Few Das Krapital readers probably know this but the first Marxist I ever knew was actually a guy I met during five gruesome* months I spent working on the metro desk of the Washington Times. (He did not make the ideology seem particularly appealing, but that’s another story.) Anyway so the Moonie paper has always held a kinda weird place in my heart and I’ve been keeping tabs on its neverending deathwatch with a kind of vague sadness that is only slightly more unsettling than that which I took the news of Howie Kurtz‘s departure from the Washington Post.

Anyway, Bloomberg is reporting that “creditors” of the Times have filed a petition in Delaware bankruptcy court to try and force the Times to file for bankruptcy protection. A highly placed Times source says it is the “first” he/she has “heard of it.” Yesterday I heard from a former Times staffer and amateur Moonologist that the paper had recently had a $10 million annual contract to run legal advertisements fall through due in part to its near-nonexistent circulation, so they could be running into a cash squeeze.

The newspaper, which still actually exists in print form although it is almost impossible to find outside the recycling bin of my father and other people who pay $200 a year to subscribe to it, is in the midst of a protracted Moon family custody battle that is too complicated to explain here but was essentially touched off when Rev. Moon anointed his youngest son Heung Jin Moon to be the True Father 2.0 or whatever the official name for Moonie Messiah is supposed to be, in lieu of his older son Preston Moon, who controls the newspaper and the source of the $40 million a year subsidy it receives from mysterious other church related entities.

My guess is that whoever these creditors are, they will be seeing their money a lot sooner than we see the Times in bankruptcy court, since whatever the source of the $2 billion and counting that has kept the lights on at the Times for the past 28 years actually is, it doesn’t exactly want to make itself known to save a few hundred grand or whatever it is.

*Mostly because I was living with my parents, not for any real reason involving the Washington Times except for the fact of its location, which is in hell.