Clergy member holds up Wells Fargo share outside the bank's shareholder meeting (via PICO National Network)

Hundreds of protesters, including religious leaders, union workers, and other 99 Percent Movement activists, gathered outside Wells Fargo’s shareholder meeting in San Francisco today, protesting the bank’s fraudulent foreclosure practices. Wells Fargo, the nation’s largest mortgage servicer, has a well-documented history of using fraudulent practices like robo-signing, and even more came to light last week when an insider account detailed the bank’s foreclosure unit as operating “exactly like an assembly line.”

Ahead of the protests, a Wells Fargo spokesperson told San Francisco’s ABC news affiliate that the bank has paid taxes and is a “responsible corporate citizen” that “makes an effort to keep people in their homes“:

Wells Fargo spokesman Ruben Pulido released a statement early this morning saying the bank is a “responsible corporate citizen” and paid $6 billion in taxes for 2011.

“Wells Fargo makes efforts to keep people in their homes,” Pulido said. “Over the past year, less than 2 percent of owner-occupied loans in our servicing portfolio have resulted in foreclosures.”

Wells Fargo was among 30 corporations that paid nothing in federal income taxes from 2008-2010 — its tax rate over that time period, in fact, was -1.4 percent. Adding 2011 to that time period just barely inches the bank’s rate into the positive.

The idea that Wells Fargo makes every attempt to keep homeowners in their homes, meanwhile, is laughable. The bank has been among the worst perpetrators of practices like robo-signing and dual tracking — the process of simultaneously offering homeowners loan modifications while also pushing them toward foreclosure. It has wrongly foreclosed on homes it didn’t own, and its victims may include thousands of members of the American military.

The initial protests drew roughly 500 people, according to early reports from a local NBC affiliate. Early marches through the city shut down numerous San Francisco streets and remained peaceful, according to NBC, though there have been arrests reported on Twitter. Later, there were more than a thousand protesters, according to other estimates, and clergy members and protesters who had purchased shares in Wells Fargo attempted to enter the meeting. Here are some pictures of the protest:

This isn’t the first time religious leaders or Occupiers have targeted Wells at its San Francisco headquarters. Local churches moved $10 million from the bank in February to protest its foreclosure practices, and they held Ash Wednesday services outside Wells Fargo asking it to repent for its wrongful practices.

Occupy protesters chanting “we pay taxes and you should too” interrupted General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt today during a speech in Detroit before the SAE World Congress. Other protesters in the hall chanted “we are the 99 percent” before being escorted off the premises by police.

“We pay 29 per cent,” Immelt responded. A GE spokesman later told CBS that “the 29 percent tax rate was what the company payed globally in 2011. In the U.S., the rate was 25 percent.”

However, that doesn’t jive with what Citizens for Tax Justice found in a recent report. CTJ calculated that GE paid an 11.3 percent tax rate in 2011, which is actually a huge increase over previous years. In 2010, for instance, GE paid -76.6 percent. In 2009, it was -52.9 percent. So in each of those years, the government subsidized the hugely profitable mega-corporation:

GE’s low taxes stem mainly from its finance arm, GE Capital, which makes big profits, but generates huge tax “losses” that reduce GE’s taxable income from its other operations. Over the past decade, GE has paid virtually nothing in federal income taxes, paying a paltry 2.3% tax rate on its $83 billion in pretax U.S. profits.

26 major corporations, GE included, had no federal income tax liability for the period between 2008 and 2011 (thought they might have owed something in an individual year), while they made billions in profits. Occupy protesters plan to protest GE’s annual shareholders’ meeting in Detroit tomorrow.

Our guest blogger is Scott Nova, Executive Director of the Worker Rights Consortium.

Apple’s response to its current public relations crisis regarding its labor force in China has been to promise big improvements in working conditions at its supplier factories. Unfortunately, there is good reason to doubt the sincerity of those pronouncements.

After all, Apple has been promising to end labor rights violations at these factories for six years, but has neither delivered on these pledges nor done anything to hold the suppliers accountable.

