Occupy Denver has no leader. Occupy Denver has no agenda. Occupy Denver has no list of demands. What it does have is passion, anger and, so far, a willingness to simply be.

“I’m down here to simply let the people know that the 99 percent are not happy,” said Mark Bostovit as he sat on the ground next to Broadway waving a sign.

Bostovit said he is a college student and also has a full-time job.

“The one percent run everything. Money has way too much to do with everything.”

Thursday was Bostovit’s first day at the Occupation, but he said he would be there as much as he could be going forward. “Whenever I’m not at work or at school,” he said.

Despite having a full-time job, he said he needs to go to the food bank to survive. “Where I work, two out of 25 people have good Social security numbers. The ones without cards don’t even get paid as much as I do. I can’t imagine how they live,” he said.

On Saturday, there will be an Occupy Denver march through downtown, beginning at noon at the Capitol.

Dennis Ormond, who recently lost a job, said he didn’t know if Occupy Denver or the Occupy movement would accomplish anything. “But at least I’m doing something by coming down here, from a solidarity point of view,” he said.

As we stand along the sidewalk west of the Capitol on Broadway, there is a constant honking from cars driving by, with many of the drivers rolling down their windows on a cool windy day to shout encouragement.

Occupiers said that once in awhile someone flips them the bird or yells at people to “get a job”, but during two hours Thursday there were no such incidents, just hundreds of people honking, waving and shouting encouragement.

Many of the hundred or so people milling around seemed to be there for general solidarity and support. Others did have specific grievances.

Teenager Seth, part of the Occupation for 10 days. (Kersgaard)

“I want to end corporate and government corruption and greed,” said Heather McKinnon by phone. “Those are the basic tenets.”

“I would like to see all student loan debt wiped out. I would like to see education be free from preschool to graduate school. I would like to see the elderly and children taken care of.”

McKinnon described herself as a 51-year-old suburban stay at home soccer mom. “The media portrays this as a bunch of bums and hippies, but the funny thing is, it really attracts people from all walks of life. What the media is trying to do is really unfair. Most of America is very fed up and if we all come together we are very powerful,” she said.

The idea that the media is getting it wrong is a common theme in this crowd, tempered somewhat by the knowledge that media–right or wrong–is one of the things fueling the movement’s growth.

“Anyone in the press can say whatever they want,” said Jeannie Hartley, “but nothing will stop us from succeeding if we stay united.”

She said there are millions of Americans who side with the occupiers. “They have to ask which side of history they want to be on. They can sit on their couches watching the news, swearing at the politicians, or they can get up and come down here.”

While the media might not always be sympathetic, The New York Times reported Thursday that the Occupy movement is already more popular than Congress. At least one U.S. Senator, Tom Harkin, is in their camp, figuratively at least.

While the group may not have leaders per se, it does have people who are more outspoken than others, more willing to try and lead a group discussion toward a desired outcome.

The group has what it calls general assembly meetings every day at 3 and 7 pm. They sit or stand in a circle and discuss issues affecting the group. Thursday, the big issue was that one man had erected a tent on park grounds, in possible violation of city law. Most of the group seems to want to stay on the good side of the police. A few others take more of an “F the police” position.

The police had asked that the tent be taken down. The tent’s owner, Corey Donahue, had put the tent up on his own, without seeking consensus from the group, and said he was not going to take it down. The 3 pm meeting Thursday was dedicated largely to debating the tent, with most of the group seeming to want it down in order to avoid confrontation with the police.

Corey Donahue in his contentious tent. (Kersgaard)

The tent did not come down and was reportedly joined by a couple more Thursday evening.

“The police have been golden,” said Hartley before the tent incident. “They’ve been supportive and helpful.”

Another of the de facto leaders, Becca Chavez, echoed Hartley’s comments on the police. “They have been excellent. They told us the rules, and we said OK.”

They and others pointed to the violence in New York City, and expressed thanks that such a thing hasn’t happened in Denver. See video below of police in New York attacking a crowd with clubs.

