All the news that's hard to take

697,000 jobs were lost during February, according to the Department of Labor's preliminary estimate.  This will be revised upward later, of course; you can see the propaganda effect pretty easily in the number.  Ju-u-u-s-t shy of 700,000.  Odd how often that seems to happen with the first number that comes out early in the month: 595,000, et cetera.  Does anyone even have a job at this point, aside from (a) TV news people and (b) government employees, such as the President?In a few months will the Dept. of Labor simply announce, "The rest of the American people lost their jobs last month," and that will be it?

Here's a wiseass from Russia weighing in: 

"MOSCOW — If you're inclined to believe Igor Panarin, and the Kremlin wouldn't mind if you did, then President Barack Obama will order martial law this year, the U.S. will split into six rump-states before 2011, and Russia and China will become the backbones of a new world order."  

Sheila Bair, the head of the FDIC and the remaining federal employee in the financial sector with any credibility left, says the FDIC may become insolvent by the end of the year.  I don't see how that can happen.  Wouldn't the Treasury Department simply "replenish" its capital by "injecting" a few trillion to keep it going?  I think that's our operative principle for everything these days.  A bulkhead buckles, the water starts pouring in, and we patch the hole with more federal "money."  That's why I'm concerned about this guy Panarin; it isn't so much that I see him as some kind of spot-on Cassandra for the West's misery.  It's simply that he's saying it at all.  Like G.K. Chesterton's horse who could play chess: it isn't so much that he plays well, said the wit; it's that he plays at all.  Sort of like that.  Russia, while floundering itself, still has a lot of stuff to sell, namely, oil and natural gas, so they can raise cash.  And we're counting on that cash, and a few trillions like it from China and Saudi Arabia, to keep the party going at the Casino at the End of the Universe.  So we don't want these guys drooling over the prospect of our collapse.  We need the money.

So this outbreak of Schadenfreude is disconcerting, to say the least.  These other... people, as Daniel Plainview says in "There Will Be Blood:"  what are we to do with them? Or without them? Are they going to drink our milkshake?  They are well aware, because they are educated at least as well as we are (okay, better, but I'm looking for a silver lining here), that the immediately precipitating cause, that which gave impetus to a long process of decline in the U.S., was the last great Casino game we could come up with: mortgage laundering.  Mortgages were sold to anyone who could pass the mirror-fogging test, then lumped together into gargantuan pools of "diversified risk," then sold as jigsaw-puzzle bonds.  It's important to remember that what looks like the actual and efficient cause of our problem is really only a symptom of something far more dire.  We had run out of ways to make money in any productive way, in any way that the plutocratic class could use to maintain an extravagant lifestyle, and so the final resort was made to the hocking of the very land of America.

And we've come up snake-eyes.  The Grim Croupier is raking in all the chips and looking askance at our furtive effort to pass off crude chips made of particle board as the real thing.

What's the guy mean by "rump state," anyway?  That sounds like some sort of Commie-speak. They're forever using such terminology in their dialectical analyses.  Bourgeois, proletariat, stooge, apparatchik, rump state.  I think he means some kind of regional federation thrown together in a state of panic.  Not to worry: one of George W. Bush's "secret memos" covers that, the memos containing what Bush/Cheney considered the Real Constitution.  The one without the Bill of Rights, and that allowed the U.S. military to operate within the country to "quell insurrections," even citing the Civil War as an example or a provocation.

Could be Dick & George were on the same page as Igor.  What may be hard for us to accept is that there are situations too dire to get out of.  They happen regularly in world history, often as the result of imperial overreach.  Everything seems okay, manageable, just a rough patch. But it just keeps getting worse, and it gradually dawns on you that you're running out of options. There's no money, no credit, and too many people are beginning to operate independently to save themselves for a cohesive center to hold.

Barack running a regime under martial law?  I was kidding about that Sheriff Bart thing, you know.