Keep Your British Hands Out of My Earl Grey

Contrary to popular belief, the original Tea Party was actually more about opposing tax cuts rather than wanting them. Parliament levied tax cuts in favor of the stuggling East India Company while passing them on to Britons and colonists.

Boston Tea Party - December 16, 1773

• After a rival English company challenged its monopoly in the late 17th century,
  the two companies were merged in 1708 to form the United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies,
  commonly styled as the Honourable East India Company (HEIC).
  
  
• HEIC was the largest corporation of its day.
  
  
• It traded mainly in cotton, silk, indigo dye, saltpetre, tea, and opium.
  
  
• HEIC also came to rule large areas of India, even exercising military power.
  
  
• In England, Parliament gave the East India Company a monopoly on the importation of tea in 1698. When tea became popular in the British colonies, Parliament sought to eliminate foreign competition by passing an act in 1721 that required colonists to import their tea only from Great Britain.


• Britons and British Americans could buy smuggled Dutch tea at much cheaper prices.
  
  
• In 1767, to help HEIC compete with smuggled Dutch tea,
  Parliament passed the Indemnity Act, which lowered the tax on tea consumed in Great Britain, and gave HEIC a refund of the 25% duty on tea that was re-exported to the colonies.
  
  
• To help offset this loss of government revenue,
  Parliament also passed the Townshend Revenue Act of 1767, which levied new taxes, including one on tea, in the colonies.
  
  
• Instead of solving the smuggling problem, however, the Townshend duties renewed a controversy about Parliament's right to tax the colonies.
  
  
• Constitutionally, British subjects could not be taxed without the consent of their elected representatives. In Great Britain, this meant that taxes could only
  be levied by Parliament. Colonists, however, did not elect members of Parliament. Colonists argued they could only be taxed by their own colonial assemblies.
  
  
• Colonists again responded with protests and boycotts. Merchants organized a non-importation agreement, and many colonists pledged to abstain from drinking British tea.
  
  
• Parliament finally responded to the protests by repealing the Townshend taxes in 1770, except for the tea duty.
  
  
• Parliament passed a new act in 1772 that reduced this refund, effectively leaving a 10% duty on tea imported into Britain. The act also restored the tea taxes within Britain,
  and left in place the three pence Townshend duty in the colonies. With this new tax burden driving up the price of British tea, sales plummeted. The company continued to import tea into Great Britain, however, amassing a huge surplus of product that no one would buy. For these and other reasons, by late 1772 the East India Company, one of Britain's most important commercial institutions, was in a serious financial crisis.
  
  
• The North ministry's solution was the Tea Act of 1773.
  
  
• This act restored HEIC's full refund on the duty for importing tea into Britain, and also permitted the company to export tea to the colonies on its own account. This would allow the company to reduce costs by eliminating the middlemen who bought the tea at wholesale auctions in London.
  
  
• Even with the Townshend duty in effect, the Tea Act would allow the East India Company to sell tea more cheaply than before, undercutting the prices offered by to the boycotters by smugglers.


• More importantly, the tax collected from the Townshend duty was used to pay the salaries of some colonial governors and judges (not elected assemblies).
  
  
• When the tea ship Dartmouth arrived in the Boston Harbor, Whig leader Samuel Adams called for a mass meeting. Thousands of people arrived, so many that the meeting was moved to the larger Old South Meeting House. British law required the Dartmouth to unload and pay the duties within twenty days or customs officials could confiscate the cargo.
  The mass meeting passed a resolution, introduced by Adams and based on a similar set of resolutions promulgated earlier in Philadelphia, urging the captain of the Dartmouth to send the ship back without paying the import duty. Meanwhile, the meeting assigned twenty-five men to watch the ship and prevent the tea from being unloaded.
  
  
• Adams lost control of the meeting, and people poured out of the Old South Meeting House and headed to Boston Harbor. That evening, a group of 30 to 130 men, some of them thinly disguised as Mohawk Indians, boarded the three vessels and, over the course of three hours, dumped all 342 chests of tea into the water.
  
  
• HEIC went on to lead Britian into the Opium Wars in China from 1839 to 1860.
  
  
• In 1857, the British government nationalized HEIC, due to the Indian Mutiny. It lost all of its Indian property, administrative rights, and armed forces.

I'm not sure that they understand the whole story.

He gets it...


But I think the Founding Fathers would have a bone to pick with both parties for repeating the mistakes of British Parliament.