Chavez and Donahue, on opposite sides of the tent debate have something in common besides their hope that Occupy Denver can lead to real change. They’re both college educated. Chavez has an English degree from CSU and is underemployed in retail. She and Donahue are both frustrated by the job market.

“I’m a hard worker, but the economy is so bad there are no opportunities,” she said. “I came down here so I could feel useful,” she said.

Donahue has a master’s in international law and relations from the University of New South Wales. He says pitching a tent is partially his protest about the fact that Denver will let the homeless sleep on sidewalks unprotected from the weather, but won’t let them pitch a tent on the soft grass of a park.

Donahue, also a marijuana activist, said that once the civil rights movement succeeded, the government launched the war on drugs in an effort to keep people of color down. He has $57,000 in college debt and no job.

“We built this world. we can build a new one,” he said.

Some in the media have made the point that the group seems not to have much of an agenda, but Betsy Reed at The Nation, says that is not a problem:

Everybody has a piece of advice for the protesters at Occupy Wall Street. They should put their clothes on. They should stop raising their fists. They should fact-check their handwritten signs. They should appoint leaders who can give pithy quotes to reporters. They should get with an electoral program. Nicholas Kristof even offered to help them out with a neat list of demands, in case those holding signs saying “We Are the 99%” just needed to have the unfairness of the carried interest rule explained to them.

Indeed, their failure to present demands is the most frequently heard criticism of the OWS protesters, not just in the mainstream press but from veteran leftists as well. What do these wan, angry young people want, anyway?

If you spend an hour or two down at Liberty Plaza, as I did with my 8-year-old daughter this past weekend, it’s clear enough. She got the point, at least: especially from the signs that read, “You should teach your kids to share,” and, “Give my mom her money back!! A single working mom…not fair!”

…

But sometimes, you also need a spark. “Occupy Wall Street,” as an idea and an action, is a stroke of brilliance. It’s not poll-tested or focus-grouped, but it expresses perfectly the outrage that is the appropriate response to the maddening political situation we find ourselves in today. It succeeds as symbolic politics: taking back the square is just what we need to do. And it’s wonderful that unions and community groups that have been working in the trenches will be linking arms with the denizens of OWS this Wednesday.

Maybe this will go nowhere too. The odds are against it, after all. But what do we have to lose? We have to try something new.

Is as unlikely a pairing as you are likely to find anywhere, Channel 9 on Thursday brought Becca Chavez into the studio for a debate with Independence Institute President Jon Caldera. See it below.

The demonstrators were the outgrowth of an Occupy Wall Street movement that started in New York more than three weeks ago. They plan to occupy the site in downtown Minneapolis indefinitely.

Their manifesto: “If you are struggling; if you have lost your job, or your home; if you have seen your child unjustly incarcerated; if you are homeless, living without health care, or drowning in debt; if you work full time but still are unable to afford food to feed your family; if you feel no one is listening to you; if you are fed up with the direction this country is going in — then you are one of the 99 percent. We are talking to you. Come and join us! This is your chance to be heard.”

Award-winning photojournalist Kathy Easthagen captured these scenes from the “occupation” of the Twin Cities on Friday morning.

Cody Cooper, second-year law student at the University of Minnesota, is planning on a career as a lobbyist or in public policy. “I, like most of the people here, want to see easier access to a voice in politics.” (Photo: Kathy Easthagen/The Minnesota Independent)

(Photo: Kathy Easthagen/The Minnesota Independent)

An unnamed woman, not wanting the message on the man's sign behind her to go unchallenged but also not wanting to draw attention to it, stands in front of him with a sign of displeasure. (Photo: Kathy Easthagen/The Minnesota Independent)

Educator Pattrice Jones paints a banner for the “teach-ins” that will be held later in the day. (Photo: Kathy Easthagen/The Minnesota Independent)

Jacob Kelly, a 28-year-old resident of the Twin Cities, is like many attending the occupation in that he has a host of reasons for attending that ranged from personal freedom to inequitable public policy. (Photo: Kathy Easthagen/The Minnesota Independent)

There was little chanting. Instead, participants chatted to one another, and to the dozens of reporters, about corporate influence on politics, America’s wars and the economic divide in this country. But despite the flurry of issues, most agreed that their overarching grievance was one of inequality, as embodied in their slogan: “We are the 99 percent.”

