Energy sector is organized crime: U.S.

April 23, 2008

Don’t blame me – they say so – I only added the names and corrected the headline …

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – International organized crime groups control "significant positions" in global energy and strategic materials and are expanding holdings in the U.S. materials sector, the U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday.

A strategy on fighting organized crime released by the department also says such groups manipulate securities exchanges and conduct financial fraud to steal billions of dollars. It says they systematically corrupt public officials, use computer networks to target victims, and provide logistical support to terrorists and foreign intelligence services.

"The activities of transnational and national organized criminal enterprises [Exxon Mobile, Halliburton, BP, Shell, Chevron, Maraton, Mobile, Imperial Oil Limited, Barrick, Billiton etc] are increasing in scope and magnitude as these groups continue to strengthen their networking with each other to expand their operations," said FBI Deputy Director John S. Pistole.
Organized crime penetrates energy sector: U.S.

Posted by b on April 23, 2008 at 19:19 UTC | Permalink

Comments

Organised crime is Democracy. Some just collect refuse bins, others don’t.

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Apr 23 2008 19:25 utc | 1

I had to read the original article twice, thought for a moment that it was the Onion.
I suppose this is one of those teasers like you see in the supermarket tabloids that let you believe for a moment that the real bad guys will be unmasked and then you are just left hanging.
Organized crime aka the Republican Party. Not that the Democrats are much better but at least they try to hide it.

Posted by: dan of steele | Apr 23 2008 20:01 utc | 2

Posted by: Juannie | Apr 23 2008 22:04 utc | 3

Did anyone else catch the closing sentence: “But officials said they did not anticipate using anti-terrorist surveillance measures such as the controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or seeking new authorities from Congress.”
So let me get this straight: International, organized crime syndicates are leeching their way into energy, but Johnny Law isn’t going to use the tools specifically created to combat this? Was this code for “we’re just tapping phones and email at whimsy – we won’t even bother with FISA?”
Stephen Hawking’s recent call for the colonization of Mars is seeming better every day….

Posted by: Jeremiah | Apr 23 2008 23:51 utc | 4

Remembering my dictum that “the msm only tell the truth when it just happens to mesh with their adgenda,” it is obvious that this is meant as a diversion away form the real organized crime group, or more appropriately, the top dons.
Bravo! hear here, buy that person a drink!
Alos, MOA’s will be happt to note, Thomas Friedman [has been] pied in the face on Earth day by the Greenwash Guerillas at Brown [university?] I guess, as I posting this on the fly while on the way out the door… anyway, it made my day…lol

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Apr 23 2008 23:59 utc | 5

On the general topic of “rogue economics” the This is Hell interview with Italian economist Loretta Napoleoni on Saturday was pretty good (not in depth on any topic, but generally).
Napoleoni believes the world is in one of its periods where international groups beyond the law are powering political events.

Posted by: Henry | Apr 24 2008 1:37 utc | 6

ain’t that something. “mobsters without borders”… isn’t that what economic globalization is all about? sure it is. if reporters actually want to take mukasey up on international criminals, why not start by taking out the big fish? you know, the ones who rob entire countries at gunpoint, taking everything of value & destroying the rest. we’re talking governments, transnational profiteers & the militaries that do the heavy-lifting, provide the logistics, bust kneecaps, and smash & grab for them.
the reality is that there is a vast extra-legal, extra-state economy that makes the world function. and however much they try, no particular outfit is every gonna be able to monopolize it. there are no clear lines between legal & illegal, legitimate & illegitimate, businessman & criminal in this world. i know that unregulated capitalists always try to simplify everything down to the most controllable basic common units — monocultures, monocrops, & monotheism — but unless they actually do “level the playing field” and extirpate most of the species, fahgetaboutit! nobody even knows how big the shadow economy is.
what the “organized crime council” (and shouldn’t we read that title literally?) is being refitted for (in part, at least) is b/c the homeland needs a new sort of enemy. the taxpayers are losing trust in the capitalist system, it just ain’t working for them the way it used to – so gotta distract ’em in order to keep ’em from considering other systems, ya see.
maybe even put some fear in the air – hey, don’t even think about acting on those extra-formal opportunities out there ready & able to supply your demands.
in a way, they’re already coming full-circle. from naylor’s satanic purses