Consider the example of excessive overtime, one of the glaring problems at Foxconn, Apple’s largest supplier. Workers at Foxconn’s plants in China have frequently been compelled to work upwards of 90 extra hours a month, sometimes far more, while the legal maximum in China is 36. Independent investigators have been reporting these abuses for years and auditors paid by Apple itself have just confirmed that massive overtime violations are still ongoing at Foxconn.

After these violations were first exposed in 2006, Apple issued a public report pledging corrective action. “Employees worked longer hours than permitted by our Code of Conduct,” Apple admitted, but “[Foxconn] has enacted a policy change to enforce the weekly overtime limits…and a management system has been implemented to track compliance… Supervisors must receive approval from upper level management for any deviation.”

Apple added, “We are committed to ensuring compliance with our Code of Conduct and will complete audits of all final assembly suppliers in 2006… In cases where a supplier’s efforts in this area do not meet our expectations, their contracts will be terminated.”

That certainly sounded like a strong stand by Apple: any supplier that did not meet the company’s labor standards would be terminated.

But as it turns out, Foxconn did not meet Apple’s standards. Instead, Foxconn continued to violate overtime laws, systematically, for the next six years (and counting). Since there are hundreds of thousands of workers making Apple products for Foxconn, the individual violations of Chinese overtime law that have been committed in the assembly of iPods, iPhones, and iPads now number in the millions.

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Social Security is going broke even faster than expected, according to a report from the program’s actuaries released yesterday. At least, that’s the narrative the national media presented to the American public.

Headlines from across the country — like the following from the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times — were quick to paint a grim picture of the program’s future finances, noting that “painful” changes would need to be made to ensure its solvency beyond 2033:

The headlines and stories that follow create the illusion that Social Security is fast going broke, even though it is fully funded for another two decades and could pay 75 percent of its benefits thereafter (imagine the shock the media would display, meanwhile, if transportation, food stamps, or other programs had two decades of guaranteed funding).

They also ignore an easy way to ensure the program’s long-term solvency without large changes or cuts to benefits. Payroll taxes that finance Social Security are only collected on income up to a certain level ($110,100 in 2012), creating a regressive system that puts an undue burden on low- and middle-income workers. Eliminating that cap would allow Social Security to pay full benefits for the next 75 years, according to a Congressional Research Service report.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) introduced legislation that would raise the cap last year, but it has been ignored by Republicans and the media, who instead continue to feed the narrative that Social Security needs vast changes — including potential benefit cuts — to shore up its future. Americans of all political stripes oppose cuts to Social Security benefits, but as the Columbia Journalism Review noted earlier this month, media coverage has perpetuated the belief — particularly among young Americans — that Social Security is broken.

“The elite press repeatedly quotes the commentary of the devoted opponents of social insurance retirement programs,” Yale professor emeritus Theodore Marmor told CJR. “But they appear unaware of how they are supporting a strategic attack on social insurance that has been going on for years.”

According to the constant refrain from Republicans in Congress, the reason that tax rates can’t be raised on anyone, even the already super-wealthy, is because doing so will hurt economic growth. However, two prominent economists — Nobel Prize winner Peter Diamond and John Bates Clark award winner Emmanuel Saez — write in today’s Wall Street Journal that the conservative theory is basically bunk:

In the postwar U.S., higher top tax rates tend to go with higher economic growth — not lower. Indeed, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, GDP annual growth per capita (to adjust for population growth) averaged 1.68% between 1980 and 2010 when top tax rates were relatively low, while growth averaged 2.23% between 1950 and 1980 when top tax rates were at or above 70%.

Neither does international evidence support a case for lower growth from higher top taxes. There is no clear correlation between economic growth since the 1970s and top tax-rate cuts across Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries.

Saez and Diamond also note that growth can be boosted if the revenue raised from higher taxes gets spend on infrastructure or other public investments. “The neglect of public investment over the last few decades suggests that the returns could be quite high,” they wrote.

As this chart shows, job growth has been weakest when the top tax rate was at its lowest:

In fact, job growth has been stronger when taxes are higher overall:

Of course, none of this should be construed as proving that higher taxes cause better job growth. But the Republican claim that higher taxes will blunt job growth is most certainly not true, as the data shows.