Marian Spiral Fractal by Bryan Evan

Well, we're up to six months of job losses (pdf). The long term carnage in manufacturing had spread to construction some time ago. It has now been joined in administrative services, with admin and support services shedding over 70K jobs. The temp market is drying up, but so is office hiring of all kinds.

What hasn't shown up on this report, but will be showing up in months to come is a contraction in bad jobs. Starbucks, for example, will be closing 600 stores. That's a lot of jobs. This won't be isolated to Starbucks; retail and hospitality of all kinds will start contracting as people shop less and eat in more. With consumer credit being restricted by banks, with jobs being lost and with fixed expenses for heating, gasoline and food going up, the consumer is not going to be able to keep up the spending pace. This crisis didn't start out as a classic consumer demand recession, but it's about to experience some significant consumer demand contraction nonetheless.

Governments increased hiring last month, but government hiring is also going to come under significant pressure. State revenues dropped 5.3% from last year, they will continue to drop. Municipal tax bases are going to be absolutely annihilated by the real estate meltdown, which still has at least 2, and possibly 4 years to play out and which will see declines of at least 20% on average before it's done. As real estate is revalued, tax assessments will crash. Municipal and state governments will find themselves with a lot less money than they're used to and will be forced to make cuts.

No More FARC by lulugaia

It reads like a Hollywood script—Colombian commandos descend into the jungle and exit with 15 hostages, including a former Colombian presidential candidate and three American Pentagon contractors who'd been held by anti-government guerillas. The hostages had been held for six long years. What a long time and what a relief.

The Pentagon's been getting great press for helping in the raid that released the hostages in Colombia. The Bush Administration was involved in the planning of the rescue and provided unspecified "specific support," according to the White House. As for John McCain, who admitted being briefed about the raid the night before it occurred -- some at Fox News Fox News are giving him props for possibly influencing the hostage release: "There really might be a connection between the high-level visit of the former prisoner of war, John McCain himself, and the release now of three American prisoners here in southern Colombia," said reporter Steve Harrigan.

John McCain, Bush and of course, Colombian president Alvaro Uribe are all too eager to cast the Uribe government in a heroic light. After all, there's another not-so "free" trade deal's at stake.

It's always cause for celebration when hostages are released. But let’s not lose sight of what side the US has been on during Colombia's grim, dirty conflict.

Although the guerillas get the coverage, it's not just the FARC that's up to nasty business in Colombia. Successive Colombian governments and their allies have waged brutal war on their critics -- and they've enjoyed support from successive US administrations.

What's Colombia got that McCain and Bush want? Resources and industry, although the place is overwhelmed with poverty. Those who'd relieve that poverty -- trade unionists, for example -- have been slaughtered by the score. Over 400 hundred labor organizers have been murdered under the Uribe regime alone.

There was a striking story this week in the Colorado Springs Gazette about the children of Japanese-American internees returning to Camp Amache, the place where they were held during World War II. It talks about the heavy human toll paid by the victims of that episode, as well as the way we've managed to dump it all down the national memory hole:

The buildings are gone, sold by the government after the war, but the camp remains, an overgrown, snake-infested patchwork of foundations. A National Historic Landmark, it is accessible to the public but rarely visited, a forgotten, open secret of the past.

"It's something we don't necessarily like to talk about," said University of Denver professor Bonnie Clark, overseeing the archaeological survey. "We like to think this isn't the kind of thing we do."

But it is the kind of thing we do -- or at least, are about to do again:

The Justice Department is considering establishing a new policy that would allow the FBI to target Americans for investigation even in the absence of evidence or other compelling indications that the person was breaking a law, according to the Associated Press.

The policy, being considered as part of the attorney general's guidelines to the FBI, would allow the agency to conduct racial profiling -- potentially singling out Muslim- and Arab-Americans -- and to open preliminary terrorism investigations against targets simply on the basis of patterns established through data mining public records and other information.

The agency would be allowed to profile targets based on their race and activities, such as travel to the Middle East or any other part of the world associated with terrorism. But race would be only one factor in the decision to open an investigation.

Now, I'm sure this news makes Michelle Malkin all warm and fuzzy. After all, that was the point of her execrable defense of the internment -- it showed that racial profiling was a perfectly reasonable enterprise, according to her logic.

But the fact is that racial profiling actually makes us more vulnerable to terrorism because it exposes our anti-terror strategy to being gamed: terrorists can more effectively elude notice by enlisting operatives who do not fit the profile. In other words, it simply doesn't work.

If there were reasons to believe they were getting desperate, we could at least understand why the FBI wants to indulge in racial profiling in its search for terrorism suspects (since at best it offers the illusion that they're doing something). But considering that there have been no significant terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11, this just doesn't make sense.