In my posting of ‘In War or Peace Viruses Rule’ here on 4/17/2009 I mentioned the two movies that incidentally have a great bearing on what is going on today. V for Vendetta was the one about how a government in England deliberately created a country wide atmosphere of fear for political aims, just as our most recent administration did here. The other I mentioned was the third in the Pirates of the Caribbean series in which the world wide and unethically produced power of the East India Company was taken for granted.
When I was a schoolboy every new student was placed in one of four houses: Raleigh, Grenville, Howard or Drake. Each of these sea-dogs would be considered as pirates in the history books of Spain. To us, in the days when the British Empire was one third of the world, they were symbols of patriotism. It was Drake’s drum at Plymouth Hoe that people heard beating during World War II when all those men were remembered, and missed. All were doing their daring deeds in the reign of Elizabeth I.
She encouraged her pirates. The seed for the whole current corporate influence catastrophe was planted by Queen Elizabeth herself. At that time it was obvious to all the European nations that Spain was making out like a bandit with the wealth it was stealing from the New World by robbery and the exploitation of the Indian nations as slave workers.
Countries like Holland and France put together business consortiums that financed ships, or small fleets to obtain some of this wealth. Queen Elizabeth, who was a real shrewdy in politics and business encouraged her favourite pirate, Sir Francis Drake to see what he could steal from the Spaniards. She was the largest shareholder in the group that sent Drake off pirating in the little fleet led by the Golden Hind.
Drake and other minor shareholders made a 5000% return on their investments. Elizabeth and several noblemen made much more. Elizabeth had fixed matters so that the most any shareholder could lose was what they invested. The providers of the shareholders, who produced the food for the expeditions and the wood and ammunition for the ships would not be paid if the expedition was not successful. Elizabeth had invented the first powerful limited liability company.
After making her fortune on Drake's expeditions, Elizabeth made plans for a more permanent system than gifted and audacious privateers. She authorized the formation of a corporation run by 218 London merchants and noblemen. It was called the East India Company,(EIC) and began on December 31, 1600.
By the 1760s, the East India Company's was a world wide organization with great power and influence. Its major competitors were the Dutch trading companies, and to keep up with them it went deep into debt and was very nearly bankrupt in 1770. Corporations now and here follow the strategy that worked then for the EIC. They lobbied for laws that would make it easy for them to put their small-business competitors out of business. And here is where the American colonies come into the picture.
In the 1770’s most of the members of the British government and its royalty (including king George) were stockholders in the East India Company, so it was easy to get laws passed in its interests. Halliburton, Enron, oil companies, credit card companies and Wall Street firms experienced the same lack of difficulty here recently, under a different George.
The American colonial entrepreneurs, ran their own small ships or little fleets to bring tea and other goods directly into America without routing them through Britain or through the EIC. Avoiding the toll gate was not allowed. Between 1681 and 1773, a series of laws were passed granting the EIC a monopoly on tea sold in the American colonies and exempting the EIC, but not the colonies, from tea taxes. So, the EIC was able to undercut the prices of the local importers and the small tea houses in every town in America.
Unlike the apathy and ignorance shown today by the general public, the colonists understood what was happening and decided not to put up with the injustice of being merely a profit center for what was in effect a multinational corporation.
A pamphlet was circulated through the colonies called The Alarm and signed by someone who called himself "Rusticus." This is what it said about the EIC, it looks as though Rusticus was of German origin because so many nouns are capitalized:
"Their Conduct in Asia, for some Years past, has given simple Proof, how little they regard the Laws of Nations, the Rights, Liberties, or Lives of Men. They have levied War, excited Rebellions, dethroned lawful Princes, and sacrificed Millions for the Sake of Gain. The Revenues of Mighty Kingdoms have entered their Coffers. And these not being sufficient to glut their Avarice, they have, by the most unparalleled Barbarities, Extortions, and Monopolies, stripped the miserable Inhabitants of their Property, and reduced whole Provinces to Indigence and Ruin. Fifteen hundred Thousands, it is said, perished by Famine in one Year, not because the Earth denied its Fruits; but [because] this Company and their Servants engulfed all the Necessaries of Life, and set them at so high a Price that the poor could not purchase them."
I hope that all sounds familiar. It’s what happens when any corporation goes multinational and can exploit cheap labour outside the country of its origin. It avoids the problems of paying decent wages to people in its country of origin because corporations can be multinational while unions are national.
Details of what happened later are in the little book Retrospect of the Boston Tea Party with a Memoir of George R.T. Hewes, a Survivor of the Little Band of Patriots Who Drowned the Tea in Boston Harbor in 1773, Hewes was a fisherman.
Schoolchildren today are usually taught that the American Revolution was a rebellion against "taxation without representation." That’s a nice phrase to remember, but you might consider what taxation is like nowadays WITH what is called representation. What actually led to the revolution was rage against the EIC that, by the 1760s, dominated trade from China to India to the Caribbean, and controlled nearly all commerce to and from North America, with subsidies and special dispensation from the British crown.
The Crown itself was having financial problems because it owed money to the central Bank of England, just as the current government here owes billions to the central bank, the Federal Reserve. Both banks are privately owned banks that print money at near zero cost and lend it at high interest to the people foolish enough to allow that system. Remember that both the central bank system and the multinational corporation danger came from Merry Old Englande in the first place. The Americans favored mom and pop stores that served their communities and were trusted by them.
