"As Yan Xuetong recently noted, 'military strength underpins hegemony.' Here the United States remains unmatched. It is far and away the most powerful nation the world has ever known, and there has been no decline in America's relative military capacity -- at least not yet."

Quinn told the crowd at his Tuesday night victory rally, "There is a principle as old as the Bible: If you work hard. If you're working 40 hours a week, and if you're doing your job, you should not have to live in poverty. You should get a decent wage. We believe in that and we're going to make it happen."

At the same time, Quinn's campaign began airing a fresh television ad ripping Republican nominee Bruce Rauner on the issue. A wealthy venture capitalist, who recently quipped that he was not just part of the 1 percent but "probably [the] 0.1 percent," Rauner financed much of his own primary campaign with contributions estimated at $6 million. Yet in the new Quinn ad he is seen proclaiming, "I am adamantly, adamantly against raising the minimum wage." Rauner, whose GOP primary win was a narrow one, has been all over the place on the wage issue. He said early in the campaign that he would lower the state minimum wage from $8.25 an hour to the national rate of $7.25 an hour. Reports that one of the wealthiest men in the state was promising to cut wages for working Illinoisans did not go over well, and Rauner then suggested he might support raising the state rate if economic conditions were favorable.

Quinn has been far clearer when it comes to discussing wages-saying he favors an increase to at least $10 an hour this year-and the broader issue of economic inequality.

I am sitting in the Red Oak Diner outside Princeton, N.J., with Christine Pagano and her friend Jeannette. They have just finished attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in a small room in a strip mall behind us. Many who were at the meeting struggle to make rent or car payments. Those with jobs worry about being laid off. Some live in terror that creditors, or the state, will electronically empty their meager bank accounts for debts they owe. Some fear outstanding warrants will land them in jail. One small tremor and the fragile stability they have achieved will crumble to dust. During AA sessions they admit there are times when they want to blunt the pain again, at least for a moment, by getting drunk or high. And when the meetings are over, everyone stands up, holds hands and says the Lord's Prayer.

The rain is lashing the window next to our booth. The diner is nearly empty. Trucks on Route 206 roar past, their headlights a blur in the rainstorm. Pagano, 31, has worked all day in a deli and bakery. She was up at 6:30 a.m. Her hands are cupped around a glass of unsweetened ice tea. Her dark, auburn hair is pulled up in a neat bun. Her eyes are carefully lined with mascara.

Her drug use began when she was a 16-year-old in high school, after a classmate confessed to the school guidance counselor that she had had sex with Pagano's stepfather. Her mother's marriage, and with it whatever stability it provided in Pagano's life, imploded. The story about the classmate and Pagano's stepfather became public in her rural community in northern New Jersey. She felt humiliated. She began to snort heroin. She dropped out of school and worked to feed her habit. She got into a drug treatment program in 2007. She got sober. She lived in a group house in Brick, N.J., where all the residents promised not to use drugs or alcohol. She met a man who had just gotten out of prison and was also in recovery. They set out to make a life together.

She worked in a diner and got a cosmetology certificate. She and her boyfriend rented a house and bought a car. She became pregnant. After she gave birth she stayed home with her son.

"I was a new mom," she says. "I had no idea what I was doing. I was really overwhelmed. I don't remember ever really thinking about using or drinking, but I was never all right. I was never really OK with who I was. I always felt not good enough. And even as a mom, with ... this beautiful child, I never felt OK. I use to bite my nails all the time. I was very anxiety-ridden."

She and her boyfriend went regularly to meetings for those in recovery from addiction. They stayed clean for four years.

"I remember the day that my son's father and I decided it would be OK that we had a drink," she says. "And it was like totally normal. We were in our house in Sussex. Our neighbor came over and she didn't know I was in recovery. And I never bothered to tell her. And she had a bottle of wine in her hand. And we barbecued and I drank a glass of wine. ... And I did not want to drink any more. I was still pretty coherent enough that I didn't want to be drunk, because of my son."

She thinks her boyfriend, who was working for a tree service company and was a member of the electricians union, was secretly taking the opiate Oxycontin. He suggested they go "doctor shopping" to get pills to sell. Her boyfriend's family had a history of addictions. His father had died in the jail on Riker's Island in New York. His sister was a heroin addict and a prostitute who worked for a well-known New Jersey pimp called "Prince" who drove a Rolls-Royce and a white Cadillac with flashy rims and white carpeting. "He would walk into this bar in Jersey City called Ringside," Pagano says. "He would go, 'The champ is here.' "

She and her boyfriend started taking pills together. A month later they switched to heroin. It was cheaper. She snorted it for a week, and then her boyfriend shot her up with heroin. It was her first time with a needle.

"He called his sister and his sister told us where we could get heroin," she says. "And she lived in the heart of Jersey City. So we went down there and in the beginning we were selling the pills to support the heroin habit. And then our heroin habit got too big for the money. This was the first time my son's father told me that I should go out on the street with his sister."

