Historic Rational for Tea Parties

Regardless of what the press tells you the modern Tea Party movement is historic and a true grass roots movement. It is not a Republican or Democrat movement. The Republicans are trying to ride on the coattails of the movement, and the Democrats are trying to paint it as a right wing movement. Most of the people I've talked to at Tea Parties are independent, third party, or disenchanted members of the Democans or Republicrats.

With the advance of the internet, the ruling elite no longer have control of the media. They no longer control the message the people receive, what news they can be exposed to, or even dictate what stories can be important. I'll bet you've heard of "ClimateGate", NBC, CBS, ABC, etc have all avoided the story as if it didn't exist, the ruling elite are trying to say it’s all just a tempest in a tea pot. The reality it exposes the ruling elite, lying, suppressing information, attacking dissenters, in order to use “global warming” as a reasoning for taking more power from the people and giving it to themselves..

Blogs, e-mail, twitter, and other internet communications, now make the ability of the ruling elite to control the message almost impossible, not that they aren't trying. They are doing everything they can to keep the people from exercising their first amendment rights. In St. Louis the ruling elite have gone so far as to have their armed enforcement people arrest people for passing out pamphlets to his neighbors publicly opposing the actions of the ruling elite. This is not as isolated a case as the ruling elite would have you believe, and is reminiscent of the actions of the British to colonials like Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet "Common Sense", which criticized and exposed the actions of the ruling elite.

In the late 18th century it was the Committees of Correspondence that performed the function that bloggers and tea party organizers perform today. At the time news was generally disseminated in hand-written letters that were carried aboard ships or by couriers on horseback. Those means were employed by the critics of British imperial policy in America to spread their interpretations of current events. Then as now the ruling elite hated not having control of all the information people were exposed.

Colonial assemblies formed special committees of correspondence as did various lesser arms of local government. These committees articulated the feelings and desires of the local body wrote them down and distributed their view to other similar groups. Many committee members were active in the secret Sons of Liberty organizations. Like our initial modern tea parties they were formed for a specific action and disbanded. Soon they became more formal and permanent.

The first formal committee of correspondence was established in Boston in 1764 and was charged with rallying opposition to the recently enacted Currency Act and the unpopular reforms imposed on the customs service. Now we are seeing more formal organization of modern Tea Parties. Liberals in both the government and the press are using this to say that the tea parties are not grass root organizations, which is like saying that Sam Adams and Thomas Paine didn’t represent the people of the colonies, and were a front organization for the rich.

The next year in response to the Stamp Act Crisis, New York took the initiative by summoning its neighbors to join in common resistance to the new taxes. Massachusetts correspondents responded by urging other colonies to send delegates to the Stamp Act Congress that fall. Sam Adams organized a committee to protest in 1772, in response to the decision to have England, not the colonial assembly, pay the salaries of the royal governor and judges, thus making them accountable to England not the colonists. In the following months, more than 100 other committees were formed in the towns and villages of Massachusetts.

These committees eventually prepared the way for and organized the First Continental Congress, which convened in the fall of 1774. The Second Continental Congress seized upon this successful idea and created its own correspondence committee to convey the American interpretation of events to foreign powers.

The committees of correspondence were formed, not just to provide the people with an alternative viewpoint of the ruling elite, but to shine light on the actions and danger to liberty that the ruling elite posed at the time. Just as in the late 18th century it was the power to tax that the committees of correspondence were attacking, today the modern Tea Party movement is attacking the ruling elite abusing their power to tax. It was the committee of correspondence which eventually lead to the removal of the ruling elite who were abusing the power to tax and the formation of a government found on the basic principles described in the Declaration of Independence. It is because our current government is acting similar to colonial England, with onerous taxes, regulations, and limiting liberty and freedom, that the people of this country are again forming “committees of correspondence” in the modern form of blogs, and web pages, and Tea Parties.