The Occupy Wall Street movement, which has spread to cities across the country in recent weeks, sunk its roots into Minnesota with the start of the Minneapolis occupation Friday. By early afternoon hundreds of people were crowded around organizers, acting as a crude sort of amplification system by repeating the speaker’s words to the hundreds out of earshot.

Photo: Donated pumpkin chickpea soup; Source; Jon Collins

Brian VanHout manned the food table packed with boxes of apples, bags of bananas and homemade burritos. “We have no idea what we’re looking at, we’re just rounding up as many resources as we can and just have people on standby,” VanHout said. “We’ve got kitchens across the city with people who are willing and ready to cook.”

One of those likely to benefit from the bags and boxes of donated food was Brandon Chandler, 17, who came from Maplewood with his older brother, Joe Ferley, a University of Minnesota student. The brothers said they were concerned about economic inequalities in the country, and planned to stay through the weekend.

“I think people are really ignorant about how things are run in this country,” Chandler said of the nationwide protest movement. “This could be a little bit of an eye opener,” Chandler said.

Photo: Workers from the Matchbox, a collectively-run coffeeshop in Northeast Minneapolis, brought coffee for demonstrators; Source: Jon Collins

Participants ranged in age, race and economic background. Judy Kjenstad, 62, was sitting on the edge of a mostly empty fountain with a sign. She said she’s never attended a protest before, but that she was drawn to the Occupy Minnesota event because of the increasing influence of corporations on American life.

“There doesn’t seem to be anything they don’t touch or influence in our lives. We used to have the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, now we have the Mall of America Field,” Kjenstad said. “We have way too big corporations, banks are too big—we’ve lost community.”

Photo: Judy Kjenstad said she sees hope in the Occupy movement; Source: Jon Collins

Other participants saw lessons to be learned from the past. Bob and Pat Tammen, environmental advocates from Soudan on the Iron Range, were in town for a state hearing on non-ferrous mining permits on private land in northeast Minnesota. Bob Tammen, a retired miner, said he’s noticed a change during his working life as well-paying jobs in the mines disappeared, despite increased productivity.

“One of our neighbor kids went to work for Mesabi Nugget, $12 an hour,” Pat Tammen said. “These are not good paying jobs like years ago, like their dads or their grandfathers [had]—they won’t make a wage like that.”

Both Bob and Pat, a retired teacher, took hits to their retirement funds as Wall Street crashed the economy.

Photo: Phil and Jasper Smith at the Occupy MN protest; Source: Jon Collins

“Our market system failed,” Bob Tammen said. “And it’s not that the whole system has to be done away with, we have to start regulating the system like we did in the ‘30s, we have to have honest regulation and honest public service.”

In the early part of the day, the mood was relaxed and festive. The one slightly combative moment came when one man in Levi’s and a striped shirt began arguing loudly that protesters should not “demonize” the rich, who he said would just move away. “Good,” one protester replied as a flock of local TV news cameramen jockeyed for the shot.

The collaboration of corporate and government interests was a theme among demonstrators. Phil Smith,who was wheeling around his infant son, Jasper, said he was hopeful about the Occupy movement: “It’s exciting to see people say, ‘Hey, we’re sick of this, you’re supporting the banks, the big financial institutions that are getting record profits and everyone else can’t find a job.’”

David Lesniaski, a professor at St. Catherine University’s library sciences program, said the Occupy Wall Street movement hasn’t been dominated by the same corporate interests that run the Republican and Democratic parties.

“I’ve lived abroad, I lived in Poland, and I lived and worked in Greece,” Lesniaski said. “And I’ve seen what happens when governments are corrupt, when they respond to monied influences or other influences of power but not to the people, and I don’t want this country to go the way that those two have been going.”

