AROUND THE U.S. - Chicago, the Occupiers

"Message from streets: Occupiers have a point" Editorial, Chicago Sun-Times 10/28/2011

One sign read, “Capitalism will never work.”

Well, no, we wouldn’t agree with that. Nobody has ever come up with an economic system that works better.

A second sign read, “TIF money for schools, not bathroom.”

Well, yes, we might agree with that. The sign referred to a particular boondoggle rumored in the news last week in which Chicago taxpayer money — taken from something called a Tax Increment Financing district — might be used to pay for somebody’s swank bathroom.

Both signs were being waved about at Occupy Chicago on Friday morning, on Jackson Boulevard in the shadow of the Board of Trade, and they allowed for dramatically different views of what this grassroots movement is all about.

The first sign gave critics an excuse to dismiss Occupy Chicago as the irrelevant acting out of lefty fringe groups.

The second sign, however, no doubt led observers to ask whether something more substantial and mainstream was going on here. Anarchists don’t protest TIFs.

“We have everybody under one umbrella, but there are only a few things we probably agree on,” said one Occupier, Grace Lloyd, 54, who was sweeping the sidewalk, keeping the protest tidy. “We all think the rich are getting richer and the rest of us don’t have a fair chance.”

Lloyd is on to something. Occupy Chicago and the rest of the Occupy movements are on to something.

As the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported last week, America’s income today is held in ever fewer hands, which cannot possibly be the proper outcome of a free enterprise system that truly rewards hard work and talent.

“For the 1 percent of the population with the highest income, average real after-tax household income grew by 275 percent between 1979 and 2007,” the CBO found, while it grew just 18 percent for the bottom 20 percent of the income scale.

Other studies show that just 1 percent of Americans control 42 percent of all the wealth. And social mobility — the ability to work one’s way up into that top 1 percent — is at a 70-year low.

Capitalism is supposed to work better than that.

The Occupy movement is a message from the streets. For all the Abbie Hoffman wannabes, it is nonetheless a sincere cry of pain that we hope will be heard by the congressional “supercommittee” this fall as it seeks to reduce the nation’s budget deficit. The committee should not achieve that end solely at the expense of the middle class and the poor, asking nothing more from the wealthy, Wall Street and major corporations.

When Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin visited the Chicago Sun-Times last week, we asked him for his take on Occupy Chi­cago. He said it was a tough movement to size up, being largely leaderless and unfocused, but he credited the protesters for being “right” on two things: the troubling growth of income disparity in the United States and the disproportionate influence of “major financial institutions” in Washington.

Any solution, Durbin suggested, must begin with an acknowledgement that the problem is real.

And, we would add, to say the problem is real hardly makes one an anti-capitalist radical.

A lot of folks, out on Jackson Boulevard and across the country, just want a better chance to earn a piece of the American Dream.