‘There's a story, perhaps apocryphal, that Pentagon
planners wanted to name the invasion of Iraq, "Operation Iraqi
Liberation." Only when someone realized that the acronym - OIL - might
raise some uncomfortable questions, was "Operation Iraqi Freedom"
born. 

Supporters of the Iraq war airily
dismiss chants of "no blood for oil" as a manifestation of the
antiwar crowd's naïveté. They point out that Iraq's government still controls
its oil and argue that we could have simply bought it on the open market.’ 

The
Great Iraq Oil Grab

From Al Jazeera

India suicide alert as stocks crash

Monday 22 May 2006, 13:48 Makka Time, 10:48 GMT

Policemen were keeping a watch near lakes and canals on Monday - possible places where people in distress could head to kill themselves. They said rescue teams were on alert.

A police official in the western city of Ahmedabad, R K Patel, said: "A financial crisis can trigger suicides. We are just trying to prevent them. Till now, no such cases have been reported."

India's Bombay Stock Exchange, which had a market value of $657 billion last week after falling 10% in the previous two sessions, slid as much as another 10% in early trade on Monday.

The latest slump came after brokers sold the stocks they were holding as security for their clients.

'We are finished'

S S Gupta, a broker in Mumbai who said he had lost millions of rupees in two hours of trading on Monday morning, said: "Gold has turned into brass. We are finished."

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Gus thinks that these overvalues and wild speculations smack of profiteering with corrupt practices that do not serve any other purpose that feeding greed... and stretching the divide between poor and rich... Same in the US where the game is played with more refinement but still the same manipulations. Same illusions of gambling... and feeding a hope of richness that do not exist yet...