Simon Johnson for The Atlantic:

From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.

The great wealth that the financial sector created and concentrated gave bankers enormous political weight—a weight not seen in the U.S. since the era of J.P. Morgan (the man). In that period, the banking panic of 1907 could be stopped only by coordination among private-sector bankers: no government entity was able to offer an effective response. But that first age of banking oligarchs came to an end with the passage of significant banking regulation in response to the Great Depression; the reemergence of an American financial oligarchy is quite recent.

Bird on the beach at East Grand Terre Island, LA. Photo source: AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, Thursday, June 3, 2010.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) on Tuesday blocked a bill Democrats have put forward to raise the liability cap from $75 million to $10 billion. He said on the Senate floor he agrees the cap should be raised, but the Senate should “wait and see where the cap should be.”

“Study after study has shown that immigrants grow the economy, expanding demand for goods and services that the foreign-born workers and their families consume, and thereby creating jobs. There is even broad agreement among economists that while immigrants may push down wages for some, the overall effect is to increase average wages for American-born workers.”

With the recent passage of Arizona’s fascist immigration law, there will be more laws coming that place the blame for our economic woes on immigrant populations, instead of on the military industrial complex filled with no-bid contracts for Halliburton. Take a quick read of FactCheck.org’s report and you will have the ammunition needed to confront those who will trot out the tired “Immigrants cost American Jobs” party line.

“Annoying e-mail messages plague all of us, but those of a more legitimate nature are surely deserving of a simple reply. Unfortunately, basic e-courtesy is in short supply. So, having been burned in the past by e-boors, I decided that enough was enough. The magazine had left me in limbo. I was going to have my revenge.”

The British Petroleum offshore oil rig disaster has now generated an oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico larger than the state of Rhode Island. Not only will this disaster eclipse the drunken exploits of the Exxon Valdez but it has now started wash up on Louisiana’s shores. It is leaking 200,000 gallons a day and will take 3 months to fix. Anyone from this point on who argues that offshore oil drilling can be done without environmental impact is either ignorant or an asshole.

Update – May 11 Now larger than Connecticut.