Tea Time

As millions of Americans take to the streets to protest the socialist coup that has gripped our nation, it seems like a good time to reflect:

In 1768, a John Hancock, a Son of Liberty and shipping merchant harassed by the British for importing/smuggling such things as low priced tea, started a colonial boycott of the East India Trading Company (you remember them, Elihu Yale's opium trading front).

Over the next few years, the company's tea sales to the colonies dried up. To protect the company and keep money flowing, the Bank of England financed a plan to help create a tea monopoly in America, by exempting the company from paying British customs duties, this lowered the price of British tea to the colonies, while leaving the American tax in place to raise cash.

The term "cash" is pidgin-English (the choppy language of the England-India-China opium trade) for forms of monetary exchange between plundered opium producers in India, the English shippers pushing the drugs on China, and Chinese merchants laundering the money into tea for sale around the world. The "business" produced huge inflows to the crown without significant expenditure of British capital. Taxes and customs duties levied on the tea were the British government's cut. The British East India Trading Company became fabulously wealthy, and created the first modern government corporatocracy.

The opium/heroin trade and eventually led to the Opium Wars that plundered China, built modern Shanghai, and financed the fortunes of little banks like HSBC (Hong Kong Shanghai Bank Corp), Barclays, the British Bank of the Middle East, etc.

The colonists saw through the plan, and British East India Company ships were immediately turned away from New York and Philadelphia. When three boats docked in Boston, locals refused to pay the British duties on the consigned (monopolized) tea. On December 16, 1773, the Sons of Liberty dressed as (American) Indians, supported by around 7,000 locals, boarded British East India Company ships docked in Boston Harbor and threw a large consignment of tea overboard. The British responded by closing the port of Boston. The rest is history.