JimH wrote:
"hk" wrote in message
. ..
JoeSpareBedroom wrote:
"Vic Smith" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 29 Mar 2008 19:26:13 GMT, "JoeSpareBedroom"
wrote:


The vast majority of raw materials and finished products are not ****ed
with
by commoditity exchanges which involve amateur investors who are
unrelated
to the industry using the raw materials. Why do you suppose that is?

Probably because it's not true. Otherwise I never would have traded
lumber, rapeseed, oats, corn, soybeans, cocoa, hogs, pork bellies,
feeder cattle, cotton, sugar, gold, silver, etc, etc.
Never traded egg futures, or rice, coffee, OJ, or many of the other
offerings you have no problem with. I have traded oil, and made a
couple grand, so I guess I'm a bad guy anyway.
You could learn more about this, instead of flailing away.
For instance, weather contracts.
That's right, the speculators not only your oil, but your weather too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_derivatives

--Vic

Where are the insane price swings, based on news like "....rose $2 a
barrel on fears of renewed violence in Baghdad..." ??

I love it. "on fears of"

Eggs rose $0.38 per dozen on fears of renewed violence in Sao Paulo,
Brazil.

Surely you don't mean the collape of "the surge" is having an impact on
oil speculation?

Collapse of the surge? Huh?



Please note that:

Petreus is going to urge a delay in the end of the "surge."
Basra and other areas have exploded into violence again, partly because
of the Iraqi government's botched "clean up" of that area.
Oh...and there's renewed and very violent fighting in Baghdad.
The U.S. is shortly going to stop paying bribe money to the Shi'ites to
keep them from killing whomever they see.
You are aware that most of what has been claimed as positive results for
"the surge" is really the result of the ethnic cleansing of the Sunnis,
right?

March 30, 2008
Shiite Militias Cling to Swaths of Basra and Stage Raids
By JAMES GLANZ and MICHAEL KAMBER
New York Times

BAGHDAD — Shiite militiamen in Basra openly controlled wide swaths of
the city on Saturday and staged increasingly bold raids on Iraqi
government forces sent five days ago to wrest control from the gunmen,
witnesses said, as Iraqi political leaders grew increasingly critical of
the stalled assault.

Witnesses in Basra said members of the most powerful militia in the
city, the Mahdi Army, were setting up checkpoints and controlling
traffic in many places ringing the central district controlled by some
of the 30,000 Iraqi Army and police forces involved in the assault.
Fighters were regularly attacking the government forces, then quickly
retreating.

Senior members of several political parties said the operation, ordered
by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, had been poorly planned. The
growing discontent adds a new level of complication to the American-led
effort to demonstrate that the Iraqi government had made strides toward
being able to operate a functioning country and keep the peace without
thousands of American troops.

Mr. Maliki has staked his reputation on the success of the Basra
assault, fulfilling a longstanding American desire for him to boldly
take on militias.

But as criticism of the assault has risen, it has brought into question
another American benchmark of progress in Iraq: political reconciliation.

Security has suffered as well.

Since the Basra assault began Tuesday, violence has spread to Shiite
districts of Baghdad and other places in Iraq where Shiite militiamen
hold sway, raising fears that security gains often attributed to a
yearlong American troop buildup could be at risk. Any widespread
breakdown of a cease-fire called by Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric
who founded the Mahdi Army, could bring the country back to the
sectarian violence that strained it in 2006 and 2007.

“We don’t have to rush to military solutions,” said Nadeem al-Jabiri, a
Parliament member from the Fadhila Party, a strong rival of Mr. Sadr’s
party that would have been expected to back the operation, at least on
political grounds. Instead of solving the problems in Basra, Mr. Jabiri
said, Mr. Maliki “escalated the situation.”

For the third straight day, the American military was reported to be
conducting airstrikes in support of Iraqi troops in Basra. Iraqi police
officials reported that an American bombing run had killed eight civilians.

The American military did not immediately acknowledge the report. But
Maj. Tom Holloway, a British military spokesman, said that the reports
were being investigated and that he had no further information.

Major Holloway did say that “coalition air power,” meaning American or
British jets, dropped two more precision-guided bombs just after noon on
Saturday on what was identified as “an enemy stronghold” in Basra.
Shortly afterward, British artillery fired on a militia mortar team. The
mortar was destroyed, Major Holloway said.

At a news briefing in Basra on Saturday, Iraq’s defense minister,
Abdul-Kader Jassem al-Obeidi , conceded that the assault had not gone
according to expectations. “We were surprised by a very strong
resistance that made us change our plans,” he said.

In Baghdad, the American military was also drawn deeper into the
violence generated by the Basra assault. The military issued a statement
saying that American soldiers had killed nine Iraqis that it called
terrorists in firefights around Sadr City, the Shiite slum that forms
Mr. Sadr’s base of support. The statement said seven of the Iraqis were
killed after they attacked an American unit, and two more when they were
caught placing roadside bombs. Later Saturday, the military announced
that two American soldiers had been killed by a roadside bomb in
Shiite-controlled eastern Baghdad.

Iraqi Interior Ministry officials said they would extend a strict and
citywide curfew indefinitely, in an attempt to keep the streets clear.

Mr. Maliki’s forces may also have lost ground in the battle for public
opinion when, in a well-publicized event in Sadr City, 40 men who said
they were Iraqi police officers surrendered their weapons to Sadr
officials, who symbolically gave the officers olive branches and Korans.
The weapons were returned after the officers pledged not to use them
against Mahdi Army members.

