Attorneys General, including NM’s, will investigate the foreclosure fraud crisis

Today, 50 state attorneys general announced an investigation into the foreclosure fraud crisis. Here is the release from the National Association of Attorneys General:

Financial reform languishes as nation’s focus shifts

As political attention has flowed from Wall Street to immigration, unemployment and myriad other topics, financial reform has fallen off the radar. The regulatory law gave guidelines for fixing the financial sector, but the rule-writing process has fallen to dozens of agencies and government bureaucrats currently hammering out the details. That means the real work of reform is just beginning and the country is only incrementally closer to a safer financial system.

Liberal groups plan DC rally to support jobs legislation

Howard Dean speaks in support of the One Nation Working Together Rally.

In response to last month’s Glenn Beck-hosted “Restoring Honor” summit, hundreds of thousands plan to descend on Washington for a rally by the Lincoln Memorial next weekend. On Saturday, liberal groups are hosting the “One Nation Working Together” event, making a case for activism for progressive legislation to a middle class that increasingly seems to be withdrawing support from Democratic candidates.

The groups attending include civil rights, gay rights, economic justice, peace and labor activists. The AFL-CIO, National Council of La Raza and dozens of others are busing in participants, and more than 200,000 are set to attend.

“Despite having such evidence of what we can accomplish together, we have seen voter participation rates plummet — from Shelby County, Tennessee to Alameda County, California,” said Ben Jealous, the head of the NAACP. “Simultaneously, far-right extremists have found their way back into the nation’s political discourse and helped re-energize a retrograde agenda that includes attacks on every pillar of our civil rights protections from the Voting Rights Act to the Civil Rights Act to the 14th Amendment itself. Now is the time to get everyone off the sidelines and back on to the battlefield.”

And one of the groups storming that battlefield will be a new, targeted umbrella organization for the 99ers, the American 99ers Union. Just a few weeks old, the union represent 17 groups that in turn represent workers who have exhausted the maximum weeks of unemployment benefits. Its stated goal is supporting fading legislation to help the long-term unemployed, given the high unemployment rate and congressional intransigence and to raise awareness.

Nationally, long-term unemployment remains one of the most prevalent and pressing results of the recession. There are about 6.6 million workers who have been out of a job for more than six months and approximately one million who have exhausted their jobless benefits. Long-term joblessness results in everything from worse health outcomes to increased use of safety-net programs such as disability insurance — and studies show the longer a worker is unemployed, the harder it is for her to find a job.

Gregg Rosen, host of the BlogTalk radio show Unemployment Roundtable, and Michael White of the Unemployed Workers Action Group started the umbrella group. It represents about 40,000 workers, most of whom connect via the Internet. “99ers and 99er groups are banding together,” explains LaDona King, one of the most prominent 99er activists on the Web and a member of the new union. “And they are coming in one by one for strength and for consistency. The idea is that we have a consistent message, not a bunch of stories of woe and terror. And the message is that Americans need legislation to stay afloat. Workers are really hurting.”

The union is intently focused on pressuring legislators to move forward on two bills to give additional weeks of benefits to jobless workers. One bill, by Reps. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.) and Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), grants 20 more weeks of benefits to workers in states where the unemployment rate is above 10 percent.

“Right now, there are more long-term jobless Americans than we’ve ever had on record, and we can’t just let them all fall off a cliff,” McDermott said, introducing the legislation. “I don’t believe how we can cut and run from helping unemployed workers when there are five of them competing for every available job. You only have to hear from a few unemployed workers to know how hard they are looking for work and to feel their sheer sense of desperation. Are we really prepared to just stand by and watch them sink into abject poverty?”

The second bill — fuller legislation that is therefore the subject of more 99er activism — is Sen. Debbie Stabenow’s (D-Mich.) Americans Want to Work Act. That legislation the maximum number of weeks to 119 in states with unemployment rates above 7.5 percent, meaning 34 states and the District of Columbia would currently qualify. It also extends a tax credit to companies that hire workers who have been unemployed for more than two months.

