AMY GOODMAN: One of the things that wasn’t addressed very much yesterday, though there was wall-to-wall coverage of the trial and the verdict that came down yesterday for Skilling and for Lay — Ken Lay found guilty on every count — is the connection between President Bush and Enron. Enron founder Ken Lay and his family rank among President Bush’s biggest financial backers of his political career. The family donated about $140,000 to Bush’s political campaigns in Texas and for the White House.

The President personally nicknamed Ken Lay ÒKenny Boy.Ó Overall, Enron employees gave Bush some $600,000 in political donations. According to the Center for Public Integrity, this made Enron Bush’s top career donor, a distinction the company maintained until 2004. Shortly after Bush took office in 2001, Vice President Cheney met with Enron officials while he was developing the administration’s energy policies. Our guest, Greg Palast, examined the connections between Enron and the Bush administration in his documentary, Bush Family Fortunes.

GREG PALAST: Even before he takes the presidential oath, Bush forms a secret task force, including Enron’s Ken Lay to rewrite America’s environmental and energy laws.

CRAIG McDONALD: He put the very people who funded him in the room to devise a clean air policy. They wrote the policy. He enacted the policy and the policy was strictly voluntary, did nothing to clean up the air, yet he touted it as a major accomplishment.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Instead of the government telling utilities where and how to cut pollution, we will give them a firm deadline and let them find the most innovative ways to meet it.

CRAIG McDONALD: These same funders were sick and tired of trying to play by the environmental rules and regulations. George Bush gave them an environmental clean air policy that any corporation would lust after.

JIM HIGHTOWER: How proud we are to be the number one state in the country in air pollution.

CRAIG McDONALD: Ken Lay, got almost total complete energy deregulation out of George Bush.

JIM HIGHTOWER: What did the Bush administration do? It refused to impose price controls to put a cap on those utility prices, meaning a company like Enron could set its own prices to consumers.

CORPORATE EXECUTIVE: Show me the money! Show me the money!

CRAIG McDONALD: He was delivering a favor in a policy that the donors who put him in that office want.

JIM HIGHTOWER: Consumers in California were being stiffed, and Enron was raking in hundreds of millions of dollars during that period in corrupt profits. So that’s a pretty good payback.

GREG PALAST: But Enron squandered their California windfall in a series of spectacular frauds which imploded, leaving thousands jobless and pensioners bankrupt. Now, George tried to downplay his links with Enron’s Ken Lay and other corrupt bosses.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: By far, the vast majority of CEOs in America are good honorable, honest people. In the corporate world, sometimes things aren’t exactly black and white when it comes to accounting procedures, and the SEC’s job is to rev — is to look and is to determine whether or not, whether or not, whether or not the decision by the auditors was the appropriate decision.

JIM HIGHTOWER: Ken Lay, whom George W. fondly called ÒKenny Boy,Ó was the major campaign contributor to George W. Bush, and they exchanged Christmas cards with each other. Ken Lay was very personal, very close with the Bush family.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: I do know that Mr. Lay came to the White House in — early in my administration along with, I think, twenty other business leaders to discuss the state of the economy. It was just kind of a general discussion. I have not met with him personally.
democracynow.org

BAGHDAD, May 26 — Witnesses to the slaying of 24 Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines in the western town of Haditha say the Americans shot men, women and children at close range in retaliation for the death of a Marine lance corporal in a roadside bombing.

Aws Fahmi, a Haditha resident who said he watched and listened from his home as Marines went from house to house killing members of three families, recalled hearing his neighbor across the street, Younis Salim Khafif, plead in English for his life and the lives of his family members. “I heard Younis speaking to the Americans, saying: ‘I am a friend. I am good,’ ” Fahmi said. “But they killed him, and his wife and daughters.”

The 24 Iraqi civilians killed on Nov. 19 included children and the women who were trying to shield them, witnesses told a Washington Post special correspondent in Haditha this week and U.S. investigators said in Washington. The girls killed inside Khafif’s house were ages 14, 10, 5, 3 and 1, according to death certificates.
washingtonpost.com

WASHINGTON, May 26 (AP) Ñ In June 1972, when Henry Kissinger was secretary of state, he told Prime Minister Zhou Enlai of China that the United States, mired in Vietnam, probably could live with a Communist government in South Vietnam as long as it evolved peacefully, according to foreign policy papers released Friday.

The discussion is included in some 28,000 pages of Kissinger-era papers published online by George Washington University at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/. The National Security Archive released the collection, drawn from the National Archives and obtained through Freedom of Information requests.

“If we can live with a Communist government in China, we ought to be able to accept it in Indochina,” Mr. Kissinger said.

He also hinted that the United States, newly courting China, would consider a nuclear response if the Soviet Union were to overrun Asia with conventional forces. At the time, the United States was playing the Communist states against each other while seeking detente with Moscow.