“These weapons are for defending the country but not for fighting your
brothers,” said Sheik Salman al-Fraji, head of the Sadr office there.

Although a citywide curfew remained in effect in Baghdad, the booms of
rockets or mortars were heard in the morning. It was not immediately
clear who had fired them or where they landed, although the fortified
Green Zone, the nerve center of American and Iraqi governmental
operations here, has been a frequent target since the Basra operation began.

Clashes between militias and Iraqi government security forces continued
elsewhere. There was intense fighting for a second day north of Basra in
Dhi Qar Province and its capital, Nasiriya, where officials said the
toll on Saturday was 28 killed and 59 wounded. There were running
battles on a main bridge in Nasiriya, an Iraqi police officer said, and
gunmen controlled the town of Shatra, about 20 miles north.

There also appeared to be a major operation under way around Baquba,
north of Baghdad, where government tanks blocked streets in at least
three neighborhoods as troops sought out members of the Mahdi Army.

The Turkish military said Saturday that it had killed 15 Kurdish rebels
in northern Iraq on Thursday using long-range land weapons, Reuters
reported.

In Basra, mortar shells rained down in the late afternoon on the area of
the Presidential Palace and the Shatt al Arab hotel, where the assault
has its operations center. Groups of 10 to 12 militia members set up a
dense net of checkpoints throughout the northern and western parts of
the city, carrying out raids on remaining areas in the city center still
controlled by government forces.

The government set up an Army recruitment center in the center of Basra.
But anyone heading in that direction was stopped by Mahdi Army members,
who questioned whether they were “Hakim’s people,” loyalists of the
Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, whose armed wing, the Badr
Organization, is a prime rival of the Mahdi Army on the streets of
Basra. Few people were seen in front of the recruitment center itself.

“Unfortunately we were expecting one thing but we saw something else,”
said Ali Hussam, 48, a teacher, who said that after Saddam Hussein the
people of Basra had hoped for peace. “But unfortunately with the
presence of this new government and this democracy that was brought to
us by the invader, it made us kill each other.”

“And the war is now between us,” he said.

Reporting was contributed by Qais Mizher, Ahmad Fadam, Mudafer
al-Husaini, Hosham Hussein and other Iraqi employees of The New York
Times in Baghdad, Basra, Nasiriya and Diyala Province.

- - -

Al-Sadr: I Am in Control of Militia

By HAMZA HENDAWI – 2 hours ago

BAGHDAD (AP) — A feisty Muqtada al-Sadr, making his first public
appearance since May, said in a TV interview aired Saturday that he was
in almost total control of the Mahdi Army and that the "liberation" of
Iraq was his militia's chief goal.

The radical Shiite cleric also said the impact of the U.S. presence on
Iraq was more negative than that of Saddam Hussein's Baath party, ousted
in the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Al-Sadr alleged that the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a
fellow Shiite, was as "distant" from the people of Iraq as Saddam's
Sunni-led regime. The government, he said, was "looking after its own
interests, not those of the people."

Al-Sadr's interview with Al-Jazeera, conducted in an undisclosed
location, came as violence was on the rise as part of a nationwide
backlash by the Mahdi Army to the government's attempt to crush Shiite
militias and criminal gangs in the southern port of Basra.

In the interview, the 34-year-old al-Sadr appeared to have lost a great
deal of weight but none of his hallmark confrontational style,
frequently interrupting or correcting the interviewer.

Al-Sadr is widely thought to be spending his time between Iran's holy
city of Qom and Najaf, another holy Shiite city south of Baghdad. But
nothing in the room where the interview took place offered a hint of his
location.

He and the interviewer, well known Al-Jazeera reporter Ghassan Bin
Jidou, sat on bamboo armed chairs with a coffee table between them.
Behind al-Sadr was a brown cabinet with several volumes of Nahj
al-Balagha, a work of philosophy by Imam Ali, the seventh century cousin
of the Prophet Muhammad and the founder of the Shiite faith.

Al-Sadr said his withdrawal from public view was motivated in part by
his desire to focus on his studies to become a mujtahid, or a religious
authority.

But he made clear that he remained in charge of his political movement —
his loyalists have 30 of parliament's 275 seats — by personally
overseeing the work of a ruling committee.

"Who among you doesn't want me to be a mujtahid?" he said. "I have given
the community five years (of my life), now I want a few years to study."

He warned against interpreting his seclusion to be a sign of weakness
and said the overwhelming majority of the Mahdi Army was "under
control." Those who broke away from the militia, he added, "always came
back to the fold and repented."

Differences between the government and al-Sadr's supporters came to a
head after hundreds of arrests by U.S. and Iraqi forces of al-Sadr
supporters that U.S. commanders say are members of Iran-linked cells
attacking American soldiers.

In the interview, al-Sadr said the militia's "strategic objective" was
"the liberation of Iraq from the occupier," meaning the Americans. He
outlined the aims of his political movement, saying he wants to rid Iraq
of sectarian politics, prevent its breakup and create an Islamic society.

Mahdi Army commanders say their militia has been taking delivery of arms
and cash from Iran, but al-Sadr sought to distance himself from the
Iranians, saying he has recently told Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah
Ali Khameini, that he did not approve of the "political and military
interests" that Tehran pursued in Iraq.