TREBEK: “The most annoying people in the world”.

BERG: “People who pedantically fuss over fairly meaningless, and usually wrong and out of context, ephemera in history to try to discredit their opponents among people who don’t pay much attention to the subject but like to think they do”.

TREBEK:  “Form of a question, Mr. Berg…”

BERG: “Who are who pedantically fuss over fairly meaningless, and usually wrong and out of context, ephemera in history to try to discredit their opponents among people who don’t pay much attention to the subject but like to think they do”

TREBEK: Correct, and you control the board.

I woke up in a cold sweat after dreaming the above exchange, and couldn’t get back to sleep.

So I fired up the computer, and – this is a completely bizarre coincidence – found  this piece in the blog PoliticsUSA, a liberal blog:

Progressive political commentator Thom Hartmann has something to say about the real history of the Boston Tea Party. Using a first-hand account written by one of the participants, he shows that it was not against government regulation; it was not against the size of government. It was not even really at its core about government at all, except to the extent that a government supported a huge mega-corporation that had a stranglehold on America’s economy. As Thom Hartmann says, the Boston Tea Party was “A revolt against corporate power and corporate tax cuts.”

It’s a good thing for Thom Hartman that there is liberal talk radio. Otherwise, he’d be, I dunno, a barrista or something.  A nutty barrista with a very selective sense of history.

Hartman – and the “account” from “one of the participants” – are right to a point; the British East India Company was a corporation.  And it definitely was powerful.

But not a corporation in the sense that we have today.  Mostly.

The BEIC was given a government charter – a legal monopoly – on trade between India and the rest of the British Empire.  It had its own special dispensations to defend that monopoly – like its own frigging Navy and Army.  Even Microsoft and Apple don’t have that kind of government-granted power (more or less).

So the BEIC was a corporation, indeed – at a time when corporations were very, very rare things that were created (if memory serves) by act of Parliament.  It served as a pseudo-government in large parts of India – and, indeed, several of the American colonies had been started by similar “corporations”.  With Armies.  And Navies.  And the power to levy taxes.

And it’s irrelevant – because the Tea Party was a reaction to Parliament’s “Tea Act“, which the BEIC passed on to the colonists in more or less the same way that Whole Foods passes on sales tax to Tom Hartman’s listeners.

There’s a reason that “discussion” with the Mos Eisly Cantina that is the AM950 audience is so futile; it’s that so much of what they “know” is crap.