Delicious Teabagger Irony
Just finished Douglas Rushkoff's Life, Inc., a book that chronicles the rise of the corporation over the last few centuries. According to Rushkoff, small businesses were garnering way too much economic power near the end of the "Dark" Ages (actually a very good time to be a peasant, but that's another story) from the established royalty. To combat this rise, monarchs granted monopoly authority over corporations for the exploitation of previously unexplored and unexploited lands. This freed the monarchy from the cost of funding expeditions, and guaranteed no pesky competitors for the explorers. About the only thing the royals had to do, in fact, was provide some military protection for the exploited lands later, after the coin started rolling into the realm.
The British East India Company was just one such corporation enjoying the monopolistic exploitation of the New World, backed by the Lobsterbacks of the British military.
The East India Company lobbied vigorously for laws that would help it quell any competition from the colonists (in the North American British colonies it established). This was a particularly easy sell since the royals and governors they were lobbying also happened to be shareholders. Laws forbidding colonists to actually fabricate anything from the resources they grew and mined made self-sufficiency or local economic prosperity impossible. "An Act for the Restraining and Punishing of Pirates" defined the import of tea from anyone other than the Company as smuggling. The Townshend Acts of 1767 and the Tea Act of 1773 helped the Company unload a surplus of tea accumulated in British warehouses by removing all barriers to trade as well as granting tax exemptions. "No taxation without representation" -- the rallying cry that led to the Boston Tea Party -- wasn't about voting as much as about Britain's passage of tax laws to the exclusive benefit of the East India Company. The American Revolution itself was less a revolt by colonists against Britain than by small businessmen against the chartered multinational corporation writing her laws.
This is why the founders so carefully limited the reach and scope of corporate power in newly independent America.
(Douglas Rushkoff, Life, Inc., Random House, 2009, pp. 11-12.)
Rushkoff goes on to list very convincing examples of this corporate limitation in early founder literature, including -- this surprised me -- the "invisible hand" comment of Adam Smith:
It was these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century equivalents of no-bid contracts to Halliburton that led Adam Smith to write Wealth of Nations. While celebrated today by corporate libertarians as philosophical justification for free-trade policies, the book was meant as an attack on the scale and effects of chartered monopoly. By arguing -- now famously -- that "self-interest" might promote a more just society, he was speaking in the context of an economy already heavily tilted against individual human agency. "By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry," Smith explains of the average person, "he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention."
Smith assumes that people would be biased against international trade, naturally preferring the security offered by sourcing goods locally -- and that his readers would agree with him on this point. Like the founders of America who may have differed on almost everything else but this, Smith saw economics as characterized by small, scaled, local economies working in interaction with one another and guided by the enlightened self-interest of individuals. This was not a reaction to "leftist" regulations on corporate power, but against the unfair practices of early transnational corporations, which were operating on a level completely removed from the real affairs of people and the proper stewardship of resources.
(Rushkoff, ibid, pp. 33-34, emphasis by the author.)
Getting to the present, we can take these historic examples and apply them to the current tea bag protest movement:
It turns out that that the tea baggers, led in part by Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds and the Coward Rick Santelli, are politically more in line with the tax policies of King George than the views of the Sons of Liberty and the colonial patriots. The tax baggers emulating a protest against a corporate tax cut -- but, oddly, in support of tax cuts for the rich and corporations. Furthermore, King George was against a corporate bailout loan. And so are the tea baggers. And I don't think it'd be a stretch to suggest that many of the tea baggers are recipients of the president's middle class tax cut.
Not only that but the tea bag revolutionaries are being urged to buy thousands of corporate tea bags, rather than horking them from Lipton trucks -- Griffin's Wharf style. . . .
So in keeping with a long, embarrassing history of ill-conceived, contradictory or just plain self-defeating marketing ploys, the tea baggers seem to have adopted a concept that completely and utterly contradicts what they claim to stand for.
From a group that shouts for the right to keep the goddamn government from meddling in medicare, I guess I shouldn't be looking too hard for informed nuance.
The British East India Company was just one such corporation enjoying the monopolistic exploitation of the New World, backed by the Lobsterbacks of the British military.
The East India Company lobbied vigorously for laws that would help it quell any competition from the colonists (in the North American British colonies it established). This was a particularly easy sell since the royals and governors they were lobbying also happened to be shareholders. Laws forbidding colonists to actually fabricate anything from the resources they grew and mined made self-sufficiency or local economic prosperity impossible. "An Act for the Restraining and Punishing of Pirates" defined the import of tea from anyone other than the Company as smuggling. The Townshend Acts of 1767 and the Tea Act of 1773 helped the Company unload a surplus of tea accumulated in British warehouses by removing all barriers to trade as well as granting tax exemptions. "No taxation without representation" -- the rallying cry that led to the Boston Tea Party -- wasn't about voting as much as about Britain's passage of tax laws to the exclusive benefit of the East India Company. The American Revolution itself was less a revolt by colonists against Britain than by small businessmen against the chartered multinational corporation writing her laws.
This is why the founders so carefully limited the reach and scope of corporate power in newly independent America.
(Douglas Rushkoff, Life, Inc., Random House, 2009, pp. 11-12.)
Rushkoff goes on to list very convincing examples of this corporate limitation in early founder literature, including -- this surprised me -- the "invisible hand" comment of Adam Smith:
It was these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century equivalents of no-bid contracts to Halliburton that led Adam Smith to write Wealth of Nations. While celebrated today by corporate libertarians as philosophical justification for free-trade policies, the book was meant as an attack on the scale and effects of chartered monopoly. By arguing -- now famously -- that "self-interest" might promote a more just society, he was speaking in the context of an economy already heavily tilted against individual human agency. "By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry," Smith explains of the average person, "he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention."
Smith assumes that people would be biased against international trade, naturally preferring the security offered by sourcing goods locally -- and that his readers would agree with him on this point. Like the founders of America who may have differed on almost everything else but this, Smith saw economics as characterized by small, scaled, local economies working in interaction with one another and guided by the enlightened self-interest of individuals. This was not a reaction to "leftist" regulations on corporate power, but against the unfair practices of early transnational corporations, which were operating on a level completely removed from the real affairs of people and the proper stewardship of resources.
(Rushkoff, ibid, pp. 33-34, emphasis by the author.)
Getting to the present, we can take these historic examples and apply them to the current tea bag protest movement:
It turns out that that the tea baggers, led in part by Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds and the Coward Rick Santelli, are politically more in line with the tax policies of King George than the views of the Sons of Liberty and the colonial patriots. The tax baggers emulating a protest against a corporate tax cut -- but, oddly, in support of tax cuts for the rich and corporations. Furthermore, King George was against a corporate bailout loan. And so are the tea baggers. And I don't think it'd be a stretch to suggest that many of the tea baggers are recipients of the president's middle class tax cut.
Not only that but the tea bag revolutionaries are being urged to buy thousands of corporate tea bags, rather than horking them from Lipton trucks -- Griffin's Wharf style. . . .
So in keeping with a long, embarrassing history of ill-conceived, contradictory or just plain self-defeating marketing ploys, the tea baggers seem to have adopted a concept that completely and utterly contradicts what they claim to stand for.
From a group that shouts for the right to keep the goddamn government from meddling in medicare, I guess I shouldn't be looking too hard for informed nuance.