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Two hundred and thirty-eight years ago – or should I say, eleven-score and eighteen years ago – our Massachusetts rebel forefathers, dressed defiantly and sardonicly in native garb, boarded the Dartmouth under cover of dark and chucked 342 chests of Limey tea into the Boston Harbor.
THIS WAS NOT A PROTEST AGAINST HIGH TAXES BY THE WAY.
This was a protest against unfair TAX BREAKS given to a giant corporation called The British East India Company by our oppressors in the distant British parliament, tax breaks that were driving our local small businesses into bankruptcy. Put THAT in your pipe and smoke it, Teabaggers of last year!
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Fast-forward two-hundred and thirty-FIVE years to 2008. For decades America’s titans of finance – Wall Street and the big banks and lenders – aided and abetted by their own bought-and-paid-for politicians of both Parties (but mostly Republican) – had been relentlessly looting the rest of us Americans – the lower 99% – bringing us to levels of income inequality not seen since the time of the Gilded Age and Robber Barons. Still unsatisfied, they devised convoluted and novel ways to kick more and more wealth up their way, until the system came crashing down in the Great Bush Financial Meltdown, leaving countless millions of us unemployed, bankrupt, foreclosed on.
At THAT point – late 2008, early 2009 – we ALL should have started a new Tea Party and “occupied Wall Street.” But MOST of us were swept away with the optimism of having just elected a new President, one who seemed different from all the others, one who would really be able (and eager) to change things for the better. Yep, Obama and the Democrats would make things right – they would boldly take on Wall Street and the banks, the health insurance industry and Big Pharma – and we could get back to our lives. (D’oh! People who really want change should never blow their whole load on electoral politics.)
The upshot was that we left the “Tea Party” of 2009-10 to be formed by elderly, gullible reactionaries who felt alienated by the new Administration and its pallid lurches toward reform. Driven by the Terror of a Black President, the age-old antipathy to paying taxes, and a vague but powerful NOSTALGIA for an imagined, simpler, and better time, and not really understanding who the enemy was that had brought 99% of us to our knees, these self-proclaimed “Teabaggers” were easily manipulated into being the useful tools of the very forces who oppress them.
[It’s okay now, Grandpa, just stop that friendly fire and put down the musket – we’ve got your back.]
Well, things didn’t exactly work out for those of us who thought electing Obama and Democrats would be enough to make much of a difference in the country. It’s still hard to say if they’ve done everything they could given GOP obstructionism, or if GOP obstructionism was just a pretext and the little they did was all they really wanted to do. But we should have been out in the streets all along just like these old guys – with whom we have a lot more in common than they realize right now, a lot more in common than any of us do with the Top 1%.
It’s taken this millenium’s new flora and fauna – the ultra-wired twenty-something hippie-dippie hacktivists – to start up the REAL Tea Party we should have had all along, now known as the exponentially burgeoning Occupy Movement – Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Los Angeles, now Occupy Orange County and OCCUPY USA. And better late than never, they’re being joined by the long-suffering and demonized Unions, by Democrats and Libertarians, Greens, and disaffected Republicans, by Van Jones’ Reclaim the American Dream Movement and Dylan Ratigan’s Get Money Out movement. And this is just the beginning. Teabaggers, you’ve been fingering the wrong culprits and you should join us. Saturday October 15 we are Occupying the Financial District in Irvine, and the following Saturday the 22nd, the Federal Building in Santa Ana:
Occupy Orange County is leaderless resistance movement in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants. Join us in occupying Orange County, CA on October 22nd 2011 at the Ronald Reagan Federal Building in Santa Ana. We are the 99% and we DO exist in Orange County.
The General Assembly’s Statement (from Occupy Wall Street New York)
As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.
As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.
They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.
They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless nonhuman animals, and actively hide these practices.
They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.
They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.
They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.
They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
They have donated large sums of money to politicians supposed to be regulating them.
They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantive profit.
They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.
They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts.*
To the people of the world:
We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.
Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.
To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.
Join us and make your voices heard!
*These grievances are not all-inclusive.
A FOX News interview that will never air on FOX News – this is Jesse La Greca:
Paul Joseph Goebbels would be proud of you Nelson.
What you lack in cogency you make up for in lack of class.
I just hope folks don’t dress up as Indigenous peoples this time as they ‘occupy’ places
… unless, like our friend Guy Fawkes, they really ARE indigenous peoples.