The Boston Tea Party resembled in many ways the growing modern-day protests against multi- and trans-national corporations and small town efforts to protect themselves from huge chain-store retailers or factory farms. Like the people who realize that WalMart can come to town, put all the small people out of business and then go away leaving a ghost town behind them with no tax base, the Tea Party folks participants thought of themselves as protesters against the actions of the multinational East India Company.
What resulted was the revolt that ended in the creation of the United States of America. We have details of it because of the memoir of George Hewes, the fisherman, who I must say writes a great deal better than another currently famous fisherman from Alaska.
To put it succinctly, they disguised their faces, assembled in crowds in the streets, and then deliberately broke the law by destroying the property of the transnational corporation that was destroying local economies, and that they were smart enough to recognize as the real enemy. This couple of thousand angry Americans started a revolution with an act of rebellion later called the Boston Tea Party.
They had to take bold, decisive action that was against the laws that the corporation had managed to have passed. Just like the laws that benefit the actions of the banks and credit card companies today, except that the current population just keep taking whatever the financiers dish out, cower in terror of the black suits and their lawyers and policemen, and wouldn’t dream of directly destroying the bank buildings and property of their oppressors like their ancestors did.
Hewes notes: "The [East India] Company received permission to transport tea, free of all duty, from Great Britain to America..." allowing it to wipe out New England-based tea wholesalers and mom-and-pop stores and take over the tea business in all of America. "Hence," he wrote, "it was no longer the small vessels of private merchants, who went to vend tea for their own account in the ports of the colonies, but, on the contrary, ships of an enormous burthen, that transported immense quantities of this commodity ... The colonies were now arrived at the decisive moment when they must cast the dye, and determine their course ... "
He described the events of the day of the last straw. On that cold November day in 1773 two thousand activists gathered in a meeting hall in a coastal town. The corporation had finally gone too far, and the two thousand people there were considering what to do about it.
What is happening here now was happening there then. Unemployment was exploding and the economic crisis was deepening; corporate crime, governmental corruption financed by corporate cash, and a culture of corporate greed were blamed. The group called for a vote on opposing the landing of the tea. The vote was unanimously in favor. "Why do we wait?" demanded George Hewes. "The more we delay, the more strength is acquired" by the company and its puppets in the government. "Now is the time to prove our courage," he said. and then someone in the gallery disguised as an Indian raised a warcry. Immediately everyone in the meeting rushed down to Griffin's wharf where the first tax free shipment of tea was at anchor in EIC ships.
History was made that night as Hewes dressed as an Indian, blackened his face with coal dust, and joined crowds of other men in smashing the chests of tea and throwing them into the harbor. The 342 chests of tea, totaling more than 90,000 pounds of it, were thrown overboard that night. The EIC valued their cargo at 9,659 Pounds Sterling which is just over $1 million in today’s currency.
When they finally heard about it, the British Parliament (no radio or TV remember) passed the Boston Port Act stating that the port of Boston would be closed until the citizens of Boston reimbursed the East India Company for the tea they had destroyed. The colonists refused.
On April 19, 1775 year and a half later, the colonists would again state their defiance of the East India Company and Great Britain by taking on British troops in an armed conflict at Lexington and Concord. These were the ‘shots heard round the world.’
That war was triggered by a transnational corporation and its government patrons trying to deny American colonists a fair and competitive local marketplace, what is called nowadays a level playing field. It ended with independence for the colonies.
That of course was not the end of it. The later bankers and the corporations used their standard tool of inciting warfare between nations to ensure great profits. The iron and steel business combined with the railways and big oil to create huge corporations. The law was fixed in favour of granting corporations the rights of individuals. The bankers of Europe finally broke through the opposition of wise American presidents and in 1913, by chicanery installed a central bank, the Federal Reserve to ensure that the country was always in debt.
The infamous trickery that founded the Federal Reserve and the making and financing of constant wars has been the result of the freedom given to those who regard greed as a virtue.
Those colonists in 1773 were preparing to throw off the yoke of the corporation that for almost 200 years had controlled nearly every aspect of their lives through its economic and political power. They were planning to physically destroy the goods of the world's largest multinational corporation, intimidate its employees, and face down the guns of the government that supported it. And they did it against impossible odds, and incidentally made coffee an American favourite drink.
The descendants of these courageous people who succeeded against every possible obstacle are showing their displeasure at the current government and corporate piracy of billions and billions of dollars by sending tea bags to frighten the financiers and their minions in Washington. And that is considered a strong gesture! Imagine how cowed the multi-millionaires and their well armed bodyguards must be when an envelope is opened and a tea bag falls out.
Remember it was not the Puritans but the EIC that founded America. The Puritans came to America on ships owned by the EIC. The first colony in North America, at Jamestown, in the Commonwealth of Virginia, stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi. It was owned by EIC. The commonwealth was named after the "Virgin Queen," Elizabeth, who had chartered the corporation. When I look at its map I see hundreds of names familiar to me from my life in England.
If you are a history buff you should read how the EIC destroyed the wealth and prosperity of India using the tactics used by corporations today. The men who ran the company like Clive of India, and their lackeys are visible as statues in England today. The people who fought them have no statues.
Now, when you watch Pirates of the Caribbean part three you will see what the Pirate Lords were up against. The huge map in Lord Becket’s office was of the whole world, not just a part of it. The Pirate Lords who went against the enormous resources of the EIC were like the outnumbered, out-financed, outgunned minority here that woke up and initiated the Boston Tea Party. It’s the same old story of the thing you are up against today, and will always be here as long as unethical greedheads are honoured just because of their wealth. As Warren Buffet the ace of investors said, “The only thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history.” And whose fault is that? The mirror’s?
