Hugo Chavez: Offering to Sell Cheap Oil to America's Poor

GOI: My favorite enemy of the Bush administration to give cheap oil to poor cities and schools in America starting with Chicago:

Worried about the skyrocketing cost of gasoline and heating oil this winter?

Well, Hugo Chavez, the firebrand president of oil-rich Venezuela, wants to help.

In an exclusive interview yesterday, the Venezuelan leader said his country will soon start to ship heating oil and diesel fuel at below market prices to poor communities and schools in the United States.

"We will begin with a pilot project in Chicago on Oct. 14, in a Mexican-American community,"said Chavez, who was in town for the United Nations sessions. "We will then expand the program to New York and Boston in November."

"If you want to eliminate poverty, you have to empower the poor, not treat them as beggars," Chavez said.

GOI: Chavez knows more about eliminating poverty then Bush knows about governing in general.

Echoing his favorite American writer, radical linguist Noam Chomsky, Chavez warned that "Americans must reorder their style of life" because "this planet cannot sustain" our "irrational" consumption, especially when it comes to oil.

But his novel oil-for-the-poor idea in this country is sure to make him an even bigger target of the Bush administration.

GOI: How does that saying go? The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

His plan is to set aside 10% of the 800,000 barrels of oil produced by the Citgo refineries and ship that oil directly to schools, religious organizations and nonprofits in poor communities for distribution.

The same approach, he said, has worked in the Caribbean, where Venezuela is already sharply subsidizing oil deliveries to more than a dozen nations.

Cutting oil prices must seem like the worst sort of radicalism to the Big Oil companies and their buddies at the Bush-Cheney White House.

But ordinary Americans fed up with price gouging by these energy companies could begin to look at Chavez in a different light if his oil-for-the-poor project works.

Still, Chavez, warns, we must all think about the future. Americans are 5% of the world's population, yet we consume 25% of the world's oil.

"These people were using up fuel," he said. "They were polluting the environment. This planet cannot sustain that mode of life."

That's the kind of message that can get a man killed these days - or at least labeled a dangerous madman by folks in the White House.

GOI: Chavez for President in 2008!!