Steve Clements and Micheal Lind explore the immigration controversy surrounding foreign students in our colleges and universities and professionals moving here to work. It's not a simple matter, but it helps to remember that Einstein was an immigrant and came to this company in the '30s and '40s along with a gaggle of geniuses who enriched our nation both intellectually and financially to an unbelievable degree.

Congress at the moment seems to favor low-skill, low-wage immigrants and to disfavor the more intelligent and skilled ones, on the grounds that the high-level ones tend to displace Americans who would otherwise be holding those high-level tech jobs. There is some truth in the latter accusation, as has been discussed previously here and here. Smart, highly trained people, however, create wealth. We ultimately gain and their foresaken homelands ultimately lose. It seems that other nations have learned this lesson and our leaders have forgotten it:

While the United States perversely tries to corner the market in uneducated hotel maids and tomato harvesters, other industrial democracies are reshaping their immigration policies to invite the skilled immigrants that we turn away. Britain is following Australia and Canada in adopting a points system that gives higher scores to skilled immigrants with advanced education and proficiency in English. British, Canadian, German and even French universities are overflowing in undergraduate and graduate enrollment as they absorb the foreign talent that America is repelling.

The number of outstanding persons in a multitude of fields who have come to this land is simply staggering. To name some of the 20th Century's greatest merely scratches the surface: Einstein, Stravinsky, Von Neuman, Fermi, Strauss, Arendt, Tillich, Heifetz, Toscanini, Nabokov .... the list is endless.

Even now, the Mississippi Symphony would be almost fatally crippled without its Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, Moldavian, Chinese, and Japanese musicians who have helped it become an orchestra of which the city and state can be proud.

Talented, intelligent people give to society far more than they take. Congress should be mindful of this when it formulates our nation's immigration policies.

The Democratic leadership caved in to the Bush administration on benchmarks and deadlines on Iraq. When the nation is overwhelmingly against the war in Iraq they have folded instead of raising. Of course, the Blue Dog Democrats didn't help either.

It's a bad day for Congress. And America.

One of my favorite journalists, Greg Palast, has recently related to Buzzflash how the Republicans stole the 2000 and 2004 elections and how they are planning to steal the election in 2008. He also had some suggestions on how the nation might overcome this vast right-wing conspiracy to suppress the votes of millions of Democratic voters. It will take work.

Of course, the Republicans must nominate somebody that's electable, and the present herd of contenders is pitiful at best.

On the other hand, it was obvious in 2000 that George W. Bush had absolutely nothing to bring to the presidency beyond his family name, but, nevertheless, a shade under half the electorate was willing not only to overlook his monumental shortcomings but to invest him with virtues he did not even remotely possess. One can only hope that the electorate is wiser as well as sadder now that it has become impossible to ignore the bitter fruits of its willful foolishness bordering on collective insanity.

Palast is the author of Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans--Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild in an updated paperback edition. The JP has reviewed the original edition.

Read Palast's interview with Buzzflash.

Via Sirotablog, Congressional leaders are hatching a new "free" trade agreement with the White House. Mississippians ought to know from their own experience what free trade does to workers--there are few towns in this state that have not lost at least one factory to NAFTA, with little to show for it in return. Now there's a new free trade agreement being drafted in secret by the Bush administration with the approval of Democratic leaders to be sprung upon the American people in due time.

Last night Bill Moyers interviewed John MacArthur, author of The Selling of Free Trade and critic of NAFTA and other free trade agreements, who believes that the new free trade agreement in the works is no more or less than an attempt by the Democratic leadership to attract political contributions from Wall Street by offering something that the large manufacturing and retailing corporations want: fewer restraints on employing overseas labor to undercut jobs and wages in the U.S. The bill has not reached Congress, but the big players, such as the National Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, have already endorsed it, which means that it bodes ill for the American worker.

Expect our Republican senators and representatives to vote for it automatically. Unless pushed, Gene Taylor will vote for it, just as he voted for the corrupt Bankruptcy Bill. Bennie Thompson will probably do the right thing, especially if he knows that Mississippians are watching.

Bill Moyers Journal: Trade Talks

Biofuels have been receiving a lot of favorable publicity recently. You can buy biodiesel at selected gas stations, and, if you are adventurous, you can drive your diesel-powered car or motor home with discarded cooking oils from fast food restaurants. I have heard that the oil from Chinese restaurants is the most desirable.

Biofuels are being widely acclaimed as the solution to the energy crisis.

There's one catch, however. Crops grown for fuel require the same land as food crops, and given the increasing demand for fuel and current world population trends, the transformation of crop lands to fuel lands will inevitably collide with the need for food, a development which has ominous implications for the vast majority of the world's peoples who barely have enough to eat even now. The price of corn has already doubled since last year, principally due to the demand for biofuel.

There's even a bigger catch, however: It takes energy to produce biofuels. In the case of ethanol, the cost of fertilization, harvesting, fermentation and distillation require so much energy input that gasohol, for example, a popular blend of gasoline and alcohol, must be subsidized through tax breaks to make its production possible.

So how does Fidel Castro, communist dictator of Cuba, come into the picture?

