The Boston Tea Party’s Actual Successors

With all the fuss about tea parties today, it’s worth noting again that the original Boston tea party was not, as is often claimed, a protest against the British imposing a tax on tea. What the colonists were actually objecting to was the British lowering the tax on tea in order to favor the East India Company, the era’s corporate giant, and undercut illegal tea smugglers. The real successors to the civil disobedience initiated by Samuel Adams in 1773 are not today’s media-boosted events, but the protests against corporate globalization, big business monopolies and the war on drugs.