Activists affiliated with Occupy Our Homes DC protested in front of a downtown Washington D.C. office of Wall Street titan JP Morgan Chase this afternoon, calling on the bank to offer a local homeowner a mortgage loan modification that would allow her to remain in her home.

Deborah Harris, a former paramedic for the D.C. Fire Department who retired after 23 years due to an injury sustained at work, said she fell behind on her mortgage after having surgery to heal the injury. After her workers’ compensation case was settled, she caught up on the payments, only to fall behind and subsequently catch up again several months later. She eventually was put into foreclosure, and after retiring from the fire department the bank sold her home even as she pursued a modification, according to a video posted on the Occupy Our Homes DC YouTube account.

“They promised me that they were going to give me a modification and then they kept leading me on for months, and months and months and it got up to two years,” Harris says in the video. “And now they want to take my house.”

Today, protesters sat outside a JP Morgan modification office near Franklin Square in downtown D.C., blocking the doors as activists called for the bank to modify the loan. Harris and other activists entered the office, asking to meet with bank officials. When Harris finally met with representatives from the bank, they denied responsibility, saying the loan was now in the hands of Freddie Mac, according to a spokesperson from Occupy Our Homes DC.

JP Morgan did not return requests for comment, though an answering machine message notes that it will not negotiate modifications “if the loan has already been sent to foreclosure,” since “there is no loan to modify.”

Multiple speakers, including Bertina Jones, another local homeowner whose home was saved by Occupy activists, called for action from JP Morgan.

“The banks and the lenders out there, they’ve got to understand that they received taxpayer money,” said Rev. Graylan Hagler. And because they received taxpayer money, we expect for them to take care of the common good. If they’re going to take that money, then they have to take care of everybody that they basically abused in the process.”

Watch it:

According to an analysis from Citizens for Tax Justice, 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney would save himself $5 million in taxes in 2013 by winning November’s election (assuming he could get his tax plan enacted into law).

Under his plan, Romney’s tax rate would fall from its current 14.7 percent to 13.1 percent, while under Obama’s tax plan, Romney would pay a 34.3 percent rate. The difference in these rates means about $5 million for Romney’s tax bill. The Associated Press laid out what causes that divide:

Romney wants to lower current tax rates for everyone by 20 percent. This benefits the wealthy most: Dropping the highest bracket from 35 percent to 28 percent, for example, yields a much bigger savings for those at the top than lowering the 15 percent bracket to 12 percent brings for taxpayers in that group.

Romney also would eliminate the much-despised alternative minimum tax, which hits the rich and some middle-class taxpayers, too. He wants to repeal Obama’s health care law and its taxes.

According to the financial disclosure that he dropped late last week, Romney’s net worth is between $190 million and $250 million. Even before he revised his plan to include a 20 percent cut in the top income tax bracket, Romney’s tax plan was going to save him a substantial amount of money.

America’s largest wireless service provider plans to cut 1,700 jobs by offering its technicians and call center employees buyouts. Verizon Communications announced last week that it would reduce its nationwide workforce by 1 percent, and if enough workers don’t accept the buyouts, it will resort to involuntary layoffs.

Verizon paid chief executive Lowell C. McAdam more than $22.5 million in 2011, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of executive compensation. The company has paid its top five executives more than $350 million in the last five years, according to the Communications Workers of America, the union that deals most directly with Verizon:

More than half of McAdam’s compensation package came from “Performance Awards,” according to the WSJ analysis. In 2011, the company’s shareholders saw an 18.8 percent increase in the value of their returns. Workers, however, have not shared in those gains. Verizon eliminated 26,000 jobs over a two-year period in 2008 and 2009 — including 16,000 jobs in 2009 alone — and laid off roughly 13,000 more in 2010.

At the same time, Verizon has demanded sizable concessions from workers in its negotiations with unions, asking for the elimination of the company’s pension plan, increases in health care premiums, and extra leeway to outsource jobs, according to a release from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

As his campaign against Prof. Elizabeth Warren picks up, Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) is trying to take credit for the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, saying in an ad last week that he provided the “tie-breaking vote” that got the law through the Senate. However, Brown’s ad neglects to mention that he demanded that the law be watered down in return for his vote.

Brown focused his efforts to weaken the law on the Volcker Rule, which is meant to prevent banks from engaging in risky trading with federally backed funds. And according to the Boston Globe, his efforts to weaken that rule did not end after President Obama signed Dodd-Frank into law:

In the second stage, as regulators began the less publicly scrutinized task of writing rules amid heavy pressure from the banking sector, Brown urged the regulators to interpret the 3 percent rule broadly and to offer banks some leeway to invest in hedge funds and private equity funds.