I keep having to re-read that statement from the General Assembly to see if it really left out immigration, deportations, raids, etc.
Somos el 99%
Please describe your version of “indigenous dress” We “indigenous people” like t-shirts, baseball caps and jeans as much as bead work, feathered head dresses and loin cloths. Even if the former are creations of Euro-industrialists.
I had been thinking – for the “Occupy the Democratic Party” event Tuesday – of going with t-shirt, baseball cap and loincloth. I hope that would not be considered racially insensitive.
Hey, good to see you Guy – are you gonna join us at some of these things?
“Hey, good to see you Guy – are you gonna join us at some of these things?”…….. Hmmmmm
Caveat Fawkes: Do not fall into the white man trap.
See spiral of life Fawkes.
The Hopi elders have long passed down their myths and prophecies from generation to generation via oral tradition. Additional details are extrapolated from their many ancient rock pictographs and tablets.
One such prophecy reveals: “When the Blue Star Kachina makes its appearance in the heavens, the Fifth World will emerge”.
Look for the Blue Star Kachina.
So have the Chippewa
As long as you don’t wear underwear underneath the loin cloth.
Guy — I see what you are saying. But I was making a reference to the history of the Boston Tea Party and the problems of trying to tie it into a contemporary political movement breaking out now. The second part goes to the colonial language of that very movement itself. In short, don’t be a hipster and wear a headdress!
Now, please describe your affinity for Guy Fawkes when he was a reactionary Catholic.
From the native appropriations blog:
“The explanation is long, and the practice of playing Indian goes all the way back to the *Boston Tea Party*, where the colonists dressed up as Indians without the benefit of PBR or ironic mustaches.
According to Philip Deloria, who literally wrote the book on Playing Indian, the colonists used the racial drag as a way to assert their individuality and differentiate themselves from the British, creating a new “American” identity in the process:
“There is this simultaneous embracing of Indians, which allows Americans to make claims of American identity. But at the same time, in order to make a real physical nation, they have to dispossess those Indians””
“But at the same time, in order to make a real physical nation, they have to dispossess those Indians”
And you wonder why we took up arms at Wounded Knee in 1973. Scared the crap out of the English dominated government so much they brought up bogus charges against Leonard Peltier and threw him in prison. Even though the bullets did not match the gun.
The white man may like to “play Indian” but as you can see when we had real Indian leaders like Russell Means and Dennis Banks (not the jackass Bellecourt brothers), we don’t play.
If you want a real bad ass radical experience and to reacquaint yourself with a culture that you continue to deny that is within your own lineage, take a trip to the Rez at sundown. Trust me, you’ll never use the term “playing Indian” ever again.
“take a trip to the Rez at sundown. Trust me, you’ll never use the term “playing Indian” ever again”………. Hmmmm
Would I get some peyote if I show up?
Stan, the first hit is on me.
How do I get there?
Gave me directions GF
Because the name Russell Means was already taken. Ever piss off a bad ass Lakota Sioux? Trust me, that’s a path that even the bravest Indian does not want to tread. So I chose to exploit a white English guy instead.
Now, young Gabriel. Explain to me your ignorance or outright denial of your own indigenous roots. Did the influence of the Spainards eradicate any notion of a culture and language that your people once had?
“Did the influence of the Spainards eradicate any notion of a culture and language that your people once had?”……… Hmmmm
That is always my point, why Latinos promote the Spanish language over the English language if Spanish was learned by burning their tongue with hot iron.
Why now, I must learn Spanish same way as they did.
Come on, both of you know that our love of Guy Fawkes masks is because we all loved V For Vendetta!
“Now, young Gabriel. Explain to me your ignorance or outright denial of your own indigenous roots. Did the influence of the Spainards eradicate any notion of a culture and language that your people once had?”
Ha! I just read this. I do not deny my indigenous roots at all.
I also don’t go by the handle of a reactionary European Catholic whose monarchical politics and tactics hold no inspirational historical value for me whatsoever.
Where the hell have you been, young Gabriel? I was getting worried about you.
Gabriel, come up to L.A., or Irvine, make some actual friendships with the non-Mexican progressive Americans. (as well with Mexican-Americans). You can participate in a dozen ways. I look forward to hearing your shouts and maybe even cracking a smile while you do so. There is so much raw love floating around at these protests that it will surely leave an impression on you. I will give you a car ride and buy you a “street dog”.
“elderly, gullible reactionaries” — why does this strike me as a plausible CBS sitcom?