“Wall Street banks are unwilling to finance new nuclear power facilities, and as a result these projects are unlikely to go forward without the United States government providing billions of dollars in loan guarantee support,” Rep. Markey wrote in a May 6 letter to OMB Director Jacob Lew. “It is my belief that if any of these deals are to go forward, the terms of loan guarantees for nuclear power plants must be as transparent to the public as possible, they must fully incorporate all known market risks, and they must go as far as possible in protecting American taxpayers from having to bailout the nuclear industry in the event of a loan default.”

Markey asked OMB to explain how Fukushima has affected the way the agency views the risks of financing nuclear plants.

He also asked the agency whether the terms of a $8.6 billion conditional loan guarantee issued last year for a project in Georgia by the Southern Company will be reevaluated in light of Fukushima.

A foreclosed home in Winchester, Va. (Jay Mallin/ZUMA Press)

Yesterday, Wall Street giant J.P. Morgan Chase announced a $4.4 billion profit in the third quarter. Wall Street analysts should have cheered. Instead, they golf-clapped, while the bank’s chief executive officer, Jamie Dimon, went on the defensive on an earnings call.

[Economy1] The reason: foreclosures, again threatening everything from homeowners’ security to banks’ bottom lines. In early September, an employee of GMAC Mortgage admitted he had signed as many as 10,000 affidavits, required in 23 states to proceed with foreclosure, a month. The affidavits attested that the employee had personal knowledge of homeowners’ financials before the bank foreclosed. Given that he obviously did not, the paperwork might have constituted fraud and the foreclosures were possibly illegal.

The scandal went big, embroiling mortgage-holding banks like J.P. Morgan Chase in a problem of possibly systemic proportions. Stories of banks lacking required title documentation and evicting the wrong families from homes flooded into the press. Financial companies, including J.P. Morgan Chase, halted foreclosures in the states that require judicial review, and then some halted them everywhere. Members of Congress announced hearings. Finally, yesterday, all 50 state attorneys general announced a probe into systemic problems with mortgage documentation.

On the J.P. Morgan Chase earnings call, Dimon promised that there was “almost no chance we made a mistake” with foreclosures. “We think we should continue and get done and make sure we do the right things for the consumers, the investors and the country. So it obviously will increase our cost a little bit and maybe we’ll have to pay penalties eventually to some of the attorneys general but we really think we should just continue.”

But the financial statement itself proved the lie. The bank said it was carefully checking 115,000 mortgage affidavits. It set aside a whopping $1.3 billion for legal costs. And it put an extra $1 billion into a now $3 billion fund for buying back bunk mortgages and mortgage products.

For banks like J.P. Morgan Chase, the issue is not just the legal headaches. It is the financial blowback. The mortgage-documentation scandal, housing experts warn, runs far and deep — involving not just foreclosure papers, but titles and rights and fiduciary contracts. And it has analysts on Wall Street and politicians on the Hill wondering whether the worst-case scenario might involve not just losses, but bank failures or government bailouts.

The pending mortgage problems resemble those that caused the failure of Lehman Brothers, the credit crunch and the ensuing financial crisis in October 2008: Every bank has problematic mortgage holdings on its books, and each bank is interconnected with every other. Before the bubble burst, investment banks bought up faulty mortgages, many of them subprime loans, from lending banks. Investment banks then bundled the mortgages into mortgage-backed securities, for sale to investors. But just as banks are now foreclosing without proper documentation, they were bundling mortgages without proper documentation — abdicating their fiduciary responsibility to investors and muddying the waters as to who actually owns the loans.

That means the investors who own mortgage-backed securities might argue that the products do not meet the contract standards. If those investors choose to sue the originating investment banks en masse, for breach of contract, they would force the banks to buy back the rotten mortgage-backed securities. That would cost in the hundreds of billions — swamping banks’ profits and sweeping away any cash they might be keeping on hand.

At least one mortgage analyst, Josh Rosner, a managing director at Graham Fisher & Co., has said that if investors force banks to take back the $1.3 trillion of mortgage-backed securities in question, it could create a kind of doomsday scenario pitching the markets back into crisis. Indeed, Rosner believes it could feel very much like 2008 again.

