About 2,500 people gathered at the intersection of Montgomery and Louisiana boulevards on Wednesday to protest the deficit the government has created by bailing out the banking industry.
They brought tea bags, homemade signs, American flags and cans of pork and beans to the metaphorical tea party - one of many hosted in cities across the country.
The protests were modeled after the 1773 Boston Tea Party, where a group of colonists defied the government, boarded ships carrying taxed tea to Britain and dumped the shipments into Boston Harbor.
CNM student Jordan Anderson was among the mass of protesters screaming at passing cars about government spending. He clutched a piece of cardboard that read "Feed the need."
Anderson said he was participating in the protest because he was worried the country was slowly going down the tubes.
"All of our money is being put into banks that are trying to corrupt us," Anderson said. "Basically, our country is being controlled by powers that are higher than our government, and it has been happening for years and years, and we're just trying to raise awareness and let people know what's really going on and hopefully try and fight it."
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Tina Carson, one of the Albuquerque Tea Party organizers, said she began working with the group about five weeks ago, and within that time period, the movement has grown from a handful of concerned citizens to about 2,000 eager participants.
"This is not paid for by anyone. This is 100 percent grassroots," Carson said. "Every walk of life. We have students. We have professors. We have doctors, lawyers, the unemployed, the elderly - everybody. We have Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians. People who are sick of seeing their money wasted - they're all uniting, and we're scaring a lot of parties, and I think that's why the rumors are going around about us."
Richard Becker, West Coast coordinator for the A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) coalition, said his organization advocates and participates in anti-war and anti-racism protests, but he disapproves of the tea party protests. He said they are inadvertently misleading people to believe that maintaining deregulation is beneficial.
"These tea parties are really selling people a false and phony sell of goods," Becker said. "One of the leaders of this movement is a man by the name of Phil Gramm who is a former senator from the state of Texas. Gramm, for his entire career in the Senate, was really an instrument, an agent of the big banks, the big financial interests, and he wrote legislation for them that got them out from under virtually all regulations."
Eric McInteer, a member of the UNM College Republicans, said he and members of his group joined the protest to support free markets and reject the government's leaning toward socialism.
McInteer said that although the U.S. government isn't entirely to blame for the economic crisis, it has worsened the situation through frivolous spending and debt-digging.
The government's reckless spending needs to stop and major adjustments need to be made to the country's tax code, or the crisis will intensify, he said.
"There are companies that are shipping hundreds of thousands of jobs overseas because our taxes on businesses are so high," McInteer said. "If we want those jobs to come here, (we have to) cut the corporate tax rate. There are so many common-sense things you can do that would help."
Becker said government intervention is unavoidable. More of the public focus should be placed on whether such intervention will "benefit the already super-rich who have made these wild bets in the big casinos on Wall Street" or benefit the people who are suffering because of their actions, he said.
"It's complete hypocrisy to talk about, 'We don't need government intervention,'" Becker said. "These big banks and insurance companies would have collapsed months ago without the trillions of dollars of our money that they've received.. All society relies on the intervention of the government. The question is not whether or not there's a need for government intervention. The only real question is, Who will that government intervention benefit?"
Carson said she's assisting the Albuquerque Tea Party not because of politics but for the sake of her five children and their futures. She doesn't want her children to become students burdened with debt and stuck looking for work in a crumbling economy, she said.
"The money that was wasted under the Bush administration and the massive spending that is happening under the Obama administration - it's not a party issue to me; it's an American issue," Carson said. "We're destroying our country. We're destroying the future of all the students at UNM. How are you going to get out and get jobs when people who have 20 years of experience can't find them?"