She accompanied her boyfriend's sister, known by the street name "Baby" on Jersey City's Tonnelle Avenue, Route 1 and Route 9, where there is a string of cheap motels. Pagano, who is white, wore a short, shimmering gold skirt and adopted the name "Gucci." Prostitutes on Tonnelle Avenue, which is close to the Holland Tunnel, connecting Jersey City and Manhattan, made $50 for oral sex and $100 for vaginal intercourse, "but if it goes any longer than 10 minutes you're charging them more." An hour cost $250 and a full night cost $1,500. To the Wall Street traders, business executives and bankers who are the area prostitutes' main customers, money never seemed to be an issue. Their wallets were stuffed with cash. On her first night Pagano hailed men headed home to the suburbs from New York City but then burst into tears or fought them off once she was inside the cars.

"I think the first night I actually never went through with it, but I ended up making money because I was a sobbing mess in these cars and guys just gave me money," she says. "Most of them had a lot of money 'cause they were coming from the city. So then my son's father got the idea that if I couldn't do it I would ... make them get a room, act like I was gonna do it-and he would kick the door in-and rob them. We did that a couple time until I couldn't keep track of who I was robbing. And the last time I went to do it I had already robbed the guy [on an earlier night] and he started beating me up in the room."

It took her two weeks to begin having sex with the "tricks." She slowly began to build a regular clientele and mastered the survival skills that come with walking the street.

"A couple times I got to stay in this really nice suite that overlooked Newark Airport," she said. "Some of them had a lot of money."

She would buy heroin after a night's work-she and her boyfriend together had a $500-a-day habit-from a dealer named "Kiss."

"Kiss would come out no matter when I called 'cause he knew he was getting his $500 from me," she says. She would drive home, often around 4:30 in the morning, and shoot up with her boyfriend. Her relationship with him deteriorated into that of "drug partners" and little else. They fought frequently, something they had not done while sober.

"He would throw it in my face a lot," she says of her prostitution, "but he had no problem doing my drugs. We were no longer parents. We were no longer anything."

But she still had her son, Liam.

"There were times where Kristen [Baby] would go out and I would sit in the car with my son," she says. "I would have him out in my car on Tonnelle Avenue. I thought I was a good mom 'cause I would wait in the car. She would go out and she would come back and wait in the car for me to come back with money."

She began to leave Liam with his father at night while she worked the streets.

Cops, she said, were regular customers, although most refused to pay. Some threatened to arrest her if she did not give them unpaid sex.

"The first time I ever got raped actually was by a cop in Elizabeth," she says. "He wanted to 'trick off,' which is normal for cops."

"They would get you in the car because they would act like they were arresting you," she says, "and then once they got you in the car they would tell you, 'Oh well, if you blow me I'll let you go.' And you get smart after a while. I mean after a while I would let them take me to jail because they can't-what are they gonna say? There's nothing on videotape. What are they gonna say? They can't. It takes you a while to learn this type of stuff."

"We were in the back of the police car," she says of her first rape. "He had paid me. Then he punched me in the face and he took the money back. He pulled out his gun and told me I was gonna do whatever he told me to do. He stuck his gun up my vagina. He told me he was gonna pull the trigger if I didn't do what he said. He wanted to treat me like a piece of shit. Ya know, he called me a bunch of names. He made me call myself a bunch of names-a dirty prostitute. At one point he made me say that I had AIDS. Yeah."

"The only cop I remember his name from down there was a Jersey City cop, we called him Barney, I don't know his real name," she says. "He looked like Barney [Rubble, the cartoon character]. He was my first prostitution arrest. And the only reason he arrested me was that I was standing next to Kristen. And she was known. When they brought us in it was her 39th prostitution arrest. They [police officers] were clapping when they brought her in. Everybody knew who she was."

On a good night Pagano made $600 to $700. On a bad night she made $100. "I made the best money in snow and rain," she says.

Some customers wanted to indulge in fetishes. "I've put diapers on guys," she says. Others wanted to put on makeup and women's clothes.

She often injected herself with heroin or smoked crack as soon as she and a client got into a hotel room. "A lot of them would do it [take drugs] with you," she says. "A lot of them pay you to get their drugs for them."

She learned to immediately open the glove compartment to get the name and address of the driver when she entered a vehicle. She made more money by threatening to call the customer's wife.

She also learned what to avoid. "In Jersey City there's a street when you go down Tonnelle Avenue," she says. "I think it's called Industrial Way [probably Industrial Drive]. It's industrial parks. You never, ever, ever want to go down there. And you always knew you were in trouble if you got in a car with a guy and he started driving that way. I've jumped out of many cars. 'Cause as soon as you saw you were driving down that street, you knew you were gonna get raped."

She endured for nine months. She begged her boyfriend to help her get off the streets. He decided to rob a bank. He entered a bank in Jersey City in June 2010 with a backpack and a note that said he had a bomb. He did not cover his face. He took $578 from a teller.

