Ordinary citizens’ voices go unheard

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Updated: May 9, 2012 10:01AM

Big business in this state has a tin ear.

It doesn’t hear the voices of the people politicians love to call “ordinary citizens” or “working families.” Nor is business listening to the concerns of the Occupy Chicago folks on Jackson Street.

And so down in Springfield, the still highly profitable CME Group, which operates the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade, is still threatening to leave the state if it doesn’t get a massive tax break. And Sears, headquartered in Hoffman Estates, is threatening to move as well.

It’s not that these businesses don’t have some legitimate issues worthy of discussion. They do. But they have no particular sensibility — at least, none they’ve effectively expressed — about the financial calamities facing the cloutless multitudes in Illinois. Those so-called ordinary folks who stay awake at night panicked about whether they can pay their bills, keep their house out of foreclosure, feed their kids or find a doctor when they don’t have health insurance.

Those working families, on a smaller scale, stare down the same kind of problems plaguing the state of Illinois with its $5 billion backlog of unpaid bills, mounting interest payments, pension liabilities and revenue streams that cannot keep pace with debt.

How do state lawmakers give big breaks to major corporations when individuals and small businesses are gasping for air?

The argument, launched by the CME Group, Sears and, earlier, Caterpillar, is that if big business picks up its marbles and moves its game out of state, Illinois will lose both tax revenue and the jobs that big business provides. Not to mention the massive political contributions. As the Chicago News Cooperative reported in June, the CME Group Inc., as one example, donated $1.27 million “to Illinois politicians in the last two decades, with almost $500,000” arriving in the prior 18 months.

That included a check to the tune of $200,000 to Rahm Emanuel’s mayoral campaign, $150,000 to Speaker Mike Madigan’s Democratic Party, and $90,000 toward Gov. Pat Quinn’s election.

As persuasive as such contributions can be, there appears to be a growing concern among some in Springfield about how many more corporations, in behalf of their shareholders, are going to knock on the General Assembly’s door demanding they also be given tax breaks to stay.

“We’re lurching from crisis to crisis,” said Lawrence Msall, head of the Civic Federation, a nonpartisan tax watchddog organization. “Everyone who comes in to look for relief is treated as a one-off as opposed to finding a comprehensive solution.”

Quinn’s proposal to hike the Earned Income Credit, a way to spread tax relief to working class families, has invited its own controversy.

Can a state so deeply in the red afford to do that either?

The Legislature will reconvene on Nov. 29 to take up these issues and, perhaps, consider once more the expansion of gambling in Illinois, including a Chicago casino.

“I could not tell you today what will happen,” said House Minority Leader Tom Cross on Friday.

The situation is simply too fluid.

No one wants to see the CME or Sears go.

And yet, as the gap widens every day between the haves and the have-nots in this state, where is the big, well-funded lobby for the homeowner whose taxes remain high even though his property values have tanked? Or for the unemployed hourly worker, or the family on a fixed income?

They’re the state’s “shareholders.”

Who’s got their back?