Twelve protestors arrested in November 2011 for occupying a Center City Wells Fargo branch have been found not guilty by a Philadelphia jury. Defendants claimed they were staging a “Citizens’ Foreclosure” on the bank for engaging in discriminatory lending and sapping millions of dollars from the School District of Philadelphia. After viewing video of the protest and hearing defendants’ testimony, a jury found all 12 defendants not guilty on charges of conspiracy and trespassing. One of the only Occupy-related trials in the country to be argued before a jury, today also marked the first civil disobedience Free Speech case in recent Philadelphia memory. Defendants included a non-profit housing counselor, a Wells Fargo mortgage holder, a local teacher, an activist who participated in Civil Rights Era struggles, and Temple and Penn graduate students. During testimony, they pointed to the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission’s report on Wells Fargo’s prejudicial lending practices and investigations by the Pennsylvania State Auditor General’s Office to draw connections between Wells Fargo’s profiteering and the defunding of our communities and school district. The group was defended by seven local lawyers working pro bono: Leo Mulvihill, Jr., Marni Snyder, Paul Hetznecker, Mike Lee, Michael Coard, Larry Krasner, and Jon Feinberg. “Today the people of Philadelphia defended the First Amendment,” said Defense Attorney Marni Snyder, one of seven lawyers who volunteered to represent the protestors pro-bono. “We sent a clear message to the District Attorney’s Office: prosecute the real criminals at Wells Fargo; these twelve defendants stand on the side of justice.”
RELATED: It’s not often that you see an entire putative political philosophy dropped from a high building until it splatters on the concrete and feral dogs and cats come to lick up that which remains, only to stagger off gagging and puking because not even they can stomach it any more. For going on 30 years now, but especially ever since That Person got himself elected twice, it has been the stated Republican economic faith that the reason that job growth is sluggish is because the Job Creators are 
“uncertain” about what That Person is up to there in the White House and that if we just knuckled some poor people and some old people a little, the job creators would give the country many good jobs at very good wages, even though there was absolutely no force strong enough any more to make them do it.
The path charted by United Technologies, an industrial giant based in Hartford that is one of 30 companies in the Dow, underscores why corporate profits and share prices continue to rise in a lackluster economy and a stagnant job market. Simply put, United Technologies does not need as many workers as it once did to churn out higher sales and profits. “Right now, C.E.O.’s are saying, ‘I don’t really need to hire because of the productivity gains of the last few years,'” said Robert E. Moritz, chairman of the accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers. At 218,300 employees, United Technologies’ work force is virtually unchanged from seven years ago, even though annual revenue soared to $57.7 billion in 2012 from $42.7 billion in 2005.
Simply put, the job creators are now not creating jobs. They have no intention of creating jobs now or in the future. They don’t have to create jobs and there’s nobody out there to make them do it. They simply will reduce the number of jobs they have now and grind the remaining employees, most of whom have no recourse any more, either to the government or to organized labor. The job creators thereupon will get rich not creating jobs, and they will continue to get rich not creating jobs, because creating jobs costs them money. Any politician who says anything else is lying to you. MORE