The Boston Tea Party as a brand has been co-opted by the extreme right as a rebellion about taxes. That is an oversimplification. The colonists knew they had to pay taxes. As Benjamin Franklin famously said, nothing is certain except death and taxes. It wasn't taxes that the colonists objected to, it was Parliament in England, a corrupt body that was owned by the eighteenth century equivalent of corporate interests.
It is a bit difficult to explain, but the overreach by the Chamber of Commerce may have given us to opening. Consider the proposed ad below the jump.
Possible ad for democratic candidates.
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You may have noticed all those ads attacking me and my character on the air lately. (some authority) has said that the those against me are outspending those on my side by (7 to 1, or whatever.) Where has this money come from?
Well, a great deal of it has come from the Chamber of Commerce, a lobbying interest for big business. It has recently been reported that the Chamber is collecting money from large corporations, both foreign and domestic, and is running ads across the country for Republican and Tea Party candidates and against democratic candidates, in an attempt to buy seats in congress.
This is nothing new. In the late eighteenth century the same thing happened in England. At that time the equivalent of giant corporations were English sugar planters with vast estates in the Caribbean. There were rotten boroughs in England, underpopulated parliamentry districts that were "bought" by these planters. There were so many of these rotten boroughs in fact that the planters succeeded in "buying" the parliament, which in turn did their bidding and passed tax and commerce rules unfair to the American Colonies. The original tea partiers refused to accept being ruled by a corporatist parliament and tossed the tea in the harbor.
So the next time you see one of these corporatist ads against me, know that not much has changed since eighteenth century Boston. The very wealthy are still attempting to buy congress for their own use. And ask yourself who Samual Adams would have voted for.
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This is just a first take and the pros can do a much better job. The great benefit of an ad like this is that every time someone sees one of their ads, it becomes one of our ads. It reframes the tea party and directs the tea party anger where it should be directed.
Any suggestions are welcome. Thanks for reading.