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The Big Money economy is booming. According to a new Commerce Department report, third-quarter profits of American businesses rose at an annual record-breaking $1.659 trillion - besting even the boom year of 2006 (in nominal dollars). Profits have soared for seven consecutive quarters now, matching or beating their fastest pace in history. Executive pay is linked to profits, so top pay is soaring as well. Higher profits are also translating into the nice gains in the stock market, which is a boon to everyone with lots of financial assets. And Wall Street is back. Bonuses on the Street are expected to rise about 5 percent this year, according to a survey by compensation consultants Johnson Associates Inc. But nothing is trickling down to the Average Worker economy. Job growth is still anemic. At October's rate of only 50,000 new private-sector jobs, unemployment won't get down to pre-recession levels for twenty years. And almost half of October's new jobs were in temporary help.

http://mediasanctuary.tv http://www.NationalPeaceConference.org  Renowned linguist and political critic Noam Chomsky delivered this address by pre-recorded video to the attendees of the United National Peace Conference in Albany, New York on July 24, 2010.   Video by Charngchi Way, Authority Smashers Collective http://www.authoritysmashers.wordpress.com Distributed by the United National Peace Conference Media Project, an initiative powered by the Sanctuary for Independent Media and Hudson Mohawk Indymedia Center.

An Arab country with neither secret police nor censorship is unprecedented in recent decades. Tunisia is inspiring similar demands in Egypt and Jordan. When skeptics wonder if the Revolutions of 2011 would really change anything essential in the region, they would be wise to keep an eye on these two developments in Tunisia, which, if consolidated, would represent an epochal transformation of culture and politics. Arguably, Tunisians are now freer than Americans. The US government thinks our private emails are actually public. The FBI and NSA routinely read our email and they and other branches of the US government issue security letters in the place of warrants allowing them to tap phones and monitor whom we call, and even to call up our library records and conduct searches of our homes without telling us about it. Millions of telephone records were turned over to George W. Bush by our weaselly telecom companies. Courts allow government agents to sneak onto our property and put GPS tracking devices under our automobiles without so much as a warrant or even probable cause. Mr. Obama thinks this way of proceeding is a dandy idea.

The NAACP has just passed a historic resolution demanding an end to the War on Drugs.  The resolution comes as young Black male unemployment hovers near 50 percent and the wealth gap's become a veritable gulf. So why is the forty-year-old "War on Drugs" public enemy number one for the nation's oldest civil rights organization? Well here's why:  it's not extraneous - it's central: the war on drugs is the engine of 21st century discrimination - an engine that has brought Jim Crow into the age of Barack Obama.     Author Michelle Alexander lays out the statistics -- and the stories --  of 21st Century Jim Crow in her ought-to-blow-your-socks off book: "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness." I had a chance to sit down with Alexander earlier this summer. We'll be posting the full interview in two parts.     "We have managed decades after the civil rights movement to create something like a caste system in the United States," says Alexander in part one here  "In major urban areas, the majority of African American men are either behind bars, under correctional control or saddled with criminal record and once branded as criminal or a felon, they're trapped for life in 2nd class status."     It's not just about people having a hard time getting ahead and climbing the ladder of success. It's about a rigged system. Sound familiar?  Like the Pew Research Center report on household wealth and the Great Recession -- the NAACP resolution story was a one-day news-blip - despite the fact that it pierces the by-your-bootstraps myth that is at the heart of - you pick it - the deficit, the stimulus, the tax code - every contemporary US economic debate.     White America just maybe ought to pay attention. With more and more Americans falling out of jobs and into debt, criminal records are a whole lot easier to come by than life-sustaining employment.  Contrary to the conventional media version, the "Drug War" story is not a people with problems

With Wall Street speculators driving up oil and gas prices to near record highs, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today urged President Obama to ask for the immediate resignation of federal regulators who won't enforce a new law to stop excessive speculation in oil markets. Gasoline pump prices in Vermont averaged $3.90 a gallon today, a penny more than the national average. At the same time, big oil companies posted record profits. ExxonMobil's $10.7 billion first-quarter profit was 69 percent greater than one year ago.

'It is now virtually certain a child born in 1979 will not reach 50 years of age before the Arctic is ice-free in the summer. That is a rapid change on a planetary scale, with far-reaching consequences that scientists are just beginning to understand.' Stephen Leahy, Inter Press Service

The Holy Al-Qur'an is the main root of the Arabic culture owing to Arabic religious, social teachings and moral, and to the reality that it's valid for every place and age, and can keep step with the essentials and the new evolutions of every old age. The Sunnah is the second primal root of culture of the Arab-Islamic. Just as they trusted on the Al-Qur'an and its recall their scientific, intellectual and civilization renascence, Moslems also trusted on their Prophet's Sunnah, after they had recorded, compiled, and divided it into chapters, and later they had committed it in their technological efforts & in their path of life. The culture of Arab-Islamic, which originally bases from the Al-Qur'an and the Sunnah, is a large-minded culture which prophesies coexistence, understanding and dialogue.

Part 1: The definition of "Rule of Law". Glenn Greenwald speaks about America's two-tiered justice system and why he wrote his latest book, "Liberty and Justice for Some". (Available on Amazon.com: http://amzn.to/tAANlP) Recorded at Claremont-McKenna College on 4 November 2011.

