A few of the protesters at Jackson's "Tea Party" yesterday. Photo by Adam Lynch
The local version of nationally coordinated Republican tea parties Wednesday offered plenty of red meat—from cries against "socialism" to a speech using racial integration as an example of how federal meddling didn't work.
National lobbyist think tanks like Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks.org organized the coordinated events, but sold the effort as a grassroots movement. About 2,300 people, organized through e-mail, Fox News broadcasts and Republican pundits like Michelle Malkin, gathered on the steps of the state capitol to criticize the administration of President Barack Obama and the majority Democratic Congress, from its recently passed stimulus package to goals for banning semi-automatic assault weapons. Many members of the crowd—which likely contained fewer than 20 African Americans, not including government staffers and members of the media—carried signs arguing against what they saw as the federal government's creeping attempts at "socialism."
One speaker, business owner Doug Wilson, repeatedly called for less government, and referenced government meddling failures with school integration.
"When we integrated the schools 30 years ago, the reason was a balanced and fair education system, yet 25 or 30 years later the public schools in Jackson are over 90 percent black, and we have a huge private school system that flourishes in this area and it's well over 90 percent white. The unintended consequences are that we now have a dual system that is anything but fair and balanced," Wilson said.
Wilson later denied that he was calling integration a mistake.
"All I was speaking to was the unintended consequences, in that it destroyed neighborhood schools, it took away parental involvement in public schools, and it lessened the sense of community. And as a person affected by it, I didn't like it worth a damn," Wilson said. He then responded to the question, "Was there a better way to handle segregation" with a frank "I don't know."
"My point," he insisted, "was that government acts and does certain things, and it has unintended consequences. It was done with a good heart. It was done with pure motives, but the end result was bad. We're still separate."
One black security person watching Wilson's speech from a distance later said he agreed that the dual system remained, but attributed the stubborn apartheid condition of Jackson's schools not to the government's meddling, but "because white people are p*ssies" who are afraid to go to school with blacks.
"No offense to you," he added hastily.
Rankin resident Jeannie Hughes, who held a sign saying "Socialism is not America," complained that the Obama administration was trying to increase her taxes to finance public-funded health care. "America is about looking after yourself," she said. "It's not about taking our money and paying for everybody's doctor bills."
Obama has revealed support for expanding healthcare for more children, both during his presidential campaign and in frequent media sessions. When asked to speak on that goal, Hughes said "children are supposed to be the responsibility of their parents, not taxpayers."
By far, the most popular tea-bag diatribe dealt with tax increases. Participants carried signs reading "No taxation without representation," and "Tax me, and I'll remember you on Election Day."
The Clarion-Ledger reported that Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant hailed former president and canonized Republican Ronald Reagan for getting the country out of debt by cutting taxes on businesses—though national debt under Republican presidents has tended to explode, while shrinking under Democratic presidents, according to congressional reports.
None of eight sources picked in the crowd could actually claim how much of a tax increase their accountant had warned them to expect next year or this year, however.
One participant, Brandon resident Sara Smith—who held a sign reading "Hands off my income"—could only say she "had been told" that her taxes were going up. She would not cite the source of the information.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed by Congress and signed by Obama, includes initiatives like the Making Work Pay Tax Credit, which is heralded as the broadest, speediest tax cut in American history by some think tanks. The tax credit is available to all employees (who are not claimed as a dependent by another taxpayer) earning up to $95,000, and to married couples earning up to $190,000.
Bob McIntyre, director of fair taxation think tank Citizens for Tax Justice, in Washington, D.C., said tea-party participants should take a second look at their refund checks this year before screaming against Obama's tax increases.
"Most of the people in the crowd with you, except for some millionaires, are seeing bigger refunds under the Obama plan," McIntyre said. "Cutting taxes for the rich is silly. Cutting taxes for low to mid-level income people is a stimulus because they'll actually spend the money, while the wealthy people probably won't. It was really a tax cut for that crowd, because I doubt there were many hedge fund managers in it."
A majority of Americans appear to agree with McIntyre, according to an April CBS News/New York Times poll. Almost three-quarters of Americans think it is a good idea to raise taxes on people making more than $250,000 per year, according to the poll, which also reveals that a majority of Americans—56 percent—say the president's overall budget plan "sets the right priorities for the country." Thirty-two percent say it doesn't, while 12 percent didn't know. The same poll shows more Americans—37 percent—believe Obama's budgetary spending proposals will help the economy, as opposed to the 23 percent who believe it will hurt the economy. Twenty-nine percent didn't know.
New York Times polls got little fanfare at this rally, however. A large percentage of sources queried by the Jackson Free Press were generally paranoid of media outside Fox News. Almost half of 12 participants addressed demanded to see media credentials before talking. Another five would-be sources turned away the reporter outright. One woman, possibly in her 70s, dismissed all inquiries saying, "You're a reporter, huh? Well, that classifies you with lawyers."
The word "freedom" remained the linchpin of many speeches, and the word was embellished on more than a dozen heartily bouncing signs. When asked what freedoms the democratically controlled government was trying to snatch, Ocean Springs resident Chuck Morris said, "Just about all of them. There's more every day."
Morris used the perceived attack on the Second Amendment as an example, and referred to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's recent announcement that the administration would seek to make permanent a ban on assault weapons that expired in 2004 during the Bush administration. Obama, who hails from a state containing one of the nation's higher incidences of gun deaths, said during his campaign that he would like to re-institute the ban on the sale of assault weapons.
The NRA declared soon after Holder's announcement that it would fight the ban.
Morris said the ban on a citizen's right to buy a weapon that can unload multiple rounds into your average squirrel is the beginning of a longer process of chipping away at gun ownership in general. "If they can take away one gun in that category, then they can take away all guns in that category. That's the way these things happen," said Morris.
Piecemeal chipping away at a constitutional right is familiar territory to Mississippi conservatives, who have restricted abortions in the state with waiting periods, mandatory pre-abortion fetal sonograms and anti-abortion pre-procedure mis-education (such as the disproved theory that abortion triggers breast cancer) to the point where only one OB-GYN clinic remains in the state.
Speaker Roy Nicholson, for example, used the event to hotly speak out against legal abortion. "We murder millions of babies every year. Abortion is not choice. It's murder," Nicholson said.
Nicholson continued to stir the crowd with a rant that seemed downright revolutionary at times: "How will we look in the eyes of our children and grandchildren if we don't seize this moment and allow tyranny to reign? Can we face them? When we stand before God in Heaven …when we meet the patriots of old, who died for us, what will we tell them if we don't stand up (to the Democratic government's policies)? So Mississippi, what is your answer to these in government who think they are our masters? Will we surrender to them … or stop them from stealing our country? I know many of you, like myself, are especially angry, about the course toward our oppressors' socialistic state of tyranny that we're rushing down," Nicholson said in a speech frequently punctuated by shrieks from the crowd.
Nicholson stopped short of burning politicians in effigy, however, demanding the audience "give them a pink slip," with the reminder that "our enslavement is not inevitable."
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