Housing prices have dropped to their lowest level in almost a decade. And while the rate of homes falling into foreclosure has slowed, the reason is delays in the paperwork, not a housing recovery, says RealtyTrac. There were 219,258 foreclosure filings in April, the latest month available.

The housing crash continues to affect the rest of the economy. But, as we recently heard from former White House economic adviser Jared Bernstein, the administration was too worried someone might get help who didn't actually deserve it -- this, despite widespread fraud that makes it almost impossible to assess blame.

To quote Atrios, "Maybe someone should do something?"

The Obama administration’s main program to keep distressed homeowners from falling into foreclosure has been aimed at those who took out subprime loans or other risky mortgages during the heady days of the housing boom. But these days, the primary cause of foreclosures is unemployment.

As a result, there is a mismatch between the homeowner program’s design and the country’s economic realities — and a new round of finger-pointing about how best to fix it.

The administration’s housing effort does include programs to help unemployed homeowners, but they have been plagued by delays, dubious benefits and abysmal participation. For example, a Treasury Department effort started in early 2010 allows the jobless to postpone mortgage payments for three months, but the average length of unemployment is now nine months. As of March 31, there were only 7,397 participants.

“So far, I think the public record will show that programs to help unemployed homeowners have not been very successful,” said Jeffrey C. Fuhrer, an executive vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

Data released last week suggests that the administration’s task is only growing more difficult as the problems created by unemployment and housing persist. New job growth in May was anemic, and unemployment inched up to 9.1 percent, the Labor Department reported Friday.

Paul Krugman, who's been pushing for government intervention all along (this video is from 2009) points out that our so-called "leadership" on both sides of the aisle is missing in action on policies that might actually help the unemployed:

So there are policies we could be pursuing to bring unemployment down. These policies would be unorthodox — but so are the economic problems we face. And those who warn about the risks of action must explain why these risks should worry us more than the certainty of continued mass suffering if we do nothing.

In pointing out that we could be doing much more about unemployment, I recognize, of course, the political obstacles to actually pursuing any of the policies that might work. In the United States, in particular, any effort to tackle unemployment will run into a stone wall of Republican opposition. Yet that’s not a reason to stop talking about the issue. In fact, looking back at my own writings over the past year or so, it’s clear that I too have sinned: political realism is all very well, but I have said far too little about what we really should be doing to deal with our most important problem.

As I see it, policy makers are sinking into a condition of learned helplessness on the jobs issue: the more they fail to do anything about the problem, the more they convince themselves that there’s nothing they could do. And those of us who know better should be doing all we can to break that vicious circle.

Dave Dayen has some thoughts on the response to Krugman's column by Jared Bernstein, the liberal economist who recently left Joe Biden's policy team. Bernstein says it was the White House, not the Republicans, who would not consider any kind of direct jobs program. He also says the White House was concerned about the political drawbacks of the "wrong" type of people getting a mortgage modification:

Now, the most interesting thing about this is that the Obama Administration, through federal regulators, are RIGHT NOW attempting to negotiate a program of mortgage modification with the country’s major banks, as part of the foreclosure fraud settlement. This raises very troubling issues about what the eligibility would look like on that deal. Clearly, the White House is preoccupied with the “right” type of person getting help; Obama has mentioned this on several occasions. Yet who is that “right” type of person when the banks have engaged in systematic fraud? They didn’t just defraud those deserving of aid, whatever “deserving” means; they defrauded everyone, with their fake documents and breaking of the chain of title and fee pyramiding and the like. There’s no way to slice the salami at this point, and divy up the “deserving” from the “undeserving” of a mortgage modification. That simply doesn’t make sense in this case.

However, it is driving the thinking inside Washington, and will almost certainly be a preoccupation with any settlement (if there even is one at this point). That makes a settlement even less valuable.

Bernstein adds that “there are ways outside of federal legislation to encourage principal write-downs” and that he will write about them later. Maybe he’s talking about federal and state enforcement actions. But the same artificial constraints of Tea Party rhetoric about deadbeat borrowers applies there as well. And instead of attacking that ludicrous constraint, Bernstein accepts it. Or rather, he reports that his former bosses in Washington and policymakers on the Hill have accepted it.

Good to know.

It's about time someone in this administration noticed. Now what are they going to do about it?