The Oakland Police Department oversaw the use of excessive force against Occupy Oakland demonstrators, and now the department is refusing to hand over information about what really happened. The ACLU of Northern California and the National Lawyers' Guild sent a public records request about OPD's use of force on the night of October 25, 2011 on demonstrators supporting Occupy Oakland. The response we received is both infuriating and misguided.

When many cynics thought it impossible, the President reaches an all-new low in his abysmal civil liberties record

Which is not to say that the Obama era has meant an end to law enforcement. On the contrary: In the past few years, the administration has allocated massive amounts of federal resources to catching wrongdoers - of a certain type. Last year, the government deported 393,000 people, at a cost of $5 billion. Since 2007, felony immigration prosecutions along the Mexican border have surged 77 percent; nonfelony prosecutions by 259 percent. In Ohio last month, a single mother was caught lying about where she lived to put her kids into a better school district; the judge in the case tried to sentence her to 10 days in jail for fraud, declaring that letting her go free would "demean the seriousness" of the offenses. So there you have it. Illegal immigrants: 393,000. Lying moms: one. Bankers: zero. The math makes sense only because the politics are so obvious. You want to win elections, you bang on the jailable class. You build prisons and fill them with people for selling dime bags and stealing CD players. But for stealing a billion dollars? For fraud that puts a million people into foreclosure? Pass. It's not a crime. Prison is too harsh. Get them to say they're sorry, and move on. Oh, wait - let's not even make them say they're sorry. That's too mean; let's just give them a piece of paper with a government stamp on it, officially clearing them of the need to apologize, and make them pay a fine instead. But don't make them pay it out of their own pockets, and don't ask them to give back the money they stole. In fact, let them profit from their collective crimes, to the tune of a record $135 billion in pay and benefits last year. What's next? Taxpayer-funded massages for every Wall Street executive guilty of fraud?

In this "Countdown" exclusive interview, Keith sits down with Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi to discuss breaking the story about the Securities and Exchange Commission destroying the records of promising cases in the years leading up to the financial meltdown.

One of the most important speeches in recorded history was given by a comedian by the name of Charlie Chaplin. If you like what you see please share the video any way you can and pass the message on.

"If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about." Many Americans have said this, or heard it, when discussing the expanded surveillance capabilities the government has claimed since 9/11. But, it turns out you should be concerned. Just ask peace activists in Pittsburgh, anti-death penalty activists in Maryland, Ron Paul supporters in Missouri, an anarchist in Texas, groups on both sides of the abortion debate in Wisconsin, Muslim-Americans and many others who pose no threat to their communities. Some of them were labeled as terrorists in state and federal databases or placed on terror watch-lists, impeding their travel, misleading investigators and putting these innocent Americans at risk. The Fourth Amendment requirement that you must be suspected of wrongdoing before the government searches your private records risks becoming a quaint notion. Congress weakened the laws designed to protect our privacy, while the executive branch secretly re-interprets or simply ignores the law with no consequence. While your privacy is being sacrificed, there's little evidence the new spying programs are catching terrorists. The question should be, "If you're not doing anything wrong, why is the government snooping on you?"

This American life of ours has long been pro-violence and anti-sex, unless the two can be merged so that violence is the dominant theme. The U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed that historical record on Monday in declaring California's ban on the sale of violent video games to minors unconstitutional while continuing to deny constitutional protection to purely prurient sexual material for either minors or adults.

Oct. 18 (Bloomberg) -- The top U.S. derivatives regulators voted 3 to 2 today to curb trading in oil, wheat, gold and other commodities after a boom in raw-materials speculation, record- high prices and years of debate and delay. The rule has been among the most controversial provisions of the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul, enacted last year, which gave the Commodity Futures Trading Commission the authority to limit trading in over-the-counter commodity swaps as well as exchange-traded futures. The rule will limit the number of contracts a single firm can hold. "Our duty is to protect both market participants and the American public from fraud, manipulation and other abuses," Chairman Gary Gensler said at the commission's meeting in Washington in support of the rule. "Position limits have served since the Commodity Exchange Act passed in 1936 as a tool to curb or prevent excessive speculation that may burden interstate commerce." The rule limits traders to 25 percent of deliverable supply in the month nearest to delivery. The spot-month limits apply separately to physically settled and cash-settled contracts. Deliverable supply will be determined by the CFTC in conjunction with the exchanges.

Why KBR continues to be awarded huge open-ended, cost-plus, no-compete contracts from the Pentagon is a question worthy of a criminal investigation, because their track record as a military contractor suggests that "KBR" is actually short for "Kickbacks, Bribes & Ripoffs".  According to the POGO Federal Contractor Misconduct Database, since 1995 the company has been involved in not less than 23 documented cases of misconduct including but not limited to Overcharging the Government, Violation of Anti-Kickback Act, Excessive Subcontract Costs, Fraud and Accepting Kickbacks, Exposing Troops to Hazardous Water Conditions, Bribery to Win International Government Contracts, Overpricing Fuel, Breach of Contract, Hurricane Relief Contract Overcharges, Sexual Assault, Freight Forwarding Kickbacks, Procurement Irregularities, and Conspiracy to Defraud the Government.  For this KBR has paid millions in fines, which it surely considers a small price to pay for the billions it continues to receive in new federal contracts every year:

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