http://www.suntimes.com/news/steinberg/8899083-452/occupy-chicago-joins-the-party.htmlOccupy Chicago joins the partyBy NEIL STEINBERG nsteinberg@suntimes.com November 17, 2011 6:22PM
<snip>I agree with those goals. I’m in the 99 percent. Where they lose me is the “and we’ll stand in the street until change happens” part. Because the Republicans, having gone through their own experiment in social protest, when it was warmer, are now hitching up their foaming horses to the civic wagon and getting ready to climb into the driver’s seat, give the reins a snap, and drive the country off in the opposite direction.
Leaving La Salle Street, I stopped in at the CVS at Washington and Wells to warm up. Customers were waiting at four automatic “Express Checkout” units, scanning and bagging their own gum and shampoo, under the watchful eye of a single CVS employee, while three cash registers sat unused. That means two clerks who once rang up sales now aren’t needed, part of the huge economic forces — aided by government bumbling, business scheming and public complicity — that are grinding regular people to powder.
How is that going to be chanted away? How long must I stand in the street before a white-collar worker in India stops being eager to earn $6,000 a year?
But I hadn’t seen the day’s highlight. Off to the Thompson Center at the appointed hour. A good turnout, heavy on labor types, nearly filling the little plaza, a few speeches, then hundreds marched up La Salle Street, across Wacker and blocking the La Salle Street Bridge at rush hour as some sat down and 46 were ticketed by police as the sun set, one day closer to President Mitt Romney.