The union held its first major push for the bills last week, having members fax in a letter to Congressional offices, urging action on the bill. Sites informed jobless workers how to use free websites to send two faxes a day, some Congressional offices reported hundreds coming in. Additionally, the 99ers union is working to bring workers to the One Nation Working Together rally.

Thus far, there are no clear signs of movement on either piece of legislation, though Stabenow’s office has indicated it will try to get the Senate Finance Committee to move forward on her bill. (It needs committee approval before a floor debate.) Congressional aides say it is highly unlikely for a vote on either bill before the November election — after which, Congress will need to take up an extension of current benefits, meaning Tier V legislation might fall by the wayside.

But the activists remain galvanized by their new coordination. “We’re fired up and we’re not giving up,” King says. Thousands of jobless workers are using the new 99er group to find free or reduce rides to the rally, a chance to press again for the cause, she says.

“If Obama said the word ‘99er’ once, if he recognized this problem, I would put all my energy into campaigning for a Democratic win this November,” she notes.

On Bush tax cuts, an impending battle between Congress and administration

The Obama administration hopes to extend the Bush tax cuts for everyone making less than $125,000 a year, or $250,000 a year for couples. Some congressional Democrats want to keep lower taxes for all Americans until the recovery takes better hold. Most Republicans want to make the tax cuts permanent. That sets the stage for a serious fight.

In unemployment benefits extension, a logistical headache for states

People seeking unemployment benefits wait in the lobby of an Employment Development Department office in California. (EPA/ZUMAPRESS.com)

On Tuesday, the Senate plans to vote on a federal extension of unemployment benefits, blocked by Senate Republicans for an unprecedented two months. The swearing-in of Carte Goodwin, the temporary replacement for the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), will give Democrats the crucial 60th vote to overcome a GOP filibuster and restore unemployment insurance to 2.5 million Americans.

But that poses a real challenge to the state unemployment insurance agencies. They are already overextended, dealing with the massive expansion of the unemployment insurance system to grant up to 99 weeks of benefits to those eligible among the 38 million people who have been unemployed at some point over the course of the recession. Now, with the Senate on the verge of action, states are scrambling to figure out how to retroactively disburse seven weeks of benefits worth more than $10 billion to the 2.5 million people needing them, as quickly as possible.

Part of the problem is that the high unemployment rate has already overloaded state systems. Last month, the National Association of State Workforce Agencies completed a survey of the unemployment insurance providers in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. In the report, 46 of the 51 providers said they had difficulty managing the work flow. And states cited congressional inaction as one source of the headaches. Oregon, responding to the NASWA inquiry, named Congress as its biggest problem: “[Lawmakers’] inability to complete legislation to extend [emergency unemployment compensation] in a timely [manner] has created a substantial amount of work in our UI Call Centers answering inquiries from concerned and panicked UI beneficiaries.”

Those “panicked UI beneficiaries” number in the millions and need answers as to what they are getting, how and when. Expecting the extension to come through, most state agencies have continued to update their files through the lapse. Though unemployed workers have not received checks, they have continued to file with their state agency to affirm that remain out of work and are searching for new jobs, a requirement to receive benefits. The decision to keep that information current through the Senate’s dithering means that the states will not need to work through a 2.5 million-person backlog of paperwork once the benefits are extended.

But unemployment benefits are allocated using a complicated multi-tier system, with dozens of rules about qualification. Nobody — neither the state agencies nor the unemployed — knows just what Congress will approve and how that will comport with state systems. Will the Senate vote on the House bill? Will the House have to take up the Senate version? Will Congress approve the $25-per-week Federal Additional Compensation funds, tacked onto unemployment checks? How will states deal with disbursing the money? Will they go claimant by claimant, or week of dropped claims by week? Confusion over what is happening means that state unemployment agencies are already receiving thousands of questions, overloading call centers.