"I was driving on the Turnpike from our house down to Jersey City and I saw a big sign 'FBI wanted' with a picture of my son's father," she says. "And I pulled over on the side of the road and lost my mind."

He was arrested a month later when the FBI, the state police and U.S. marshals kicked down the door of their house at 5:30 in the morning. He is now serving a nine-year sentence in the maximum-security federal prison at Lewisburg, Pa.

"That's when I really went off the deep end," Pagano says. "I gave up on everything."

She sent her son to live with her mother, who is a teacher. She moved in for a while with her boyfriend's sister, Baby, in Jersey City. She eventually became homeless, sleeping in an abandoned flower shop. Her drug use soared. She would be awake for six or seven days at a time. She had as many as 20 clients a day. Finally, nearly broken, she got back into rehab. She became sober again. She met a man in the program. He relapsed two weeks later and went to jail. She began drinking heavily with the mother of her baby's father.

"We were in Atlantic City one night, me and his mom," she says. "We were out all night long at some grimy bar. Some guy offered me 'dog food.' And I said, 'What the hell is dog food?' I had never heard a lot of terms before. It was heroin. I was drunk. I followed him. I got the heroin. It progresses very quickly."

She started taking the bus from Williamstown, N.J., where she was living, to Atlantic City to "trick" and buy drugs. She got arrested. When she got out of jail she decided to go to Camden. Camden was where many Atlantic City pushers got their drugs. Heroin costs $10 a bag in Camden and $6 a bag in Jersey City, but the Camden heroin was far more potent and provided a much longer high. And Camden was only 20 minutes from where she was living.

Camden is among the country's poorest and most crime-ridden cities. The loss of its manufacturing base has seen its population shrink from 120,000 in the 1950s to less than 80,000 today. Whole blocks lie abandoned. There are an estimated 1,500 derelict buildings. The roofs of many empty row houses, gas stations, stores and warehouses have collapsed. Basements in derelict buildings are flooded. Copper wiring, metal doors, radiators and piping have been ripped out by scavengers who sell the materials to the huge scrap yard along the Delaware River. Some 175 open-air drug markets exist in the city. Hookers, often white addicts, congregate on street corners and near the main exit ramp of the multilane highway that cuts through the heart of Camden.

The first time Pagano took the bus to Camden, she walked up to the first person she saw upon her arrival at Walter Rand Transportation Center and said: "Where do you sell your ass around here?" She was told to go to Broadway. She never went home. Camden, however, was not Jersey City or Atlantic City. Her clients were not wealthy businessmen or Wall Street managers, but fellow addicts. She could not make the same kind of money. There were women on the street who would give oral sex for as little as $5.

"They'd suck your dick for a hit of crack," she says. "Camden was like nothing I had ever seen before. The poverty is so bad. People rob you for $5, literally for $5. They would pull a gun on you for no money. I would get out of cars, I would walk five feet up the road and get held up. And they would take all my money. The first time it happened to me I cried an hour. You degrade yourself. You get out of the car. And some guy pulls a gun on you."

She scaled down her charges, eventually giving oral sex for $20. And she found that her clients refused to let her use condoms.

"I gave up on everything at that point, I wanted to die," she says. "I didn't care anymore. All the guilt and the shame and leaving my son, not talking to my son, not talking to my family."

She met a man named E-frie who had just finished an 18-year prison sentence. He gave her drugs in return for sex. He drank heavily and smoked marijuana. He taunted her for being a junkie and frequently beat her, once pushing her down a flight of stairs.

"I was still living on the streets," she says. "I was living everywhere. Abandoned buildings. Most of my stuff was hidden all over downtown Camden. I would dig holes and bury stuff in backyards."

She gently fingers a ring dangling from her necklace.

"My mother gave this to me from my son," she says. "I never take it off my neck. It's a mother-and-son ring. It's made it through everything with me. Someone ripped my necklace off one time. I flipped out. It was the only thing that made me feel like I had my son with me. I found the ring after someone ripped it off. I used to wear it on my hand. But I would get nervous that someone would rob me over a ring. I would dig holes and bury it. I would bury it with my money."

She put her profile on an Internet site to solicit clients. By then she had been raped as many as 20 times.

"The last time was the most brutal," she says. "It was on Pine Street near the Off Broadway [Lounge]. There's weeds on the side. I never took tricks off the street. They had to be in cars. But I was sick. I was tired."

A man on the street had offered her $20 for oral sex. But once they were in the weeds he pulled out a knife. He told her if she screamed he would kill her. When she offered some resistance he stabbed her. "He was trying to stab me in my vagina," she says. He stabbed her thigh. "It's kind of bad because I actually never ended up doing anything about it. It ended up turning into a big infection."

