…I just got back from meeting with Chavez, as you know, and you showed our interview a few weeks ago. He’s offered the U.S. $50-a-barrel oil. That’s a third off of what we’re paying right now. Now, you would think our president would be down in Caracas kissing Hugo Chavez’s behind and saying, ‘Thank you, thank you for dropping the price of oil by a third, and let’s make a deal,’ because Chavez wants a deal.

But he’s not doing that, our president, even though the high prices are costing about a million jobs right now. And the reason he’s not is that what Chavez will not do is that Chavez will not return the money. It’s not about petroleum, it’s about petrodollars, as I explain in the book. In other words, when George Bush rides around King Abdullah in his little golf cart on the Crawford ranch, he’s not trying to get Abdullah’s oil. Abdullah can’t drink the stuff. He’s got to sell it to us and Japan. But Abdullah takes the money back from the — when you fill up your SUV, you give your money to Saudi Arabia, the big oil companies, Saudi Arabia. But then he returns it the form of petrodollars, and that is what is funding George Bush’s mad spending spree.

We have a president who has racked up $2 trillion in extra debt, you know, stone sober, apparently. And someone’s got to pay for that. And basically we’re paying for it by effectively an oil tax, which is returned to us, because the Gulf states and our other trading partners are now buying up $2 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds and debt. So, in other words, they’re recycling the money back and paying for George Bush’s spending spree on ending inheritance taxes, you know, several wars, etc.

Now, Hugo Chavez says, ‘I’ll give you cheap oil, not only to the poor, but to everyone. But I’m not giving you back the money. That money is going to stay in Latin America to build our nations.’ And he just withdrew $20 billion out of the U.S. Federal Reserve. You have to understand, this is a punch in the face of the U.S. administration, far more than withholding oil, withholding and withdrawing petrodollars, as I explain in the book, and that’s why you have that little nice floater from — balloon thrown out by Reverend Robertson, Pat Robertson, saying ‘Hugo Chavez thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, and I think we ought to just go and do it,’ because they have got to get that — it’s not that they need that oil, they need that oil money. And if they can’t get it, they have to eliminate Hugo Chavez.
democracynow.org

Venezuelan President promises fuel to the needy and proclaims ‘final days of the North American empire’ before visit to Britain today.

Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez arrives in London today with an extraordinary promise to offer cut-rate heating oil for needy families in Europe, modelled on a similar campaign in the US which has been seen partly as a bid to embarrass President George Bush.
Last night Chavez also issued a taunting obituary for the ‘American empire’ on the eve of a visit where he will be shunned by Downing Street but welcomed by London Mayor Ken Livingststone.

Chavez said in Vienna yesterday that the ‘final hours of the North American empire have arrived … Now we have to say to the empire: “We’re not afraid of you. You’re a paper tiger.”
guardian.co.uk

VIENNA: Two firm admirers of Fidel Castro, the presidents of oil-and-gas-rich nations Bolivia and Venezuela, made clear at a protest rally that the anti-US, anti-imperialistic movement has a future.

‘We must dismantle, neutralize and make vanish this cynical empire,’ Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez told a cheering crowd Saturday of 1,600 in a conference hall in Vienna decked with pictures of Che Guevara, who was Cuban President Castro’s revolutionary comrade-in-arms. Che was killed in Bolivia in 1967. Chavez scoffed at the US war against terrorism saying that the United States has itself become ‘a terrorist state, itself a genocidal state.

‘We’re all threatened. This empire has no limits,’ Chavez said, speaking in Spanish as did the others at the rally. Cuban Vice President Carlos Lage Davila spoke about the ‘criminal Yankee blockade of Cuba’ and Bolivian President Evo Morales mentioned his ‘great admiration for Fidel.’ The youthful crowd, some with painted faces, were anti-globalisation protestors at the final rally of an ‘anti-summit’ against a more august gathering of European Union and Latin American leaders at another congress centre in Vienna.
thenews.com

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, May 14 — President Rene Preval pleaded with Haitians to bring peace to the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country as he was inaugurated Sunday during a ceremony that drew thousands to the whitewashed National Palace and marked the return of democratic rule in Haiti.

Crowds sang “Preval, Preval, we’ve been waiting for you” at each stop in the four-hour event, which his supporters hope will set Haiti on a new course two years after the violent ouster of Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Signs of the chaos inherited by Preval — a soft-spoken agronomist who once owned a bakery in Port-au-Prince — were everywhere: As he prepared to be inaugurated, inmates at a central Port-au-Prince jail known for holding political prisoners protested, occupying a rooftop and chanting, “We want justice.”
washingtonpost.com

SAO PAULO, Brazil (AP) – Masked men attacked bars, banks and police stations with machine guns. Gangs set buses on fire. And inmates at dozens of prisons took guards hostage in an unprecedented four-day wave of violence around South America’s largest city that left more than 80 dead by Monday.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva prepared to send in 4,000 federal troops, and officials worried the violence could spread 220 miles northeast to Rio de Janeiro, where police were put on high alert and extra patrols were dispatched to slums where drug gang leaders live.

