by Tula Connell, Apr 24, 2008

Here are a few news items worth noting. 

• New home sales in March plunged to the lowest level in 17 years, according to U.S. Commerce Department figures out this morning, far more than forecast. The median sales price slumped 13.3 percent from the same time last year, the most in almost four decades. This bad news follows a report showing home values dropped 2.4 percent in February from a year earlier, according to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight. Meanwhile, sales of previously owned homes, which account for about 85 percent of the market, fell 2 percent in March, according to the National Association of Realtors—the seventh decline in eight months. The AFL-CIO has been calling for an immediate moratorium on home foreclosures as a first step to address this rolling crisis.
• Yet as recently as this week, George W. Bush repeated that the nation is not in a recession: “We’re in a slowdown.” Just don’t tell that to working families. Or to an economist. As the BBC reports:

…it’s still hard to find an economist who doesn’t believe the U.S. is either in recession or so close it’s not worth arguing about…. 

Bush’s blather is not fooling the majority of the American people, 76 percent of whom say the nation is in a recession. But his disconnect from reality could be contributing to his sinking ratings: Only 28 percent of U.S. residents polled by Gallup approve of the job he’s doing, another new low for the Bush administration—and the lowest ever in Gallup’s polling history.  

• Favorite headline of the week:

McCain picks failing Ohio factory to laud free trade 

That headline would be amusing because it shows how out of touch Sen. John McCain is when it comes to the precarious state of the nation’s middle- and working-class. But it’s far from amusing because behind his tone-deaf choice of touting bad trade deals at a struggling plant, are families and entire communities devastated by trade deals that benefit wealthy corporations at the expense of U.S. workers. 

McCain needs to support trade pacts that work for working families. Instead, as The New York Times reports: 

…Mr. McCain kept up his free-trade-is-good message in this economically depressed city, a contrast to his Democratic competitors, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, who both have called for renegotiating NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement]. Mr. McCain also repeated his message that lost manufacturing jobs would not return…

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Paid for by the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education Political Contributions Committee, www.aflcio.org, and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

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