Ordinary citizens’ voices go unheard

CAROL MARIN

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.