"I had seen this episode of Oprah years ago and this girl had been raped-her survival skills kicked in and what she did was tell the guy that he didn't have to do that to her, that he could do better," she says. "I got outta him that he and his girlfriend had gotten into a fight and that she wouldn't have sex with him and that somebody was gonna have sex with him that night. He made me hold his phone that had porn on it. He never really pulled his pants all the way down. And at this point I'm bleeding pretty badly. I'm lying on glass outside of this bar. I had like little bits of glass in my back. I remember being really scared. Then it just got to the point where I was just numb. I asked him if he could stop at one point so I could smoke a cigarette. He let me. I got him to put the knife down because I was being good and listening to him. He stabbed the knife in the dirt. He said, 'Just so you know I can pick it up at any point.' I think in his head he thought that I was scared enough. In my head I was trying to figure out how the hell I was going to get outta there. And it occurred to me one of the things he kept asking me to do was lick his butt. And he was getting off on this. The last time he turned around and asked me to do this I pushed him. I had myself set up to get up." She ran naked into the street. The commotion attracted the police. A passerby gave her his shirt to cover up. At 5 feet 5 inches tall she weighed only 86 pounds. Her skin was gray. Her feet were so swollen she was wearing size 12 men's slippers.

She would last four more weeks on the streets, until a private investigator hired by her mother found her in September 2012. He called her mother and handed the phone to Pagano. "I told her to leave me the fuck alone, just let me die," she says. "And she told me that she was not going to let me die out there. She said, 'You will not be sleeping on the streets of Camden tonight.' "

Because Pagano had a raft of outstanding warrants the investigator took her to jail, but her physical condition was so bad the jail refused to accept her. She was hospitalized for two weeks. She went into a methadone program that cost her mother $20,000.

"I was so hurt and so broken," she says. "I was in shock. When it all wore off I would wake up at night screaming, sweating, I had peed myself a couple times in the middle of the night. I still have nightmares. A lot of it goes back to that last rape. A lot of it has to do with E-frie."

"I live in a shitty little apartment, at 31 years old, with a roommate, who used to be sober and is now a stripper," she says. "I have a crappy car. I will never have a prestigious job. I've never been more happy in my life."

This summer she will regain custody of her son.

She tells me about her new boyfriend, Jose. She speaks his name as if the fact of Jose is a miracle.

"He knows everything there is to ever know about me and has never judged me, never," she says. "If I'm in a funk, he says, 'Just go to the 5:30 meeting,' " referring to a daily Alcoholics Anonymous session. "He doesn't even know what the 5:30 AA meeting is."

"I struggle with God," she says. "I have to believe that I haven't been put through this to give up. And there's been a lot of times when I wanted to do just that. I sat through Camden County jail [on an old warrant] sober. I was looking at all the same people I used to be out on the street with-being called Gucci again."

"I think the one thing I am most grateful for is that I am scared today," she says. "I'm scared of the law. I never was. I'm scared to lose what little I have. Not the material things-but I look at my son now. I remember the day that I had him and thinking this was it. And looking back I think I thought that this was gonna fix me. But it didn't. And I learned that nothing is going to fix me. Liam's not going to fix me. Those [AA] meetings are not going to fix me. They're going to help. Jeannette's going to help. All these people in my life are going to help. But the only person that can fix me is me. And that's a hard pill to swallow when you've done nothing your whole life but fuck it up. And one of the biggest things I still can't get over is that even when I'm doing something right, I still feel like I'm doing something wrong. I always have that feeling that it's not good enough. That I'm not good enough. And now here I am at 31. I have a huge criminal record. I have horrible credit. I lost a house. I lost a car. It amazes me that my mother still looks at me knowing what I've done-and she doesn't look at me any differently. And [when I go wrong] she'll be the first to tell you, 'That's not my daughter, that's what my daughter does when she's not thinking straight.' "

Liam, 5, recently learned where his dad is. Before, when he asked, Pagano had answered by saying only, "Your dad loves you very much." But eventually she had to tell him the truth. The boy cried for more than an hour. He asked his mother to play a game in which she is a cop who arrests him so he can go to prison and talk to his father. It is a game they play often.

"He's going to be 11 when [his father] gets out," she says. "Liam wants to know if he's going to be in his life. I can't give him an answer. It's really sad that for $578 [the father is] sitting in prison for nine years. I'm not condoning what he did. He did it. He's guilty, but nine years?"

"The system is set up for us to fail," she says. "Ten years from now I'm still just going to be a number. I'm always going to have an SBI [State Bureau of Identification] number. I'm always going to have mug shots all over the Internet. Liam's father is going to be out when he's 42 years old. And what the fuck is he going to do? And they expect people not to go back. What's he going to do? I realize everyone's got a choice, but the state won't even help me. They're not going to help him. I'm not saying people shouldn't pay for what they do. Most people don't change. I'm not going to say that they do. But some change. I fight everyday to be a better person. I fight to fit into society."

The manager of the diner comes over to tell us he is closing in 15 minutes. He looks at Pagano. He sees she is distraught. "Take your time," he says gently. We are drinking coffee, pouring in little containers of creamer and stirring it too long.

"I never thought this would be my story," Pagano says. "You couldn't have told me this. Now I cry a lot. I'm very compassionate. I never used to be. They used to call me the ice queen."