“This is poetic justice,” says Janet Tavakoli, of Tavakoli Structured Finance in Chicago. “The mortgages that seem to be most affected are by predatory lenders, or lenders who engaged in fraudulent practices, like appraising a home for twice its value. The careless investment banks were willing to overlook that fraud. But they just bred fraud into their mortgage-backed securities.”

She does not believe every bank will have face write-downs due to mortgage buy-backs. But she does believe the losses might be substantial. “It’s not clear to me that every mortgage has this problem,” she says. “But there’s no transparency on this issue now. And it is clear that we are dealing with massive, systemic fraud.”

One way or another, some on the Hill are bracing for the worst.

“[Banks will] have to buy back one mortgage at a time,” Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) told The Washington Post. “Someone said there might be a second round of bank insolvencies because of this and there might need to be more TARP. There is no chance that Congress would pass more TARP. It’s hard even to see how it ends. But I’ve got to think it creates more uncertainty about the health of the banks.”

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) has gone further, proactively asking the Financial Stability Oversight Council — created by the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform law — to step in to stop foreclosures and monitor the banks, just in case.

“There are now trillions of dollars of securitizations of these loans in the hands of investors,” Grayson wrote in a letter (PDF) to the Council, which includes Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chair Sheila Bair. “The trusts holding these loans are in a legal gray area, as the mortgage titles were never officially transferred to the trusts. The result of this is foreclosure fraud on a massive scale, including foreclosures on people without mortgages or who are on time with their payments. The liability here for the major banks is potentially enormous, and can lead to a systemic risk.”

And it seems the banks — if not J.P. Morgan Chase — are also acknowledging that risk. Josh Levin, an analyst with Citigroup Global Markets, described three potential outcomes to investors, citing work by Georgetown law professor Adam Levitin. The first is that courts consider the erroneous foreclosures technicalities, and the losses are minimal. The second is that banks face significant legislation, but ultimately aren’t forced to buy back mortgage-backed securities.

And the third? “In the worst-case scenario,” he said, “the aforementioned issues become a ‘systemic problem’ which causes the mortgage market to grind to a halt.”

Today Paul is honing in on some of those advertising dollars, but from an altogether different type of benefactor: Steve Forbes, along with E. O’Brien Murray, Mallory Factor and James Higgins of the Free Enterprise Fund, is hosting a gilded fundraiser for Paul in the Big Apple.

But Republicans, who a month ago were saying that they’d recognize progress when the jobless rate fell, aren’t impressed. Indeed, Republican House Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) just issued a statement blasting the stimulus programs that are propping the numbers up.

[M]uch of what the Administration touts as a ‘jobs recovery’ has caused – and will continue to cause — the deficit to soar. Let me be clear – during challenging times, a job is a job. Yet government jobs that are paid for by taxing small business people and borrowing from the Chinese are not signs of a healthy economic recovery.

He has a point: 411,000 of those 431,000 new jobs are related to the 2010 Census and therefore temporary. Still, any new job creation is good news relative to the hundreds of thousands of jobs the economy was shedding a year ago. And, of course, the idea behind stimulus spending all along has been that the short-term hit to the deficit will be a tiny cost relative to the consequences of federal inaction.

The group — in collaboration with the California Reinvestment Coalition, the Community Reinvestment Association of North Carolina, the Empire Justice Center, the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project and the Ohio Fair Lending Coalition – found that between 2006 and 2008:

• Prime lending in communities of color decreased by 60.3 percent, compared to 28.4 percent in predominantly white neighborhoods.

• Prime refinance lending declined by 66.4 percent in neighborhoods of color, and by 13.9 percent in predominantly white areas.

• The overall share of prime refinance loans made to communities of color shrank by 35 percent, whereas the share made to predominantly white communities increased by 11 percent.

• Prime refinance lending by the country’s four largest banks – Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo – to predominantly white communities collectively increased by 32 percent, whereas prime refinance lending to communities of color declined by 33 percent.