Supporters as well as critics of the banking industry agree that Brown’s suggestions would mean looser regulations for banks, though specialists disagree on the extent of the impact.

MIT professor and staunch reform advocate Simon Johnson said Brown’s prescriptions amount to “significant loosening of the regulations and [are] absolutely serving the interests of people who do not want to have meaningful reform.’’

While Brown was working to water down Dodd-Frank, he received 400 percent more in campaign donations from the financial industry than than the average received by other GOP senators during that period. And money from the financial sector hasn’t stopped pouring in. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, employees from the securities and investment industries have donated more to Brown than those of any other industry. JP Morgan Chase, which just lost billions of dollars engaging in risky trading, is one of his top ten donors.

On June 4, 1912 — 100 years ago today — Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to pass a minimum wage law, as Holly Sklar, director of Business for Shared Prosperity, noted:

Massachusetts led the nation when it passed the first state minimum wage law 100 years ago on June 4, 1912. [...] The commonwealth’s 1912 Report of the Commission on Minimum Wage Boards did not mince words. It said that whenever wages “are less than the cost of living and the reasonable provision for maintaining the worker in health, the industry employing her is in receipt of the working energy of a human being at less than its cost, and to that extent is parasitic.”

The Massachusetts law was quite weak, as it only covered women and children, outsourced the decision on where the wage would actually be set to a commission, and called for light penalties for violators. It wasn’t until 1938 that the nation got a federal minimum wage law as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

The minimum wage actually hit its peak in terms of buying power in 1968; to have the same buying power, the minimum wage today would have to be $9.92, instead of $7.25. If the minimum wage had been indexed to the Consumer Price Index since 1968, it would be approximately $10.40 today.

The minimum wage today is also covering a much smaller percentage of health care and tuition costs than it was just a few decades ago, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research:

This year, 1.4 million workers are benefiting from scheduled increases in the minimum wage in eight states.

Republican Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign whipped out a new number over the weekend to dispute federal government data that ranked Massachusetts 47th in job creation during Romney’s time as governor there. Three campaign surrogates used the Sunday morning news circuit to claim that the state was actually 30th in job growth in Romney’s final year in office.

Of course, moving the state to 30th would still mean it was in the bottom half of the nation, a fact that would seem to fit assertions from local experts that the state’s economy was “below average and often near the bottom” while Romney was governor. Here are five facts about the Massachusetts economy from Romney’s 2003-2007 tenure:

1. Ranked 47th in job growth: Despite Romney’s professed expertise in creating jobs, Massachusetts ranked 47th in job growth during his time as governor. The state’s total job growth was just 0.9 percent, well behind other high-wage, high-skill economies in New York (2.7), California (4.7), and North Carolina (7.6). The national average, meanwhile, was better than 5 percent.

2. Suffered the second-largest labor force decline in the nation: Only Louisiana, which was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, saw a bigger decline in its labor force than Massachusetts during Romney’s tenure as governor. The US Census Bureau estimated that between July 2002 and July 2006, 222,000 more residents left Massachusetts for other states than came to it. That decline largely explains the state’s decreasing unemployment rate (from 5.6 to 4.7 percent) while Romney was in office, according to Northeastern University economics professor Andrew Sum. At the same time, the nation as a whole added 8 million people to the labor force.

3. Lost 14 percent of its manufacturing jobs: Massachusetts lost 14 percent of its manufacturing jobs during Romney’s time in office, according to Sum. The loss was double the rate that the nation as a whole lost manufacturing jobs. In 2004, Romney vetoed legislation that would have banned companies doing business with the state from outsourcing jobs to other countries.

4. Experienced “below average” economic growth and was “often near the bottom”: “There was not one measure where the state did well under his term in office. We were below average and often near the bottom,” Sum told the Washington Post in February. As a result, the state was more comparable to Rust Belt states like Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio than it was to other high-tech economies it typically competes with.

5. Piled on more debt than any other state: Romney left Massachusetts residents with $10,504 in per capita bond debt, the highest of any state in the nation when he left office in 2007. The state ranked second in debt as a percentage of personal income. Romney regularly omits those statistics from his Massachusetts record, instead touting the fact that he balanced the state’s budget (he was constitutionally required to do so). He wouldn’t be much different as president: his proposed tax plan adds more than $10 trillion to the national debt.