She pauses and looks down at the table, trying to recover her composure. "I look in the mirror. Half the time I still see that girl again," she says, referring to her former self. "The other half of the time I see me."

We leave the diner, darting through the rain to our cars.

Two decades ago I was the investigator for the legal team that sold you the bullshit that a drunken captain was the principal cause of the Exxon Valdez disaster, the oil tanker crackup that poisoned over a thousand miles of Alaska's coastline 25 years ago on March 24, 1989.

The truth is far uglier, and the real culprit-British Petroleum, now BP-got away without a scratch to its reputation or to its pocketbook.

And because BP's willful negligence, prevarications and fraud in the Exxon Valdez spill cost the company nothing, its disdain for the law, for the environment and for the safety of its workers was repeated in the Gulf of Mexico with deadly consequences, resulting, two decades later, in the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Just this month, the Obama administration authorized BP to return to drilling in the Gulf.

It would be worth the time of our ever-trusting regulators to take a look at my Exxon Valdez BP files. They would see a decades-long pattern of BP's lies, bribes and cover-ups that led, inexorably, to the Deepwater Horizon blowout-and that continue today within BP's worldwide oil operations.

Here is a sample from my files on BP from the original Exxon Valdez fraud and racketeering investigation:

Fraud No. 1: The Emergency Sucker Boat fraud

Containing an oil spill-preventing spilled crude from spreading to the shore-is not rocket science.

As the principal owner of the Alaska Pipeline and Terminal, BP, not Exxon, was designated by law to prevent oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez from hitting the beach. It was BP's disastrous failures, more than Exxon's, that allowed the oil to devastate Alaska's coast.

To contain a spill all you need are rubbers and suckers. It works like this:

If a tanker, oil rig or pipe bursts open, you surround it with a giant rubber skirt known as "boom." Then you suck the oil out through vacuum hoses on board special "containment" ships. The containment ship, which lays out the boom and skimmer hoses, is the firetruck of oil spills. You simply don't let tankers out of port unless a containment ship is ready to roll. It's against the law.

But the law has never meant much to BP.

In May 1977, as the first tankers left Valdez, BP executives promised the state of Alaska that no tanker would leave port unless there were two containment barges at the ready and loaded with boom, with one placed near Bligh Island.

In fact, on March 24, 1989, when the Exxon Valdez ran aground, right at Bligh Island, the containment barge was far away in Valdez, locked in a dry dock, its boom and hoses under Alaskan ice. As a result, by the time the emergency oil spill vessel got to the stricken ship, the oil slick was a hundred miles in circumference and beyond control.

Two decades later, I watched fireboats uselessly spraying the burning oil on the Deepwater Horizon. Once again there were no BP skimmer barges, no boom surrounding the rig. Just as in Alaska, the promised spill containment operation was a con. By the time the Navy set out 400 miles of rubber boom days later, the slick was already as big as Cuba and slathering the Gulf shores.

Recently, Chevron and other big oil giants, now drilling the Gulf, have printed a series of full-page ads in papers across America touting their new state-of-the-art oil spill containment operations. Hey, thanks. But these are the same vessels BP and its fellow Gulf drillers promised before the Deepwater Horizon blew apart.

Fraud No. 2: Ghost Crews

There's no sense having a firetruck without firemen. And so, years before the Exxon Valdez grounding, Alyeska, the oil company consortium headed by BP, promised the U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Congress, under oath, that the oil shipper would employ a trained and equipped crew around the clock to jump from helicopters, if needed, to contain an oil spill. My clients, the Chugach Natives of Alaska, agreed to give up ownership of the land under the Port of Valdez to the oil companies in return for those jobs.

The night the Exxon Valdez grounded, Chugach Natives watched from the beach at nearby Tatitlek Village as the tanker headed into the reef. They could have prevented the disaster-but they were helpless: BP had fired them.

In my team's investigation for the Chugach, we discovered that, to save money, BP's Alyeska simply drew up lists of nonexistent emergency spill response workers or wrote down names of untrained, unequipped dockworkers: an imaginary crew to man phantom emergency ships.

Fraud No. 3: Phantom Equipment

And the rubber boom? That was a phantom as well. BP's Alyeska had promised that too, in writing. The equipment was supposed to be placed along the tanker route including Bligh Island-exactly the spot where the Exxon Valdez grounded.

And so, it was no surprise to me that 21 years later in the Gulf there were neither skimmers nor boom at the site of the Deepwater Horizon. The equipment was there, as in Alaska, only on paper.

Indeed, part of BP's Gulf Coast response plan was a photocopy of the Alaska plan, including ways to wash down Arctic seals.

Cover-Up, Threats and Bribery

Did BP's top executives and partners know of the ghost response teams and phantom equipment ruse? Yes, we have the documents and insiders' testimony. Just three examples from my bulging file cabinet:

In a confidential letter dated April 19, 1984, Capt. James Woodle, BP's commander of the port at Valdez, warned that "due to a reduction in manning, age of equipment, limited training and lack of personnel, serious doubt exists that [we] would be able to contain and clean up effectively a medium or large size oil spill."

