State street is reflected in the windows of the Walgreen's store at State and Randolph streets. (Nancy Stone, Chicago Tribune)

First they took away our jobs.

Now they’re taking away their taxes.

Don’t look now, but while our corporate-owned media have us worried about congressional expense accounts and city workers getting free parking, big business is busy nailing the coffin lid on this nation’s middle class.

Deerfield-based Walgreen, the nation’s largest drugstore chain, is talking about moving its headquarters to Switzerland. Pfizer Inc. the nation’s second-largest drugmaker, is negotiating a deal that would land it in Great Britain.

Major Illinois stalwarts like insurance brokerage Aon, Chicago Bridge & Iron Co. and several others already have vamoosed.

The pace is quickening. The newest maneuver is called an inversion. U.S. corporations merge into foreign companies so that more than 20 percent of the expanded firm’s stock is owned overseas. That allows them to relocate headquarters elsewhere for tax purposes, though for practical purposes they can still run things from here and take advantage of U.S. goodies.

Goodies? You know: property rights, enforceable contracts, top-notch health care and educational institutions for executives and their families and, most important, continued unlimited access to America’s commercial marketplace.

The other factor speeding the Great Vamoose is the rise of activist investors. Billionaires like Carl Icahn and Barry Rosenstein (the guy pushing Walgreen toward Switzerland) say corporate boards are slacking off in their obeisance to the One Great Commandment: Maximize shareholder value. They’ve been buying big chunks of stock in underperforming corporations, pushing their way onto governing boards and demanding action to benefit stockholders in the short run. (They rarely stay for the long haul.)

Meantime, the billionaires and their tax-exempt front organizations wag their fingers at us voters and at Congress for maintaining one of the highest corporate income tax rates among developed nations. There’s a grain of truth to this. Our top rate of 35 percent is higher than rates levied in the tax havens.

Not mentioned is that our effective tax rate the rate corporations actually pay after taking advantage of loopholes in our tax code is actually less than most of our competitors’ effective rates.

The beauty of moving their letterheads overseas is that lower corporate taxes are good for business and really good for shareholders. Some analysts say Pfizer could save $1 billion a year. Think of the dividend. The rest of us schlubs can make up the difference. Or make do with fewer government services, per the balanced budget plan being pushed by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis.

Don’t expect Washington to do anything. A bipartisan consensus has evolved over the past 20 years that holds what’s good for Big Business is good for America. Anyone who opposes free trade or globalization of labor markets, no matter how one-sided the deal, is derided as a flat-Earth protectionist.

So powerful is the consensus reinforced daily by corporate-owned media that even we baby boomers think it’s reasonable, or at least inevitable, that communist China, the godless enemy of our Cold War youth, be handed our jobs, our technology, our industrial plants.

Meantime, outrage is being focused on those congressional expense accounts, on free parking for city workers and, most egregious of all, lavish public employee pensions. That’s what’s forcing Illinois to contemplate a tax increase, right?

Public pension abuses do need to stop. But with your typical state retiree with 27 years of service collecting less than $37,000 a year, I’ll save some outrage for Mr. Rosenstein and his $10 billion investment firm.

If he succeeds in moving Walgreen to England, I may just move my prescriptions to CVS. Until they vamoose. After all, who’s going to stop them?

John McCarron teaches, consults and writes on urban affairs.