What exactly happened this past tax day? People on the right yelled for change, people on the left yelled for patience, and everyone got fucked. Just a few months ago during the presidential campaigns just the reversal of slogans and attacks were thrown around with the left clamoring for change and the right preaching stay the course. Irony passed over the day in its usual silent style except for the few cynics that noted the hypocrisy on both sides but no one seems to like them or their opinions and the chuckles of amusement faded before they even happened. As one of those cynics I watched in bemusement as my conservative parents rabble roused at their home in New York to the tune of Fox News and read with gusto the blog rants and comments on CNN and MSNBC youtube clips. It seems everyone got it wrong on Tax Day and it’s a shame.

Where did the tea parties come from? Most of the Fox set gave credit to Rick Santelli of CNBC for starting the Tax Day tea party movement and to them it really did start with Rick Santelli. His claim was that on July 4th he was going to dump thousands of stocks that were going to be worth nothing into Lake Eerie in Chicago due to unreasonable tax burdens and government regulations from Obama’s administration including the new budget, the ARRA, and other recent regulations that have passed in the past few months. In reality a lot of the tea party organizers were not following Santelli’s lead and the movement had started about a year before then. Fox News didn’t notice since they were supporters of McCain or Guiliani or Huckabee that the annivcersary of the Boston Tea Party in 2008 was the single biggest fundraising day of Libertarian/Republican candidate Ron Paul and that his campaign resurrected the idea of “no taxation without representation”. To the right, which inevitably took over the tea party idea as their own, Tax Day Tea Parties were another chance to gripe about Obama’s election, the chaos in their own party, and how much they don’t like paying taxes.

What was the real message of the Tax Day Tea Parties? To true Libertarians, many of which organised the tea parties across the nation, the point of the demonstrations was simply “no taxation without representation.” I believe the offshoot of Ron Paul’s Revolution Campaign, the Campaign for Liberty, stated most simply that Americans are no longer in control of the government that we pay to rule over us. The people’s power has been subjugated by lobbyists and special interest groups that are primarily responsible for electing public officials and passing legistlation. These interest groups and lobbyists are not guilty of belonging to one side or the other, they are only guilty of creating laws that interfere with the way people live their lives, either directly such as anti-Abortion activists that bring religion into law by banning abortions or indirectly like creating subsidies to big businesses like the current paper industry scandal. But beyond the special interests and lobbyists, the greedy politicians that have been elected continued to expand the power of the government including in recent history Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, George W Bush, and now Barrack Obama. These presidents have taken the power from the people with limitless beauracracy which is controlled by appointed officials and with each new government seat has the ability to swing wildly to the left or right as subsequent presidents step into power and replace the bureau heads with their own choices.

Why didn’t the message get across? The Tax Day Tea Parties were destroyed by the media on both sides. In Fox’s charge to get more people to the rallies they destroyed the original message and lionized the events as solely conservative when originally they were third party. In response the liberal and even centrist media sources responded with vicious attacks going so far as to label the parties as Fox-sponsored, right wing militant, and anti-Obama. Both sides are equally guilty of killing the message and it wouldn’t be right to say one side was more to blame or the other but such things happen and will happen more frequently as the political parties become further radicallized. Although Fox’s coverage did an excellent job covering the spectrum of the ideas that the tea parties ended up supporting, their very presence created a cloud of mistrust from everyone on the left   further resulting in putting off a lot of the original tea partiers from the Ron Paul Campaign, yes those same people that created the events in the first place. The coverage meanwhile on MSNBC and CNN in particular were disturbingly partisan as some anchors showed their true colours as opinion overran their objective reporting. Fox at least tried not to label the as conservative to no avail but CNN and MSNBC went so far as to claim the events were Fox-sponsored which was unfounded and outrageous to anyone who knew anything about the work put in to organizing the events. It was generally a case of Fox stampeding around like a bull in a china shop and CNN and MSNBC putting their heads where their asses are. Thank you objective journalism.

So what can we hope for? Not much. It seems that the liberals which are in charge of the whole of Congress and the White House have plenty on their plates with a failing national economy, deteriorating global markets, increased hostilities in Pakistan, Iran, and Somalia, and a list of reasons why the ARRA and increasing the national debt won’t help for long. The conservatives on the other hand were so beaten back that they’re hopelessly in the minority and can’t do anything except squabble and kvetch about Obama’s administration. They could use this time to reorganise and modernise their party politics but if it took twenty years for the Tory party in England to come up with anything who knows how long it will take for the Republicans here. It isn’t completely unreasonable to see the conservatives swing wildly right wing in which case we’d be in for a real tough time in the future, but it’s equally easy to foresee a change toward a more centrist or Libertarian stance in the conservatives if they can learn their lessons from the Bush administration. But that’s a huge IF and one that I am not abundantly optimistic about either.

For now I’ll continue to push for a true third party in the United States and a return to politics of the people. Shorter term limits for all elected positions, banning campaign contributions from third parties, creating accountability in the government, a peaceful foreign policy, and a true free market system instead of this false-free market pro-big business system that we’ve had for the past forty years.