“After inflicting harm on neighborhoods of color through years of problematic subprime and option ARM loans, banks are now pulling back at a time when communities are most in need of responsible loans and investment,” said Geoff Smith, Woodstock’s senior vice president, said in a statement. “We are concerned that we have gone from a period of reverse redlining to a period of re-redlining.”

The groups are recommending that Congress tackle the problem by modernizing the Community Reinvestment Act, creating a strong Consumer Financial Protection Agency and bolstering enforcement of existing fair-lending laws.

All food for thought as Senate lawmakers continue the long slog to pass financial reforms this month.

In 2007, when the housing bubble started to burst, Killinger continued to stand by WaMu’s home loans business. With billions in losses racking up, in March, 2008, he rejected an $8-a-share merger offer from J.P. Morgan. Just months later, in September, 2008, WaMu went entirely belly up, with all of its shareholders effectively wiped out.

It is hard to pity Kerry Killinger — and less so after reading his prepared testimony for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, headed by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.). Killinger insists that the government seizure of WaMu, in the largest bankruptcy in banking history, was an “unfair” mistake. Moreover, he whines that WaMu was shut out from meetings between the Wall Street banks and Treasury and Fed officials:

The unfair treatment of Washington Mutual did not begin with its unnecessary seizure. In July 2008, Washington Mutual was excluded from the “do not short” list, which protected large Wall Street banks from abusive short selling. The Company was similarly excluded from hundreds of meetings and telephone calls between Wall Street executives and policy leaders that ultimately determined the winners and losers in this financial crisis. For those that were part of the inner circle and were “too clubby to fail,” the benefits were obvious. For those outside of the club, the penalty was severe.

As for Killinger’s contention that the government shut WaMu down rather than rescuing it because it was not running with the in-crowd: September and October 2008 marked the absolute height of the credit crisis. In the weeks after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Fed and Treasury officials were concerned with averting utter economic catastrophe, not with punishing banks that weren’t part of the “club.” The statement is as absurd as it is tone-deaf. I will note that unlike most other executives testifying to Congress, Killinger does not use the words “sorry” or “apologize” even once in his 7,600-word testimony. (He does say he is “saddened” by what has happened.) He does not apologize to his shareholders, employees or the homeowners and average citizens who patronized WaMu.

And my sense is that in the coming week Killinger’s testimony will seem even more ridiculous. Levin’s committee’s report, due to be released in full on Friday, reportedly shows gross negligence and fraud at WaMu, which made hundreds of millions off of mortgage-backed deals before collapsing and spurring the “man-made economic assault” of the Great Recession, as Levin describes it in his blistering opening remarks.

Today, the OCC’s deputy comptroller for public affairs Robert Garsson jumped off the train of government officials suggesting that protecting consumers’ rights would be bad for the economy. Acknowledging that the OCC had played a role in the blocking the president’s plan to create a consumer protection agency independent of other government agencies, Garsson acknowledged the stupidity of the idea that an informed, protected consumer base was bad for an economy made up of those consumers.

“It’s unlikely there will be any meaningful conflicts between safety and soundness and consumer protection,” Garsson said. “The potential for conflicts is very rare.”

That’s right, a government official finally acknowledged that protecting consumers from predatory companies or deliberately non-transparent contracts and relationships might be good for the soundness of an economy still recovering from a tailspin caused by fraud, a lack of consumer understanding, non-transparent markets and financial instruments so complex that even traders didn’t understand them.

Garsson continued.

“It’s hard to say in the abstract what sort of conflicts could arise, though I don’t think there will actually be many instances in which there is a genuine conflict,” he wrote.”But where a conflict does arise, I don’t think that a consumer protection regulator should be allowed to prescribe a standard that reduces the safety and soundness of an institution. And I’m not talking about consumer protection provisions that simply reduce a bank’s profitability — that’s not something I would characterize as conflicting with safety and soundness, and a statutory provision could say so.”

That’s right, someone in the government acknowledged that a bank’s profitability wasn’t the sole standard for safety and soundness of the economy! That is some change to believe in.