Simple. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, and thus the cessation of its oil subsidies to Cuba, the latter has been forced to adapt to an energy-poor and petroleum-poor (and thus fertilizer-poor) economy that likely foreshadows our own future here in the U.S. Considering the unremitting hostility of the U.S. to the Castro regime and the resulting long-term economic sanctions imposed by the U. S. government on Cuba, the Cuban people have done admirably well under the circumstances.

Via Stan Goff's Feral Scholar, Casto, who has earned the right to comment upon such matters, has written a thoughtful paper based on the writings of Atilio Borón, a prestigious leftist intellectual who until recently headed the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), on the pitfalls of biofuels. He spares no words:

Transforming food into fuels is a monstrosity.

Capitalism is preparing to perpetrate a massive euthanasia on the poor, and particularly on the poor of the South, since it is there that the greatest reserves of the earth’s biomass required to produce biofuels are found. Regardless of numerous official statements assuring that this is not a choice between food and fuel, reality shows that this, and no other, is exactly the alternative: either the land is used to produce food or to produce biofuels.

Read the paper and the comments, many of which are very insightful. Castro may be an odious dictator, but he is no fool and he is now approaching the end of his life, a time when persons are supposed to become mellower and wiser.

We Can’t Have Our Ethanol and Eat It Too — Castro on Biofuels

Update (5/21/2007): The Wall Street Journal is running an article (subscribers only) today on the problems pig farmers are having with the rising cost of corn. Many are feeding their pigs trail mix. Even the pig farmers who grow feed corn are selling their corn to ethanol producers and using discarded trimmings from the food industry. The article points out that the 51-cent tax credit paid to producers that blend ethanol and gasoline has encouraged this trend. Like many other subsidies that indirectly benefit farmers, it seems to me that we would be better off simply paying the money to the farmers.

On the other hand, the entire corn, livestock and gasahol carnival is an economic, agricultural, environmental and public health disaster. Economic, because the market is distorted by unwise subsidies and fuel addiction on the part of the public; agricultural, because corn erodes the topsoil, especially when it is the exclusive crop; environmental because of the wastes from livestock farming and a host of other pollutants introduced into the environment, including carbon; finally, the excessive consumption of meat is a major factor in cardiovascular diseases. This is merely a sample of the hidden costs of our multiple addictions and their enabling by our industrial-financial system.

And you heard it right; any sane economic theory would consider addiction to be a form of market failure.

More Republicans are telling Gonzales that it's time for him to go. Senator Schumer (D-NY) predicts a no-confidence vote, but doesn't say exactly when. The latest Republican senator calling for Gonzales's scalp is that boneless wonder of American politices, chief stealth legislative enabler of the U. S. Attorney firing scandel, whose statesmanlike words and protestations of outrage are belied by his record of voting in lockstep with all that Bush and his minions have decreed, Senator Arlen Specter (R) of Pennsylvania. And Specter is one of the better Republican senators on a scale of integrity and honesty.

You read it here: Gonzales will cease to be the attorney general of the United States on the day that George W. Bush ceases to be president, which is almost certain to be January 20, 2009.

The reason (for the tenth time): Bush, Cheney and Rove are toast if Gonzales goes. A Democratic congress will not confirm another Gonzalez willing to obstruct justice the way Gonzales has. The next attorney general will not have as his raison d'etre the protection at all costs of Bush and Company. So don't look for Gonzales to be replaced.

The media are playing games with the American public over this issue.

For years, I've asked candidates  "If you are elected governor, how do you expect the State of Mississippi to be different when you leave the office four or eight years from now?" Having never received a satisfactory answer, I've attempted in the Jackson Progressive to answer the question myself as though I were a candidate.

If I'm Elected Governor Here's How I Would Like Things to be Different When I Leave Office

Mississippi's own senator Thad Cochran again demonstrated where his loyalties lie: the pharmaceutical industry.

Not the people of Mississippi who elected him.

The issue before Congress was whether Americans should be able to purchase prescriptions medicines sold by American manufacturers abroad at a fraction of the price charged for the identical medicines here in America. It is a fact that pharmaceutical companies charge Americans far more than they charge the citizens of other nations. Naturally, the industry is resisting any change that would cut back on this profitable racket, and it backs up that opposition with an army of lobbyists and a fortune in campaign contributions.

Cochran introduced a poison-pill amendment that for all practical purposes crippled a bill that would have made it possible for Americans to purchase medicines from other nations. It is amazing that the people of this poorest state in the union continue to elect to the Senate a person with so little regard for their health and welfare.

Yahoo: Senate Blocks Bid to Allow Drug Imports

All the Republican presidential wanabes want to be like Reagan. This is understandable, since Reagan's ability to read naturally from a teleprompter was legendary.

For those folks who think the Reagan administration brought economic salvation by lifting the nation out of the high interest rates and high unemployment blamed on Jimmy Carter, the following article should show them their error:

The Reagan Years: A Statistical Overview of the 1980s

Reagan left the country meaner, more unequal, less stable, and less free than it was when he became president.

This article from the Asia Times is not at all farfetched. Via Feral Scholar.