgrown its mother, and at some point it had to detach. It was the natural progression of things.

Would the Tea Party crowd please stop with the more-patriotic-than-thou attitude now?

President Obama talking like a true liberal (for once)

You see, our predecessors understood that government could not, and should not, solve every problem. They understood that there are instances when the gains in security from government action are not worth the added constraints on our freedom. But they also understood that the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little; that without the leavening hand of wise policy, markets can crash, monopolies can stifle competition, the vulnerable can be exploited. And they knew that when any government measure, no matter how carefully crafted or beneficial, is subject to scorn; when any efforts to help people in need are attacked as un-American; when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom, and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter -- that at that point we don't merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves. - President Barack Obama

I thought this guy would never say anything worth quoting again. I was wrong. If this is his first time as president talking like a progressive and not a centrist, let's hope he can walk the walk for once too.

Van Jones resigns due to pressure from Glenn Beck and Fox News

TV killed our democracy. - David Bazan

The Democratic Party, except for its most progressive members, is basically a subsidiary of corporate America at this point. Congress, with few exceptions, is essentially bought and paid for by our corporate overlords. Corporate money in politics has hijacked our democracy and sent it straight to hell. A sad thing, really. So it goes with a two-party system. I have no faith in either party anymore. The Democratic Party is simply a (slightly) lesser of two very sinister evils.

I write this hours after Van Jones, now former "green jobs czar" of the Obama administration, has resigned due to pressure from, well, Glenn Beck and Fox News - and not the American people. We have lost another brilliant mind in the Obama administration due to right-wing paranoia and hyperbole.

Thomas Jefferson writing to Isaac McPherson on "intellectual property"

Thomas Jefferson was a genius. Some of his words have been unfortunately used for gravely perverted purposes (such as his quote that appeared on the t-shirt of Timothy McVeigh, as well as that recent nutcase that brought a loaded gun to a town hall meeting on health care reform). In the following writing, though, Thomas Jefferson demonstrates a brilliant insight about the very concept of ideas. He is absolutely correct in his assertions here, and this makes for a great argument against the current copyright and patent laws in this country.

It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that [Volume 3, Page 43] these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.

Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not. As a member of the patent board for several years, while the law authorized a board to grant or refuse patents, I saw with what slow progress a system of general rules could be matured.

The Founders' Constitution
Volume 3, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8, Document 12
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12.html
The University of Chicago Press

The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh. 20 vols. Washington: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1905.