PhillyDeals: Occupy challenges the Center City establishment

Some look out, some look in.

In New York, Occupy Wall Street has held arresting protests: a solemn Iraq War veterans' march, a pirate-themed Bank of America Corp. raid.

In California, Occupy Oakland declared a general strike that slowed U.S. imports from China last week.

Meanwhile, Occupy Philadelphia, the tent village of agitators, underemployed workers, and homeless people that fills Dilworth Plaza next to City Hall, has targeted the Center City establishment.

The group poses an irritant to Paul Levy's Center City District plan for a new $50 million plaza on its campsite. It could delay this month's planned start date, or force a public confrontation, if the critics of capitalism and their civil-libertarian lawyers don't make way for building-trades construction crews soon.

In trying to justify their camp on public property, the protesters questioned the use of scarce taxpayer millions for that project: "We believe that it is morally bankrupt to consider spending $50 million on the redevelopment of Dilworth Plaza." (Levy says his group spent three years winning support for the plan.)

Then on Wednesday, 10 Occupy Philly protesters got themselves arrested at Comcast Corp.'s high-rise headquarters, two blocks west of their camp.

The protesters were not campaigning against TV programming quality, or high profit margins, or the millions of dollars paid Comcast chief executive officer Brian L. Roberts (a friend of President Obama's) or top lobbyist David L. Cohen (an Obama fund-raiser.)

Instead, they told reporters they were protesting Comcast and its landlord's use of government funding and a construction tax abatement.

"These subsidies and tax cuts could save the AdultBasic program that Gov. Corbett has gutted, which provided over 45,000 low-income Pennsylvanians with health insurance," Occupy Philly said in a statement.

These two Occupy Philly complaints attack the long efforts of the city's political and business establishment, via tax breaks, incentives, special-service districts, and publicly funded projects, to improve and expand Center City, in the face of Philadelphia's high base tax rates and competition from other cities and the suburbs.

Over the last 20 years, those efforts have succeeded in persuading more and more people to live downtown and in adjacent neighborhoods. They have failed to boost Center City office employment, which has remained static for the last two decades, along with rents and commercial office space. New jobs at Comcast and other growing companies made up for lost jobs at departing bank and industrial headquarters. Center City kept still, as the suburbs kept growing.

By that measure, Philadelphia is not declining like some of the Midwest and Sun Belt cities, but it also isn't expanding to keep up with its neighbors and competitors - Boston, New York, Washington.

If the Philly establishment has not done enough to make the city grow as a business center, the Occupiers say it has done way too much in favoring big business over other sectors.

Does their criticism matter? A Quinnipiac University poll last week said a large minority of Americans support Occupy, but a larger group dislikes it.

Occupy has energized the left wing. But who respects it? Who's afraid of it? Not Congress, not Harrisburg, not even City Council:

Republicans in Congress last week blocked Obama's latest attempt to boost income taxes on millionaires - by less than 1 percent - to fund highway work and other job-creating stimulus.

Elected Pennsylvania officials such as Corbett keep telling us they would rather see public services and public projects turned over to private management and funded by higher tolls and fees. Not expanded at the expense of taxpayers. Even millionaire taxpayers.

On Thursday, Philadelphia City Council unanimously approved the latest Bill Green-Maria Quiñones Sánchez business-tax bill - after they agreed to cut overall business-tax payments 20 percent. (Their previous proposal, to shift the tax burden from small city firms to big out-of-town companies that do business here, went nowhere in the face of business opposition.)

It's going to take a lot more than a partial shutdown of the Oakland port, New York street theater, or a handful of protesters arrested at Comcast headquarters to change where our leaders are taking us.