by Bob Unruh,
WorldNetDaily
An activist lawyer who has taken on leaders such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bill Clinton and Hugo Chavez has traveled to Austria to serve, personally, officials at OPEC with a lawsuit charging the cartel with “economic terrorism.”
Larry Klayman, founder of Freedom Watch USA, told WND that he recently traveled in Vienna to deliver the legal notification.
His claim of conspiracy against American consumers by OPEC is contained in the lawsuit he filed just days ago in federal court in Washington.
Freedom Watch USA, a public interest organization, charges that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries engages in illegal price fixing and market division by artificially inflating crude prices.
Klayman said the member nations “specifically and intentionally limit barrels of oil that each country produces,” causing the price to rise.
“This amounts to illegal price fixing,” he said, as well as antitrust law violations.
“These artificially inflated crude oil prices fall hard on the backs of Americans, many of whom cannot afford to buy gasoline during these severely depressed economic times,” said Klayman, a former Justice Department lawyer.
As a government attorney in the Antitrust Division, Klayman participated in breaking up AT&T. Now he and Freedom Watch have launched a campaign against the 12 nations that work together on oil prices and production.
Klayman alleges leaders of both major U.S. political parties “line their pockets from big oil interests and are just sitting back and not doing anything.”
He also noted the federal government is not allowing the U.S. to increase its own oil production, and Barack Obama’s policies have discouraged oil discovery and drilling.
“This has led to more speculation on oil prices, causing them to rise. And the president’s policies regarding Iran also have contributed to the spike,” he said.
The complaint argues that without OPEC’s anti-competitive agreement, more oil would be in production, and the result would be lower prices.
“Even when OPEC members produce to the full extent of their capacity, they produce far less oil than they would were they operating in a competitive market, because they artificially restrict their production capacity as part of their price-fixing scheme,” the complaint alleges.
“The … nature of OPEC’s price-fixing conduct is further confirmed by its course of dealing with non-members. OPEC has met with these non-members and has secured their agreement to limit production and has thereby increased the price of gasoline and other petroleum products over competitive levels,” the complaint says.
Klayman previously brought legal action against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on behalf of torture victims, advancing the case against Iran to the point of obtaining a default judgment. Klayman also won a nearly $2 million unpaid judgment against Cuban interests in 1996 over the shooting down of an airplane.
The new claim against OPEC alleges that “as a form of economic terrorism,” OPEC’s actions “are designed to severely harm the economics or strategic interests of the United States and Western Europe in particular.”
“The illegal conduct of the defendant, and its constituent members and co-conspirators, is thus intended at this time to also influence the American presidential and congressional elections of 2012 by destabilizing the economy to further their pro Islamic and communist agendas,” the complaint says.
“In short, the recent huge calculated increase in the price of gasoline and petroleum products, which is the result of per se violations of the antitrust laws, is part of a calculated strategy to advance the constituent members of OPEC’s latent war against Western democratic interests, since political actions, overt terrorist acts, and other means have thus far not produced the ‘desired’ results and ‘cleverly’ adds economic terrorism to their panoply of weapons.”
The complaint continues: “The acts … are not the unilateral, independent acts of sovereign nations taken and effectuated entirely within the confines of their own territorial boundaries.
As a multinational cartel, OPEC depends upon the concerted and agreed upon commercial acts of all of its members, and those which act in concert with OPEC, to achieve the conspiracy’s price fixing scheme.”