As the Fed updated its forecast last week, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission held a forum on discrimination against unemployed job seekers. Members of Congress had urged the commission to explore the issue, after reading press reports of numerous instances in which employers and staffing agencies refused to consider the unemployed for openings.

The message — “the unemployed need not apply” — has at times been explicitly stated in job announcements. In other cases, unemployed job seekers have reported verbal rejections after a recruiter or employer learned they were not currently working.

One of the questions for the E.E.O.C. is whether excluding unemployed applicants is illegal. Jobless workers are not specifically protected by antidiscrimination laws, but various laws outlaw hiring bias on the basis of sex, race, national origin, religion, age and disability. Since African-Americans, older workers — especially older women — and disabled workers have been hit particularly hard in the downturn, discriminating against unemployed people in those groups may violate the law.

Take African-American workers. They make up 12 percent of the work force, but 20 percent of the unemployed. Even college-educated black Americans are far more likely than their white peers to be unemployed.

Another question for the E.E.O.C. is whether it is acceptable for employers to use current employment as a proxy for relevant experience, or as an expedient to screen applicants. Testimony at the forum by Helen Norton, associate professor at the University of Colorado Law School, rebutted those and other possible justifications. Current employment is not relevant to jobs that provide on-the-job training. And even for jobs that require up-to-date skills, an interview or a test would be a more accurate and less discriminatory way to evaluate a candidate’s qualifications.

Simply excluding unemployed workers also excludes candidates who may have been employed until recently as well as those who have used a period of unemployment to receive additional training or education.

Even if the economy does bounce back sooner than expected, we're still going to have to deal with all the ways employers will find to discriminate against the long-term unemployed. As I've written, when I was a recruiter during the 2000 recession, this was a real roadblock and getting all these Americans back will probably require protective legislation:

From an employer's standpoint, however, there could be some legitimate reasons for not hiring the unemployed, Morse said.

"For any particular position in this dour economy, there are thousands of applicants," he said. "People are looking for a way to narrow the field. They have pressure to put the best team on the field."

On top of employers' perceptions of unemployed workers, many long-term jobless applicants lose self-confidence and hurt themselves walking into the interview already beaten, said Karl Ahlrichs, a human-relations consultant at Gregory & Appel in Indianapolis.

"There can be a lot of comfort in playing the victim," he said. "But it's quickly picked up by the employer that that might carry through if you get hired."

On the other hand, if the candidates go in and point out the positives of long-term unemployment, it can work to their advantage.

"The people that are currently working are pretty burned out. They have been over-tasked and under-motivated and scared for a long time and their reserves are probably pretty far down," Ahlrichs said. "Somebody coming off the bench will be fresher."

Sitting the bench, however, hasn't proved to be a positive for Henri Shenter. Since losing his job in construction sales 15 months ago, Shenter has been turned down for jobs nearly 50 times.

He's looking for another sales job and at 35 has 15 years experience, but as soon as they see his last date of employment, he said, it's over.

"They throw it in the trash," said Shenter, of Greenwood. "There is absolute discrimination going on."

Whether that discrimination is legal is up for debate.

"An employer that discriminates against the unemployed risks legal action," said Michael Blickman, partner in the labor and employment group at Ice Miller, adding he is unaware of any legal precedent.

The candidate could argue that filing for unemployment is a statutory right and that an employer's policy not to hire the unemployed unjustly interferes with that right.

Morse disagrees, arguing that the unemployed are not among the categories protected by discrimination laws.

"The mere fact of you being unemployed for a period of time is not a protected characteristic," he said. Categories like age, race and gender are.

Still, a company like PMG Indiana that recently ran an ad for a production assistant that read: "Must have worked in the previous 12 months," walks a fine line, Blickman said.

"An employer should ensure that it has a solid business justification if it adopts that kind of policy or practice," he said. "The employer also risks the loss of good will among its own employees, customers and the public with this kind of policy."

The Awl has some interesting news. Does this Goldman Sachs report mean that politicians are now allowed to give additional aid to the unemployed without upsetting the Gods of Wall Street?

Goldman Sachs released a report today Wednesday for its clients about unemployment, and finds that extension of unemployment benefits in a recession does not actually make workers lazy and unwilling to work.