History well-told, Vern. Pearls cast, notwithstanding some swinish readers.
“There is so much raw love floating around at these protests that it will surely leave an impression on you.”
Yeah – there was a topless chic with a fake mustache amongst the “occupy” rabble in NYC – I AM impressed.
If a topless chick with a mustache can’t impress you …nothing can.
Conditions Unsanitary From Occupy Wall Street Protests
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/10/07/owners-zuccotti-park-says-conditions-unsanitary-from-wall-street-protests/#ixzz1a7jzoRFa
Quelqu’un a laissé la porte ouverte – les porcs sont lâches.
Yeah … I really trust that source. Come back with something from a real news outlet.
Brookfield Office properties, the firm that owns the central location for the Occupy Wall Street protests, has released a statement claiming that they have not been able to properly maintain the park and that sanitation has become a growing concern.
“Because many of the protestors refuse to cooperate by adhering to the [park] rules, the park has not been cleaned since Friday, September 16th, and as a result, sanitary conditions have reached unacceptable levels,” said in a written statement by the property management firm.
Well in that case I hope my peeps do something about it … and I bet you they will, if they haven’t already.
FFC Vern – I have seen the aftermath of liberal/progressive protests – your people are pigs and you know it.
At least my people kept their shit clean at Wounded Knee in 1973
Fox News = unsanitary conditions, years running.
First OC action:
TOMORROW (Saturday) at Noon, ORANGE CIRCLE!
Sign-making party at the Santora Building, Santa Ana Artists Village, TONIGHT! (Friday)
Your characterization of the Boston Tea Party as a reaction to “corporate tax breaks” is off the mark. The Boston Tea Parrty was a reaction to taxation without representation.
Granted it was a very complicated situation. These corporate tax breaks were given without any representation from the colonists, and other taxes were levied on the colonists without representation – to pay off what Britain considered owed to them for “defending” us in the French-Indian War, and to pay off their damn governors which we didn’t want, and later to pay for all the tea we threw into the harbor…
But if the proximate cause – the specific grievance leading to the Tea Party – has to be encapsulated into a short phrase, the way I did it is the most accurate – tax breaks for the British East India Company giving them an unfair advantage over our domestic tea producers *cough*smugglers*cough*
And I love that that doesn’t jibe with the Teabagger mythology. It was a big corporation, over-friendly with an unresponsive government, getting unfair tax breaks, that sent us off the deep end.
“It was a big corporation, over-friendly with an unresponsive government, getting unfair tax breaks, that sent us off the deep end.”……. Hmmmm
Nice story with predictable ending.
What ever sent us off the deep end it was a catalytic force which eventually created, USA, the most human political system which gets periodically of a tangent and has to be put on its course.
The bad guys in the government usually destroy their symbols like Nazi burned Reich stat to crack down on communists so did neocons and “scull and boners” the World Trade Center to eliminate constitution.
These mini occupations are too a catalytic force which will eventually restore the constitutional principles because there is nothing better out there.
However, it will be very chaotic and confusing before such force will emerge.
Caveat Vern: Do not solicit the beer in these mini occupations, you may get more you can handle.
Still off the mark Vern. The tea was taxed before it arrived in the colonies.
BEITCO priced their tea accordingly – the original Tea Partiers refused to pay for the taxed tea and tossed it into Boston Harbor.
Taxation without representation Vern – not corporate tax breaks.
Well, junior, you’re just wrong. I’m telling the story the way it happened.
Parliament’s Tea Act of 1773 slashed the tax that the BEITCO was paying, with the intent to flood the colonies with cheap British tea and undercut the colonial merchants (smugglers.) You could f-ng look it up.
The Dartmouth was one of FOUR of the first shiploads of artificially cheap British tea. The other three colonial locations managed to prevent the ships from unloading, but loyal Mass. Governor Hutchinson refused to let the Dartmouth go back to Britain with the tea. He wasn’t counting on the troublemakers of Boston. (Troublemakers like you and I, I’d like to think – or would you have been a Tory?)
Are you just telling the story the way you want it to be, or are you relying on some revisionist source? I suspect the former. If it’s the latter, then please identify the revisionist source – it’s always good to be able to rip out lies by their roots!
The Tea Act was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain. Its principal overt objective was to reduce the massive surplus of tea held by the financially troubled British East India Company in its London warehouses. A related objective was to undercut the price of tea smuggled into Britain’s North American colonies. This was supposed to convince the colonists to purchase Company tea on which the Townshend duties were paid, thus implicitly agreeing to accept Parliament’s right of taxation.