In response, BP threatened him with a file on his marital infidelities (fabricated), fired him, then forced him to destroy his files.

Ten months before the Exxon Valdez spill, BP's Alyeska chief, Theo Polasek, told a secret meeting of the top executives of the Alaska group oil companies (including BP, Exxon and ConocoPhillips) that containing an oil spill "at the mid-point of Prince William Sound [is] not possible with present equipment." But no change was made. Polasek was denied the funds needed to protect the mid-Sound-exactly where the tanker grounded.

In September 1984, before the Exxon Valdez disaster, BP's shipping broker, Charles Hamel, was so concerned at what he saw as an immediate danger in Alaska that he flew by Concorde to London to warn BP's chiefs of the looming emergency. In response, BP hired ex-CIA operatives to tap Hamel's phone and intercept his mail. BP's black ops team even ran a toy truck with a microphone into the air vents of a building where he was speaking with a congressman. (Ultimately, BP's spooks were captured by a team of Navy SEALs.)

BP Gets Off Cheap

The team of attorneys representing the Natives and fishermen whose lives were destroyed by the tanker spill chose to hold back the true and ugly story of systematic fraud and penny-pinching negligence by BP and its partners. We focused instead on the simpler story of human frailty and error-"drunken skipper hits reef."

We didn't have a choice: Oil company chiefs had told our clients-Natives who were out of cash, isolated and desperate-that they wouldn't get a dime unless we agreed not to use the "f-word": fraud. Exxon would withhold payment for 20 years.

We buried the fraud charges-yet Exxon still didn't pay for 22 years. By that time, a third of the Natives and fishermen in the lawsuit were dead.

And BP? Who said crime doesn't pay? BP walked away with a nominal payment to Alaska's Natives, fishermen and towns of $125 million-100 percent of it covered by insurance.

And that's what led, years later, to the incineration of 11 men on the Deepwater Horizon and 600 miles of Gulf coastline still poisoned today.

BP and other oil companies have a clear motive for these safety games: skimmer barges, crews, equipment and operations cost billions of dollars a year worldwide to man and maintain. It's cheaper to lie, cover up and buy the favor of politicians and regulators.

In London, BP executives told me on camera of their systematic bribery of presidents and their minions in the new Caspian Sea oil states. (Bribery charges against one bagman were dropped when in 2010 the National Security Agency acknowledged that it had authorized the bribes.)

But it's not just "over there" that BP spreads its largesse. BP's original sweetheart oil leases in the Gulf and the light hand of regulators were doubtless the result of favors-monetary and sexual-that the company lavished on U.S. regulatory agents at the Minerals Management Service, an agency that President Obama shuttered in response to the Deepwater Horizon blowout.

There's also the monetary and political love laid upon America's powerful. Although a foreign company, BP's chief in Alaska, Bob Malone, became a co-chairman and fundraiser for George W. Bush's election campaign.

Polluted Shores, Polluted Politics

In 2010 for the U.K.'s Channel 4 Television, I returned to Alaska with filmmaker Richard Rowley. In the quiet rivulets of the islands within Prince William Sound, we picked up gobs of oil with the telltale chemical markers of the Exxon Valdez. Then we flew to the Gulf Coast with Alaskan oil spill biologist Rick Steiner-and found miles and miles of BP's oil oozing under beaches the company and the Obama administration had already declared clean.

Yet just last week, BP was awarded more tracts to drill in the Gulf even as its onetime vice president for Gulf exploration, David Rainey, stands trial on felony charges of obstruction of Congress.

It seems safe to say that "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," the magnum opus of the French economist Thomas Piketty, will be the most important economics book of the year - and maybe of the decade. Mr. Piketty, arguably the world's leading expert on income and wealth inequality, does more than document the growing concentration of income in the hands of a small economic elite. He also makes a powerful case that we're on the way back to "patrimonial capitalism," in which the commanding heights of the economy are dominated not just by wealth, but also by inherited wealth, in which birth matters more than effort and talent.

To be sure, Mr. Piketty concedes that we aren't there yet. So far, the rise of America's 1 percent has mainly been driven by executive salaries and bonuses rather than income from investments, let alone inherited wealth. But six of the 10 wealthiest Americans are already heirs rather than self-made entrepreneurs, and the children of today's economic elite start from a position of immense privilege. As Mr. Piketty notes, "the risk of a drift toward oligarchy is real and gives little reason for optimism."

Indeed. And if you want to feel even less optimistic, consider what many U.S. politicians are up to. America's nascent oligarchy may not yet be fully formed - but one of our two main political parties already seems committed to defending the oligarchy's interests.

Despite the frantic efforts of some Republicans to pretend otherwise, most people realize that today's G.O.P. favors the interests of the rich over those of ordinary families. I suspect, however, that fewer people realize the extent to which the party favors returns on wealth over wages and salaries. And the dominance of income from capital, which can be inherited, over wages - the dominance of wealth over work - is what patrimonial capitalism is all about.