Some commentators have argued that extended unemployment insurance (UI) benefits are the key reason for high unemployment in the United States. Using data from 20 OECD countries we present evidence to the contrary. Our results suggest that only ½ percentage point of the current 9.4% jobless rate can be explained by the extension of UI benefits. Moreover, our calculations suggest that this effect will fade when the extended benefits eventually expire. These estimates—broadly in line with a recent study by the San Francisco Fed—reinforce our view that the overwhelming share of unemployment is cyclical rather than structural.

Emphasis ours.

To the math!

We find that a 10 point increase in the replacement rate—broadly similar to what we saw during the Great Recession in the United States—is associated with a 0.2pt increase in the unemployment rate in the same year. Given the persistence in unemployment, the effect ultimately grows to just above 1 percentage point if the extension of the benefits is permanent (calculated as 0.2 divided by (1-0.83)). These estimates suggest that the unemployment rate is currently ½ percentage point higher due to the extension of the UI benefits than it otherwise would be.

No, this information will be used to urge Congress to purge the unemployment rolls of that pesky one percent! How dare they refuse to work at sub-par wages?

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Perhaps if we purged the tax code of the numerous incentives to move jobs overseas (the latest was in the recent tax cut deal), it would be more likely to translate into jobs within shorter commuting distance than India:

Corporate profits are up. Stock prices are up. So why isn't anyone hiring?

Actually, many American companies are – just maybe not in your town. They're hiring overseas, where sales are surging and the pipeline of orders is fat.

More than half of the 15,000 people that Caterpillar Inc. has hired this year were outside the U.S. UPS is also hiring at a faster clip overseas. For both companies, sales in international markets are growing at least twice as fast as domestically.

The trend helps explain why unemployment remains high in the United States, edging up to 9.8 percent last month, even though companies are performing well: All but 4 percent of the top 500 U.S. corporations reported profits this year, and the stock market is close to its highest point since the 2008 financial meltdown.

But the jobs are going elsewhere. The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, says American companies have created 1.4 million jobs overseas this year, compared with less than 1 million in the U.S. The additional 1.4 million jobs would have lowered the U.S. unemployment rate to 8.9 percent, says Robert Scott, the institute's senior international economist.

"There's a huge difference between what is good for American companies versus what is good for the American economy," says Scott.

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Credit: Nicole Sandler

Last week, while guest hosting The Randi Rhodes Show and discussing the unexpected but wonderful progress made in the lame duck session of Congress, we began talking about the group of Americans who've been left out in the cold: the 99ers. I wanted to something to help them, so I spent Christmas weekend building Helpthe99ers.com.

The 99ers.

That's the name given to the millions of people who lost their jobs during the Bush almost-a-depression-recession, and have now exhausted all of their unemployment benefits. President Obama "negotiated" a big deal just weeks ago that, I supposed, paved the way for the lame duck Congress to repeal DADT, give health care to the 9-11 first responders, pass a food safety bill and ratify the new START treaty. He agreed to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest of Americans in return for the big Republican concession -- a 13-month extension of unemployment benefits, something that they should have (and likely would have) agreed to anyway.

But what most people don't realize is that the 13-month extension doesn't extend the benefits for the unemployed... it just allows the current unemployment benefits programs to continue operating, giving people benefits for up to a maximum of 99 weeks, for another 13 months.

But if you're a "99er" -- if you've exhausted your benefits, you're likely feeling quite forgotten right now. From the Obama-GOP tax cut "compromise" to the very productive not-so-lame duck session of Congress, there was nothing for the 99ers.

So, last week on the Randi Rhodes Show, we were talking about the plight of the 99ers, and people began calling in with their stories. I knew I needed to do something, though I'm not in much better shape than they are!

I'm also unemployed. Or, I guess, underemployed. My last regular paycheck stopped coming on January 21, 2010 when Air America radio filed Chapter 7 and closed its doors.

I immediately moved my show online, where it continues to this day Monday through Thursday mornings from 10-noon ET at www.radioornot.com. It doesn't come with a paycheck, but I don't collect unemployment, as I'm now technically self-employed.

In addition to doing some voiceover work, voicetracking, web work, and other odd jobs, I'm honored to guest host the Randi Rhodes Show when she's out or on vacation, as is the case for these last two weeks of the year.

So, I was trying to figure out what I could do, and I came up with the idea of www.HelpThe99ers.com, where people in need can post their stories, and those fortunate enough to be in a position to help can contact them directly.

