Published by Huffington Post.

by Zach Carter

WASHINGTON — More than 1,000 activists descended on JPMorgan Chase’s annual shareholder meeting Tuesday, according to community organizers present at the event, demanding action on the company’s foreclosure practices and calling for an end to the company’s investment in a company promoting genocide in Darfur.

Neighborhood activists, religious leaders, outraged homeowners and political activists presented the company’s shareholders with stories of alleged abuse and neglect by JPMorgan Chase, particularly from Chase’s mortgage wing, according to activists present at the event, who provided HuffPost with several photos. The shareholder meeting and demonstration were held at a JPMorgan Chase building in Columbus, Ohio, a city ravaged by the foreclosure crisis and heavy unemployment.

George Goehl, Executive Director of National Peoples’ Action, a coalition of anti-foreclosure activists, said his group briefly blocked all five entrances to the building in an effort to disrupt the shareholder meeting and show their outrage over Chase’s foreclosure policies. Goehl said NPA had bused in two separate groups of 500 activists, mostly from midwestern states.

One of the biggest subprime lenders during the housing bubble, Chase has been immersed in legal troubles associated with foreclosures, facing accusations that the bank improperly ‘robo-signed’ thousands of foreclosure documents and defrauded taxpayers. Federal banking regulators slapped the company and several other big banks with a consent order requiring it to review its foreclosure practices, although fines have not been issued. The company has apologized for illegally foreclosing on the families of active-duty military members fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a set of confidential federal audits accuse the company of abusing the Federal Housing Administration by deploying faulty documents when seeking reimbursement on foreclosures of government-guaranteed loans..

At today’s meeting, dozens of activists dressed in Robin Hood costumes used a plywood bridge to cross a series of ponds that partially surround the building. Protesters then placed model homes into the water, letting them sink in a demonstration against Chase’s foreclosure practices.

Inside the shareholder meeting — webcast by the bank and monitored by HuffPost in Washington, D.C. — homeowners presented bleak stories that stood in stark contrast to CEO Jamie Dimon’s opening comments, which touted the company’s dedication to its customers, boasted of $17 billion in annual profits and bemoaned the overregulation of large American banks.

Virginia Holwell, a 59-year-old shareholder from Peoria Heights, Illinois, even brought her own mortgage paperwork to the meeting to request help. Speaking to the gathering of shareholders, Holwell said she went to Chase to ask for a loan modification after losing her job a year ago. Howell said the company has lost her paperwork five times but has urged her not to go seek legal aid, housing counseling or advice from other parties. In March, after stringing her along for over 10 months, Chase advised her to “liquidate the property.”