The papers also indicate that the United States reached out to hostile Arabs three decades ago with an offer to work toward making Israel a “small friendly country” and with an assurance to Iraq that Washington had stopped backing Kurdish rebels.
nytimes.com

Papers Show U.S. Courted Arabs in Mid-70s
Kissinger pressed: “Our attitude is not unsympathetic to Iraq. Don’t believe; watch it.”

He said U.S. public opinion was turning more pro-Palestinian and U.S. aid to Israel could not be sustained for much longer at its massive levels. He predicted that in 10 or 15 years, “Israel will be like Lebanon – struggling for existence, with no influence in the Arab world.”

Mindful of Israel’s nuclear capability, a skeptical Hammadi peppered Kissinger with questions, including whether Washington would recognize Palestinian identity and even a Palestinian state. “Is it in your power to create such a thing?”

Kissinger said he could not make recognition of Palestinian identity happen right away but, “No solution is possible without it.”

“After a settlement, Israel will be a small friendly country,” he said.

When there is no solution, there is no problem, observed James Burnham, the former Trotskyite turned Cold War geostrategist.

Burnham’s insight came again to mind as President Bush ended his meeting with Ehud Olmert by announcing that the Israeli prime minister had brought with him some “bold ideas” for peace.

And what bold ideas might that be?

Olmert wants Bush to remain steadfast in refusing to talk to the Hamas-dominated Palestinian Authority. He wants U.S. support for Israel’s wall that is fencing in large slices of the West Bank and all of Jerusalem, forever denying the Palestinians a viable state. He wants U.S. recognition of Israeli-drawn lines as the final borders of Israel. And he wants America to remove the “existential threat” of Iran.

In the six months before he proceeds unilaterally with this Sharon-Olmert plan, he will be happy to talk with Mahmoud Abbas, the isolated Palestinian president he has called “powerless.”

What is the Bush plan to advance our interests in the Middle East? There is none. For five years, the Bush policy has been to sign off on whatever Sharon put in front of him. And now that Bush is weak, he is not going to pick a fight he cannot win and, in candor, he does not want.
theconservativevoice.com

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe looks set to win a new four-year mandate on Sunday to continue his security-minded policies that have brought some stability to the country despite controversy over his heavy-handed tactics.

Polls show Mr Uribe holds a comfortable margin over his closest rivals in this weekend’s presidential election and appears likely to avoid a second round vote that would be triggered if he fails to get more than 50% of the vote.

An Uribe win would be welcomed by the US as a counterbalance to the growing anti-American nationalism in the Andean region.
Mr Uribe remains a staunch ally of the US, which bankrolls the fight against the booming drugs trade that funds Colombia’s 40-year-old war, in which leftist rebels are pitted against government forces and rightwing paramilitary groups.
guardian.co.uk

Here’s the sort of ‘democracy’ the US can get behind.

For almost half a century now Cuba, the unapologetically communist nation led by Fidel Castro, has endured crippling economic and trade sanctions imposed by its next-door neighbour, the United States. But not only has this tiny Caribbean country survived, it’s achieved close to the unthinkable. Over the years of its isolation, Cuba has made major medical breakthroughs and now has a health system that’s the envy of most of its neighbours, including the mighty US.
informationclearinghouse.com

Palast makes a key point related to the price of crude. At $10 a barrel the supply is low because only the easy to extract and refine kind are economically feasible. But at $70 a barrel it’s a whole new oil market. The heavy stuff and tar sands then become economical to extract and refine, and a new far higher finite supply is realized almost magically. In short, it’s just a question of supply and demand and how the price of a commodity depends on how much of it consumers want. Too little demand and the price is low, but when it’s high like now and rising, then so does the price.
axisoflogic.com

“We are the product of 500 years of struggle . . . They don’t care that we have nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a roof over our heads, no land, no work, no health care, no food, no education, without the right to freely and democratically choose our authorities, without independence from foreigners, nor is there peace nor justice for ourselves and our children. But today, we say enough! (Ya Basta!)”
axisoflogic

…“We see how the United States defends its interests, we see what methods and means they use for this,” Putin said at a news conference following a summit meeting of Russia and the European Union in his most direct criticism of Cheney’s remarks.

In a speech earlier this month in Lithuania, Cheney accused the Kremlin of rolling back democracy and strong-arming its ex-Soviet neighbors.

“When we fight for our interests, we also look for the most acceptable methods to accomplish our national tasks, and I find it strange that this seems inexplicable to someone,” Putin said, replying to a reporter’s request for his reaction to the vice president’s remarks.
guardian.co.uk

The Respect MP George Galloway has said it would be morally justified for a suicide bomber to murder Tony Blair.

In an interview with GQ magazine, the reporter asked him: “Would the assassination of, say, Tony Blair by a suicide bomber – if there were no other casualties – be justified as revenge for the war on Iraq?”

Mr Galloway replied: “Yes, it would be morally justified. I am not calling for it – but if it happened it would be of a wholly different moral order to the events of 7/7. It would be entirely logical and explicable. And morally equivalent to ordering the deaths of thousands of innocent people in Iraq – as Blair did.”
independent.co.uk