One issue is that if a worker has had an intervening period of work during the eight-week lapse, he or she needs to inform the state and might qualify for a new tier of benefits. “Say you were a construction worker who got a week-long gig on a project during the lapse,” explains George Wentworth, an analyst at the National Employment Law Project. “Maybe before you qualified for $600 a week in federal extended benefits. You might requalify for a $150 state benefit rate because of those intervening earnings, even if you had weeks of federal benefits left. Congress is, in this legislation, probably saying you can stay on your federal benefits. But all of those people need to be reprocessed, and there is no sense of scale as to how many people that might be.”

Communication — simply getting news about about changes and processes — might be the biggest challenge. “You will hear lots of claims from workers, claims that will be accurate, that it will be difficult to get through to staff in the unemployment insurance agencies,” Wentworth says. “The infrastructure has really been operating beyond maximum capacity for some time. This is the most weeks [of benefits] for the most people that states have ever had to manage. Frankly, the systems were designed in terms of capacity based on historical previous high levels of unemployment. And this is the highest level of unemployment since the early 1980s.”

Other problems are state-specific. Some states, such as Georgia, have had no official policy of retroactive payment, but are planning to make make an exception this time — posing a logistical challenge as they update their systems. And in Florida, more than 200,000 unemployed persons might not get their benefits at all. The state included a June 5 expiration on the extended benefits in a state statute. That means that when Washington re-ups the program, hundreds of thousands of Floridians won’t be able to resume receiving their benefits if current law stands, the Florida Independent reports.

“Almost 35,000 workers are losing their only real source of income each week while Congress continues to stall the re-authorization of the extended benefits program,” Florida AFL-CIO President Mike Williams said in a statement. “The fact that these workers and our economy will continue to suffer when Congress does act because of a single line in Florida Statutes is appalling. This program costs the state next to nothing and does not raise unemployment insurance rates for businesses.”

Other states have prepared for the congressional reauthorization but still face an enormous logistical challenge. Norm Isotalo, a spokesperson for the Department of Labor in Michigan, the state with the second-highest unemployment rate at 14 percent, said the state had been working overtime to ensure the more than 120,000 persons in need of retroactive benefits get them quickly. “We’ve been holding meetings in anticipation that the Senate will pass some legislation next week that will restore these federal benefits,” he said. “We will probably make a lump sum payment to people who are owed retroactively. Then, we are going to reach out to people who have exhausted state benefits and never had a chance to apply to [federal extension programs].” He noted the department was preparing for the deluge by keeping additional workers on overtime, but that planning remained ongoing.

Labor experts say that unemployment insurance recipients should expect some hiccups as their states send all of those checks out. “It’s unfair to the states,” Wentworth says. “It is very difficult to manage these situations when you have a long gap in reauthorization, even in terms of just explaining it to unemployment insurance recipients.”

Slashed summer jobs funding hits young workers hard

The White House is touting it as “recovery summer”: The economy is adding jobs, the unemployment rate is falling, housing is stabilizing and the $787 billion stimulus is working. But it certainly doesn’t feel that way to America’s young workers, who suffer the worst rates of joblessness of any demographic group. And with July in full swing, their jobs situation is about to get worse.

Reid introduces new standalone unemployment extension bill

Here we go again. Last night, Sens. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Max Baucus (D-Mont.), the Senate majority leader and the head of the Senate Finance Committee, introduced a new unemployment extension bill. It is not actually strictly standalone: It includes…

Amid unemployment crisis, Senate gridlock leaves jobs bill in limbo

This week, Senate Democrats will attempt to push through a jobs bill that has stalled in the chamber for seven weeks. If Congress does not pass the bill, hundreds of thousands will lose their federally extended unemployment insurance. Doctors will take a 21 percent cut in Medicare reimbursement rates, and states will see less money for Medicaid.