Record Profits; Wikileaks and Bank of America; etc.

(1) Record Profits in 3rd Quarter: In case you missed it last week while making pumpkin pie, U.S. companies just had their best quarter on record.  From the New York Times:

according to a Commerce Department report

Bob Herbert had a nice take on this in a column called Winning the Class War.

(2) Does Wikileaks have Dirt on Bank of America, Too? This is the title of an article from McClatchy (hat-tip to Herr Prof. Snyder). Basically, Forbes magazine posted something recently quoting Wikileak's Julian Assange saying that they would release a "megaleak" about a major U.S. bank sometime this coming January.  And Assange apparently told Computerworld back in October, 2009 that Wikileaks had a BoA executive's harddrive with lots of information on it.  Sorry, Hillary, but this is starting to get fun...

(3) The Messiah Among Us. I admire all the wonderful people who write for D&S. But I have to admit that it was pretty surprising to find out from an article in the most recent New Yorker that one of them has recently begun to be considered by many people to be "the culminating Messiah figure awaited by all the world’s major religions."  The author in question is Raj Patel, a political economist who wrote a piece for our May/June 2010 issue on Corporate Accountability International's campaign against McDonald's.  (Sorry--we haven't posted his articles online;  we reserve our most divine coverage for the print edition. But the truly devout can subscribe or order back issues.) Good luck to Raj coping with all the adulation.

(3)  D&S Author in Monthly Review: It's not quite like getting deified, but kudos to Dan DiMaggio, author of The Jobs Crisis and the Art of Flexible Labor, for getting an article in the venerable Monthly Review.  Dan's article, "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Test-Scorer," is about his experience grading standardized tests as a temp worker.  (Dan's MR article is also not online, but here's the current issue's table of contents.)

(4) Liberal Alternatives to Cat Food: Two left-liberal groups came out with (similar) deficit-reduction proposals that aim to be alternatives to Obama's Deficit Commission's austerity plan (not that the commission as a whole has been able to agree on anything).  From Demos, EPI, and the Century Foundation we have something called the Blueprint for Our Fiscal Security;  meanwhile the Citizens’ Commission on Jobs, Deficits and America’s Economic Future issued its Report and Recommendations.  Hallmarks of both are good ideas like waiting for a while before even trying to reduce the deficit;  letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire;  a tax on financial transactions;  deep military cuts;  raising the cap on wages taxable for Social Security.

--Chris Sturr