The main part of the site is The Help Board. In addition to a general discussion area and a jobs area (where people can post their skills, employers can post openings, and entrepreneurs can share ideas), there's a section for 99ers to tell their stories, organized by states.

My idea and wish is that people who can help will read the stories and reach out to those who touch them the most. The site is set up so that people can contact one another directly.

But it will only work if people use it. So, if you're in need, post your story. If you can help someone, please do. And please help spread the word.

First, there's this technical definition that says there's a recovery. Why? Because some rich people are getting richer? If the economy doesn't serve the broadest group of citizens and there aren't jobs for people who want them, what kind of recovery is that? Perhaps this is why economists are so often confused.

Maybe, as Atrios says, somebody should do something?

A slowdown in American manufacturing and weak employment data sent stocks lower on Thursday as investors continued to absorb news of a weak economic recovery.

The separate reports from the Federal Reserve and the Labor Department were a fresh reminder of the slow pace of the recovery. Manufacturing, in particular, had shown tentative signs of a rebound in recent months.

The reports were enough to reverse the upward trend of the previous two days, when the market rose 1.1 percent.

“You had a one-two punch in one day,” said Doug Roberts, chief investment strategist for the Channel Capital Research Institute.

The result was a broad sell-off. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 144.33 points, or 1.39 percent, to 10,271.21. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index declined 18.53 points, or 1.69 percent, to 1,075.63, and the Nasdaq composite index fell 36.75 points, or 1.66 percent, to 2,178.95.

Financial, materials and industrial stocks all fell more than 2 percent.

If we were having an actual national emergency, rather than corporations happily sitting on piles of cash and handing out record bonuses and dividends, this might --- might make sense. But since the only "emergency" here is corporate greed, I can only speculate as to why it only makes sense to take money from workers.

I think it would make a lot more sense to take 95% from CEOs:

With 9.5 percent unemployment and millions more underemployed, it seems like a daunting, almost impossible, task to find jobs for everyone. But Ken Maryland, president of ClearView Economics, has an idea: Cut everyone's pay by 10 percent.

"EVERYBODY -- from the president down to the chambermaid -- takes a 10% cut in compensation," writes Marlyand for Marketwatch. "This freed-up compensation expense is then used to re-employ the 8% (12.3 million) of the unemployed. Net-net, the nation's compensation bill has remained unchanged, and the unemployment rate is now 4.5%! Voila!"

The 4.5 percent Maryland refers to, is the optimal unemployment rate, which allows for employee turnover and doesn't risk inflation. While his idea may seem crazy, companies have begun to do it in small fashion, as Maryland points out, by having furloughs and pay cuts.

Maryland says this has a chance because there's an "inherent fairness" to the idea since everyone will be receiving the pay cut. But not really, since the employed would have to take the pay cut, while the unemployed will receive a significant increase in pay by suddenly having a paycheck.

Not to mention, the drop in pay doesn't mean a mortgage that's locked in will suddenly be cheaper or a car payment miraculously fall 10 percent. Maryland also says an issue with the idea would be making sure everyone falls in line, pointing out that unions would have a fit (although I'm not sure that CEO, whose pay increased more than anyone in business over the past 30 years, would be too happy with the idea as well).

Not to mention the biggest flaw in this proposal: Namely, why would you trust executives to hire people after they cut salaries?

It really is amazing when you think about it: Hundreds of thousands of unemployed Americans are virtually ignored -- because their unemployment benefits ran out in March instead of May. Congress needs to add another tier of benefits to help the 99ers:

The 99ers took a stand on Wall Street Thursday.

A throng of desperate job-hunters -- who've been out of work so long their unemployment benefits ran out -- staged a protest rally on the steps of Federal Hall.

"Are you going to tell us, President Obama and Congress, that our lives are not worth saving?" asked 99er Connie Kaplan.

She had to move in with her daughter in Astoria, Queens to survive and gets food from food banks.

The grassroots political group, which sprang up after jobless Americans started commiserating online, is demanding that unemployment benefits be extended to include them. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) co-sponsored a recently introduced bill that would create extensions in states with unemployment rates of 7.5% or higher.

"My family is broken up," 99er and former public relations director Anne Strauss, 58, of Smithtown, L.I., told the Daily News.

Her house is for sale and her husband, also unemployed, has moved in with his son in Albany to take a commission-only job.

Strauss applied for a job at a bakery. One question on the application form asked of the job, "Will it interfere with your after-school activities?"