Taxation without representation was the issue for the colonists – not corporate tax breaks – otherwise they would have been happy to accept cheap tea.
Your first paragraph is correct. Where did you get it from?
In your second paragraph you cleverly swerve, and talk about the colonists in general. I was talking about the Boston Tea Party specifically.
What, you think the colonists paid taxes to the British on their smuggled tea? No, the BIETCO had such a sweet deal they were undercutting contraband! Hence your last sentence is just wrong.
A version (OK A sliver) of the East Indian Tea Company exisits a few miles North of OC in Pomona.
The Yamamatamoyo tea company off the 57 is a spin off of one of the oldest companies in the world.
Cool guys. GOOD employers, one of the managers was a leader in a roundtable we had before we sold the company and talk about progressive conservatisism!!!! Not in the political sense but in the human sense, they still use 150 old baggers and mark the product with bluetube lasers built in the shadow of Anaheim stadium. They chose that solution because “it let us keep the tradition and quality of the old equipment, but the lasers kept a dozen guys working nearby”.
Cool info. Although when I saw the phrase “150 old baggers” I thought you were talking about a Bachmann rally.
Fiala is correct. These mini occupations will work. because it is all that we have. Try taking a musket to a Black Hawk helicopter.
It worked in the entire communist block.
In 1990 people just started gathering on daily bases in center of Prague and were holding keys in hand a ringing with them signaling time to go.
The government walk away. There was no one there to pickup the phone in presidential office.
It will take time before the people start ridiculing these youngsters and calling them lazy bums…… maybe they never will stop this time but it is extremely useful to gather like this.
It took the God 7 days to create earth so gave us more.
I pray that we have no Kent State Shootings, May 4, 1970, in Santa Ana because Police Chief Walters is trigger happy lunatic and the council is all brutal Mexican like Fullerton Ramos.
Pedroza is already warning us of the horseback Santa Ana Police. Here Horsy Horsy.
Taxation without representation was the issue for the colonists, including the Boston Tea Partiers – not corporate tax breaks – otherwise they would have been happy to accept cheap tea.
Yeah, sure. accept it as fish food.
The specific grievance leading to the original Boston Tea Party – encapsulated into a short phrase – has to be “Taxation Without Representation.”
Let’s just agree on this – REPRESENTATION is key.
“He wasn’t counting on the troublemakers of Boston. (Troublemakers like you and I, I’d like to think – or would you have been a Tory?)”
My French-Canadian ancestors defended the walled city of Quebec from the invading attack of Benedict Arnold and his American troops.
AHA! Say no more. I would have kept quiet about that too.
Benedict Arnold side by side with the great Ethan Allen, if I’m remembering that particular adventure correctly!
Fine article. Am new to this site, and don’t know how you manage to post comments, even the antagonistic ones, that are either “cleaned up”, or otherwise seem generally reasonable and responsible. Is no one under 30 allowed, maybe?
Hanrod,
I guess that you did not see Vern’s “Fuck Sept. 11th” article – nothing reasonable or responsible about that one.
http://www.orangejuiceblog.com/2011/09/fk-september-11/
Yeah, I was kind of chuckling too – hanrod obviously hasn’t seen any Fiala or Quinn comments yet, or even junior when he gets pissed. No, friend, we do not “clean things up” here.
“hardon obviously hasn’t seen any Fiala or Quinn”……… Hmmmmm
Hardon you have not seen Vern Nelson’s Dream Act.
You must be over 18+60 to click on my site above and even then you will be shocked to see what he dreams about democratic party’s mascot.
That’s Fiala btw.
I wish I could share your dreams!
“This was a protest against unfair TAX BREAKS given to a giant corporation called The British East India Company by our oppressors in the distant British parliament, tax breaks that were driving our local small businesses into bankruptcy.”
COOL!
Also, the use of public plazas was a big part of the Revolutionaries organization strategy back then as I recall.
Actually the protest was against a small tax that was left on the tea sold in America. The revenue went to pay for governors and officials loyal to the Crown – and not the assemblies of the colonies.
Other offended parties included local tea merchants who had not been chosen to distribute the tea, and other merchants who had ties to tea smugglers whose tea price was actually undercut by the tea act.
In any case the issue of corporate subsidy whether the British East India Co. or our own Redevelopment parasites is still a cautionary tale: mercantilism doesn’t work.