Tax Lawyer's Blog

USA Today reports that,

A nationwide protest in 500 cities and towns is scheduled for Wednesday, the deadline for filing federal income tax returns.

The goal is to pressure Congress and states to reject government spending as a way out of the recession and build an anti-spending coalition around regular taxpayers.

“The tea parties are a means, not an end,” says Mark Meckler of Grass Valley, Calif., a lawyer

Why Call Them Tea Parties?

In 1773 about 200 American colonists disguised as Indians descended upon the three East India Tea Company ships and dumped their entire cargos of tea into the Boston Harbor.

This was later called The Boston Tea Party.

In the American colonies the actions were widely applauded, but the English were not amused.

In March 1774 Parliament passed the Intolerable Acts which, among other things, closed the Port of Boston.

This, most historians agree, was the triggering point of the American Revolution.

How Did the Anti-Spending, Anti-Tax Tea Party Idea Start?

According to the USA Today article, here’s how the Tea Party idea began,

The inspiration for the tea parties was an on-air [rebuke] on Feb. 19 by Rick Santelli of CNBC, who complained that Obama’s $75 billion bailout of mortgage defaulters “rewarded bad behavior.”

As traders at the Chicago Board of Trade behind him cheered, Santelli said it was time for a new Tea Party, referring to the tax protest in 1773 by colonialists who dumped chests of English tea into Boston Harbor.

The remarks spread quickly through e-mail and websites like Facebook and YouTube, which has recorded more than a million views of the Santelli video clip. Organized parties soon popped up in Atlanta, Denver and St. Louis. Some were no more than a few dozen people in business suits. Others drew thousands.

Organizers say they were not pleased by former president George W. Bush’s performance on spending, either, but what moved them from yelling at the TV to rallying in the streets was Obama’s proposed $3.6 trillion budget, a package the Congressional Budget Office says would produce record breaking deficits of $9.3 trillion over 10 years.

Absence of Media Coverage

I hate to sound paranoid, but it’s hard not to notice the absence of mainstream media attention to these unique (conservatives rarely take to the streets in protest) gatherings. 

Had similar numbers of left wing activists gathered in various cities throughout America for any liberal cause, history tells us they would have gotten “gavel to gavel” coverage?

Do you doubt that had these groups been left wing activists organizing by the thousands to protest, say, the Bush tax cuts, or the Iraq war, or the passage of Proposition 8, the protests would have been on the front page of the New York Times and led the nightly news coverage on all three major networks?

Listen to this from Newsbusters, a conservative media watch group committed to identification and weeding out of liberal media bias:

Liberal double standards ahoy! The New York Times news pages have virtually ignored the grass-roots “tea party” protests held in various towns across the country opposing Obama’s big-spending and supporting free markets. The paper has run not a single story on a protest, even when one happened in the paper’s own backyard of Ridgefield, Conn.

By contrast, a much smaller “bus tour” protest organized by a left-wing group of the homes of AIG executives received prominent and sympathetic coverage in the paper’s National section, a protest where the media (50) outnumbered the protestors (40).

On Tuesday, Times editorial writer Lawrence Downes took the plunge and covered a genuine “tea party” in Northport, N.Y., a hamlet on Long Island Sound, complete with costumes and wooden crates for the dumping.

The only question is: Why did he bother?

From the start of his signed editorial, “Don’t Tread on Them,” it’s clear Downes considers the movement a patchwork of right-wing kooks, snottily caricaturizing the protestors as silly, lazy, and greedy (“mostly, it was about tax cuts”). The text box: “Long Island patriots strike a blow against tyranny and whatever.”

The Protestors Have a Legitimate Point and Should be Heard

Whether you agree with the Tea Party protestors or not, they have a legitimate gripe and should be taken seriously.

In less than 3 months, Mr. Obama and the Democrat controlled congress have hemorrhaged taxpayers’ money at a rate unsurpassed in American history. Now, in order to pay for it, they want to increase taxes on a certain class of citizens, the so-called “rich”, most of whom happen to be loyal supporters of the opposition party.

Liberals complained that the media failed to do its job in the lead up to the Iraq war. They said that it didn’t properly vet statements made by the Bush administration that alleged that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction and was in some way tied to the 9/11 attacks.

Very well, but those who complained about the negligence of the media back then shouldn’t object now when conservatives want the media to challenge the Obama administration’s profligate (some say reckless) spending, the burden of which will have to be borne by our children and grandchildren.

It seems that the mainstream media is taking statements from the Obama administration at face value and is refusing to vet those statements.

In short, the media is failing Americans now in much the same way liberals believed that it failed them in the lead up to the Iraq war.

If media negligence (cowardice?) was wrong when Bush was running the show, it’s also wrong now when Obama is running the show.

If we’re going to speak truth to power, we ought to speak it to all power, not just the power we didn’t vote for.

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