To see what I'm talking about, start with actual policies and policy proposals. It's generally understood that George W. Bush did all he could to cut taxes on the very affluent, that the middle-class cuts he included were essentially political loss leaders. It's less well understood that the biggest breaks went not to people paid high salaries but to coupon-clippers and heirs to large estates. True, the top tax bracket on earned income fell from 39.6 to 35 percent. But the top rate on dividends fell from 39.6 percent (because they were taxed as ordinary income) to 15 percent - and the estate tax was completely eliminated.

Some of these cuts were reversed under President Obama, but the point is that the great tax-cut push of the Bush years was mainly about reducing taxes on unearned income. And when Republicans retook one house of Congress, they promptly came up with a plan - Representative Paul Ryan's "road map" - calling for the elimination of taxes on interest, dividends, capital gains and estates. Under this plan, someone living solely off inherited wealth would have owed no federal taxes at all.

This tilt of policy toward the interests of wealth has been mirrored by a tilt in rhetoric; Republicans often seem so intent on exalting "job creators" that they forget to mention American workers. In 2012 Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, famously commemorated Labor Day with a Twitter post honoring business owners. More recently, Mr. Cantor reportedly reminded colleagues at a G.O.P. retreat that most Americans work for other people, which is at least one reason attempts to make a big issue out of Mr. Obama's supposed denigration of businesspeople fell flat. (Another reason was that Mr. Obama did no such thing.)

In fact, not only don't most Americans own businesses, but business income, and income from capital in general, is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people. In 1979 the top 1 percent of households accounted for 17 percent of business income; by 2007 the same group was getting 43 percent of business income, and 75 percent of capital gains. Yet this small elite gets all of the G.O.P.'s love, and most of its policy attention.

Why is this happening? Well, bear in mind that both Koch brothers are numbered among the 10 wealthiest Americans, and so are four Walmart heirs. Great wealth buys great political influence - and not just through campaign contributions. Many conservatives live inside an intellectual bubble of think tanks and captive media that is ultimately financed by a handful of megadonors. Not surprisingly, those inside the bubble tend to assume, instinctively, that what is good for oligarchs is good for America.

As I've already suggested, the results can sometimes seem comical. The important point to remember, however, is that the people inside the bubble have a lot of power, which they wield on behalf of their patrons. And the drift toward oligarchy continues.
(c) 2014 Paul Krugman --- The New York Times

There are more than 300 million people in the USA. 492 of them are billionaires. That represents roughly 16 millionths of 1%. In decimal form that's .0000016, or as a fraction, 16 over 1 million. This is not the 1% the Occupy Movement imprinted on (some of) the national consciousness. Even an innumerate person can understand that represents a teeny, tiny, microscopic portion of our supposedly democratic, equal opportunity, propaganda spouting world's most deadly military killing machine in history.

But hey, we're a free enterprise system, right? Those less than 500 of us are brilliant, industrious, hard working people who've earned every penny of that money by getting up early and getting off to the foundry, office, factory, school, hospital and sundry other places where people work, while the rest of us - roughly 99.9999984% - are loutish chumps (except for a small professional elite who were smart enough to become servants to that 16/millionth) who, if we work much harder, regularly attend religious services and even more regularly take good drugs, can also hope to join them up at that fractional faction of a factional fraction at the top. Someday. Sure.

It's in the Constitution. Or the Declaration. Or the bible? Well, maybe a comic book?

Meanwhile, at the other extreme of our population, far more people, actually tens of thousands, live in and on the street. They sleep in shelters, which put them up for the night if they are lucky enough to get in, and put them out in the morning. Or they sleep in cars, doorways, under bridges and on park benches, if there is no room at the inn - oops - shelter. But not to worry, theirs is not complete despair, abject misery or living death by comparison to the opulence enjoyed by the top fraction and its servant class.

Our bottom dwelling humans who absorb the most extreme loss that ultimately benefits upper level private profits can avail themselves of free food dispensaries at least once a day. And free health clinics and hospital emergency rooms when their economically and elements weakened state brings on illness or disease. And if they drop dead in the street and are not claimed by relatives, they are guaranteed publicly financed burial in Potter's Fields. That's after their bodies have been used to train future doctors and nurses, assuming the ravages of their lives haven't reduced them to former human but now garbage offering no useful parts or organs as tools for medical education.

We also have tens of millions of pet dogs and cats which live in warmth and comfort, are often loved as members of our human families, are very well fed and have health care from thousands of pet clinics staffed by educated veterinarians, including oncologists. This in a nation where some die in the street and no one even knows they had cancer until their unclaimed bodies are used for medical experiments.

Those may seem uncommon extremes of the social order but they are factual and not the healthiest sign for a nation and culture in which many still believe that we are superior to others, and if not a master race of chosen people, at least an exceptionally wonderful place to have a family, raise a dog, tap a phone or aim a drone. Given that and the fact that the overwhelming majority of what is called the scientific community warns us that our treatment of the planet's human and other resources is bringing us closer to a failure and possible breakdown of society previously inconceivable, what would you say we should be most concerned about?