“What happened in Sao Paulo was a provocation, a show of force by organized crime,” Silva said. He said the gangs'”tentacles are spread around the world and we must use a lot of intelligence” to quell the chaos their attacks caused.
apnews.myway.com

The immigration reform bill that the Senate takes up today would more than double the flow of legal immigration into the United States each year and dramatically lower the skill level of those immigrants.

…Currently, a little less than 60 percent of the 140,000 work visas granted each year are reserved for professors, engineers, doctors and others with “extraordinary abilities.” Fewer than 10 percent are set aside for unskilled laborers. The idea has always been to draw the best and the brightest to America.

Under the Senate proposal, those priorities would be flipped.

The percentage of work visas that would go to the highly educated or highly skilled would be cut in half to about 30 percent. The percentage of work visas that go to unskilled laborers would more than triple. In hard numbers for those categories, the highest skilled workers would be granted 135,000 visas annually, while the unskilled would be granted 150,000 annually.

What’s more, the Hagel-Martinez bill would make it considerably easier for unskilled workers to remain here permanently while keeping hurdles in place for skilled workers. It would still require highly skilled workers who are here on a temporary basis to find an employer to “petition” for their permanent residency but it would allow unskilled laborers to “self-petition,” meaning their employer would not have to guarantee their employment as a condition on staying.
washingtontimes.com

Bill permits 193 million more aliens by 2026
The Senate immigration reform bill would allow for up to 193 million new legal immigrants — a number greater than 60 percent of the current U.S. population — in the next 20 years, according to a study released yesterday.

“The magnitude of changes that are entailed in this bill — and are largely unknown — rival the impact of the creation of Social Security or the creation of the Medicare program,” said Robert Rector, senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation who conducted the study.

Latinos enlisting in record numbers
Despite opposition to the Iraq war, pride motivates many to sign up for military duty
…According to the Department of Defense, in 2004, the most recent year of confirmed data, Latinos made up 13 percent of new recruits. This is an all-time high, nearly twice the percentage of 10 years earlier.

Latinos’ presence in the military still does not match their 17 percent share of the overall population ages 18 to 24. And African Americans continue to be overrepresented in the military, making up about 18 percent of active duty personnel but only 13 percent of the U.S. population. Nonetheless, the absolute number of Latinos entering the armed forces continues to grow.

CAIRO, May 15 — The normalization of U.S.-Libya relations is a natural marriage of an American administration desperate for friends and oil in the Middle East and a government that needs to open its economy to the outside world, Arab and exiled Libyan observers said Monday.

The announcement was called proof that promotion of democracy is no longer a top priority of the Bush administration, which is grappling to hold Iraq together and has turned attention toward building alliances against a hostile Iran over its nuclear program. Libya has been ruled by Moammar Gaddafi since he seized power in 1969.

“The timing can be explained by a need for the United States to have a positive breakthrough in the Middle East,” said Mohamed Sayed Said, a political analyst at the Egyptian government-run Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. “With Libya, Washington gets a regime that has converted itself from radicalism to accommodation.”

“It’s self-evident,” Said went on, “that there is a retreat from democracy and that in the current atmosphere, the United States is aligning itself with nondemocratic regimes. Democracy is not going to be the point of departure for relations between the United States and governments in the region.”
washingtonpost.com

What did the Italian government, under then-Prime Minister Berlusconi, get in return for providing Bush with a smoking gun to attack Iraq?

Italian journalists and parliamentary investigators are hot on the trail of how pre-Iraq War Italian forged documents were delivered to the White House alleging that Saddam Hussein had obtained yellowcake uranium ore from Niger.

New links implicating Italian companies and individuals with then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi now raise the question of whether Berlusconi received a payback as part of the deal — namely, a Pentagon contract to build the U.S. president’s special fleet of helicopters.
alertnet.org

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The Army surgeon general is warning that the HBO documentary “Baghdad ER” is so graphic that military personnel watching it could experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

In a memo dated May 9 and obtained by CNN, Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley said the film “shows the ravages and anguish of war.”

“Those who view this documentary may experience many emotions,” he said in the memo. “If they have been stationed in Iraq, they may re-experience some symptoms of post-traumatic stress, such as flashbacks or nightmares.”
cnn.com

Ain’t nothin’ like the real thing…

BAGHDAD, May 15 (Reuters) – Iraq’s main Sunni religious grouping accused U.S. forces on Monday of killing 25 civilians in raids near Baghdad in the past two days, rejecting the U.S. account that only suspected insurgents had died.

“We hold the Iraqi government and the occupiers responsible for this brutal atrocity,” the Muslim Clerics Association said in a statement.

The U.S. military earlier on Monday said its forces had killed more than 41 insurgents in and around the villages of Latifiya and Yusifiya, south of the capital, on Saturday and Sunday. It also said a U.S. helicopter was shot down, killing two soldiers.

Two separate U.S. statements on the air and ground raids did not mention any civilian deaths, but said several women and children were wounded.

The U.S. military says al Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, uses the area as a staging ground for suicide attacks in Baghdad. It says he aims to incite a sectarian civil war between majority Shi’ites and minority Sunnis.

The Sunni association accused U.S. forces of attacking civilian houses and killing people as they tried to flee.
alertnet.org