What happened at Downton Abbey? The outcome of the NCAA March Madness? The chances that Miley Somebody's twerky tongue will grow a foot longer? That Pussy Riot will move to America and host next year's Academy Awards? Nope, nothing that important. Guess?

Putin, and Russia's attempt to take over the globe and make us all eat evil black bread!

You'd think as much if you read, watch, listen to and especially believe what you're told by our nation's corporate ministry of disinformation, which has been beating the drums of war for years now but most recently over this alleged renewed threat from Russia. And where is the evil Cossack saber poised to strike at the burgers, fries, Fox TV and PBS series we so love, cherish and would die for?

Right on our very borders at the Ukraine!

Well, though it actually borders on Russia and parts of it like the Crimea have actually been in Russia and millions of its population identify with and speak Russian, you might think it was in downtown Dallas or uptown New York for the way it has been treated by our sometimes telegenically attractive brain dead media mind managers and their pinheaded mentors in our Hollywood-for-ugly-people Government.

This would be laughable if not hysterically so, but for the fact that what passes for leadership, like the president, secretary of state, a wannabe president, and half wit critics of those dim bulbs because they aren't warlike enough, dominate what passes for discussion on an issue that could lead to even greater stress on a failing system, if not a blunder into a war that might just bring on collapse that much sooner.

There has never have been a better time to totally disregard corporate media and to be extremely careful about what passes for its "alternative." Study a map of the world and also look at the material reality of the USA that's neglected by those who tell us about it rather than allowing us to experience it. Learn to respect your neighbors and turn anger at those who allegedly represent you but are owned and operated exclusively for the benefit of that top minuscule minority and their servants. Demand and create social transformation before these people and their system destroys us all. Hurry.

"My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government." So wrote President Barack Obama, back on Jan. 29, 2009, just days into his presidency. "Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government." Now, six years into the Obama administration, his promise of "a new era of open Government" seems just another grand promise, cynically broken.

As the news industry observed its annual "Sunshine Week" in mid-March, The Associated Press reported that "[m]ore often than ever, the administration censored government files or outright denied access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act [FOIA]." The AP report continued, "The government's efforts to be more open about its activities last year were their worst since President Barack Obama took office."

This comes as no surprise to Ryan Shapiro, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who just filed a federal lawsuit against the FBI, the CIA and the National Security Agency, seeking public records pertaining to the U.S. role in the 1962 arrest of Nelson Mandela, which would land him in prison for 27 years. When his FOIA requests on Mandela were denied, he sued. "I'm pursuing these records," he explained to me, "mostly because I'm interested in knowing why the U.S. intelligence community viewed Mandela as a threat to American security and what role the U.S. intelligence community played in thwarting Mandela's struggle for racial justice and democracy in South Africa."

Shapiro filed a FOIA request with the NSA, seeking details on the arrest of Mandela over 50 years ago. The NSA wrote in reply, "To the extent that you are seeking intelligence information on Nelson Mandela, we have determined that the fact of the existence or non-existence of the materials you request is a currently and properly classified matter." Half a century later?

Shapiro also is seeking information on Mandela's placement on the U.S. terror watch list until 2008, which was years after he had served as South Africa's first democratically elected president, years after he had won not only the Nobel Peace Prize, but the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal and U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom. I asked Shapiro why he was chasing down all these documents. "The answer," he replied, "has to do with this blinkered understanding of national security, this myopic understanding that places crass military alliances and corporate profits over human rights and civil liberties."

Shapiro has an interesting history, and a personal stake in the government labeling activists "terrorists." In 2002, Shapiro engaged in an act of civil disobedience, infiltrating a farm where ducks are raised for the production of foie gras, exposing what he calls "horrific conditions which are the absolute norm on factory farms." He said he and other activists "openly rescued, or stole, animals from a factory farm, made a movie about it. I did it as an act of civil disobedience, but it's a real crime ... I did 40 hours of community service, and that was it." Since that time, state after state has passed so-called Ag-Gag laws, which equate some animal-rights activism with terrorism, and which can include incredibly harsh prison sentences.

He says his dissertation in progress, titled "Bodies at War: Animals, the Freedom of Science, and National Security in the United States," looks "at the use of the rhetoric and apparatus of national security to marginalize animal protectionists from the late 19th century to the present." Shapiro is seeking a wealth of public documents to answer the question. He has close to 700 FOIA requests before the FBI, seeking 350,000 documents, leading the Justice Department to call him its "most prolific" requester. The FBI has labeled part of his dissertation a threat to national security.

Dear Generalbundesanwalt Schuette,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling and last year's winner Volksjudge John (the enforcer) Roberts.

Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your demand to keep gay folks from having equal rights, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Rethuglican whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Obama at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 05-24-2014. We salute you Herr Schuette, Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Biden