In a 20 September 2001 address to Congress and to the US people, President George W. Bush declared that “al-Qaeda” was to terrorism what the Mafia was to crime. Thus he captured in a pithy phrase a common belief – that crime and terrorism were both the work of fabulously wealthy, heirarchically structured, transnational entities whose commitment to tear asunder the moral and economic fabric of US society could be countered only by emergency military or legal measures, both of which he took.
This view, heartily endorsed both by media pundits and by the growing army of post-9/11 “national security experts,” did not emerge suddenly from the fevered mind of some Republican Party spinmeister. It had been gaining converts for decades before it crystallized in the legislative and military aftermath of 9/11. The anti-Mafia hysteria that had gripped the United States during the late nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries provided the images, the vocabulary, and even some of the important legal weaponry deployed in the anti-Islamic Terror campaign of the late twentieth and early twenty-first.
The Crime Was also set the precedent followed assiduously in the future Terror War of viewing the danger through racially (and/or religiously) tinted lenses. It started the process, even more evident in the later Terror War, of reading evidence and testimony, both in public enquiries and in trials, not for what it actually said but for how it confirmed existing stereotypes. It permitted US politicians and senior bureaucrats long before 9/11 to use an external threat to advance an internal agenda, including their own careers; while the media learned early the vital commerical lesson that, in bring such a danger to public attention, nothing succeeds like excess.

Posted by: b real | Apr 24 2008 4:05 utc | 7

Just like it ever was David Frost:

These meetings produced a plan, the Huston Plan, which advocated the systematic use of wiretappings, burglaries, or so-called black bag jobs, mail openings and infiltration against antiwar groups and others. Some of these activities, as Huston emphasized to Nixon, were clearly illegal. Nevertheless, the president approved the plan. Five days later, after opposition from J. Edgar Hoover, the plan was withdrawn, but the president’s approval was later to be listed in the Articles of Impeachment as an alleged abuse of presidential power.

Do you see any difference? Richard Nixon:

Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.

Nowadays they call it the Unitary Executive fully backed by the Court:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that Whitman was faced with conflicting information about dangers posed by the dust and that she had passed on assurances that came from the White House.

It’s not a lie if the government says it:
Environment head not liable for 9/11 assurances

Posted by: Sam | Apr 24 2008 6:27 utc | 8

Gazprom, anyone?

Posted by: Anonymous | Apr 24 2008 8:06 utc | 9

OK on the face of it a bit of humour but as Juannie pointed out above these guys don’t play for laughs. The story seems to have come from here on the Reuters wire It started to make sense.

Launching a campaign against such international criminals, Attorney General Michael Mukasey said they were more adaptable and sophisticated than La Cosa Nostra and other syndicates the U.S. government set out to defeat half a century ago.
“These international criminals pose real national security threats to this country,” Mukasey said in a speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. He cited recent cases, many with links to the former Soviet bloc.

Pretty straightforward bureaucratic jobbery really. Remember after the action against the world trade centre the Feebs and a bunch of other agencies got together to solve world terrorism and cure the world of all known diseases or somesuch? (well I throw in the disease bit but they did promise miracles) They haven’t delivered any miracles. The reverse in fact. Homeland security has been lurching from one scandal to another.
To make matter worse there has been a dearth of terraism of late, well against white folks anyhow. Justice has decided to get back to harrassing non-Aryan migrants – eg, Russians Italians etc, by ethnicising crime in their communities again. Now since this is a bit of a back to the future thing if peeps look at it too closely, they may argue that the Feebs and their sidekicks in ATF and Treasury should downsize back to where they were before 01. Law enforcement is a federal bureaucracy and federal bureaucracies that don’t harrass the elites get bigger, not smaller. That is an immutable fact. Only the EPA and the FDA are downsized.
So the obvious way to fix this problem is to convince the gullible that there are criminal conspiracies that are worse than terraism(remember back when nothing was worse than terraism?) and therefore all these agencies don’t need less they need more. This press conference is just a preliminary sounding out to get lobbyists, fellow travellers and those crime fighters who have felt like the poor relation back on side to present a united front when they raid the federal cookie jar.
At least some of the assholes who have been subjecting the people of Islam to rendition and the like are coming home to utilise their skills on their countrymen. The rest will be harassing Russians, Italians, Romanians (always a favourite rounding up gypsies)in their country of origin, along with anyone else who doesn’t seems as white as the average Feeb.
Sickening really because they will get to keep all their tricks to spy on everyone, get more people to do less and no one in the political class will say a word to oppose this jobbery.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Apr 24 2008 9:02 utc | 10

back in the days, Elliot Ness went after big catch in Chicago like Capone and others.In todays world, he’s sent to the Niger-Delta to chase down “bad boyz in the creeks” smuggling crude out in little barges. Of course the fat cats in Europe (unless your Russian) & America have nothing to fear. Its all good at the villa.

Posted by: jony_b_cool | Apr 24 2008 12:24 utc | 11

Launching a campaign against such international criminals, Attorney General Michael Mukasey said they were more adaptable and sophisticated than La Cosa Nostra and other syndicates the U.S. government set out to defeat half a century ago.
“These international criminals pose real national security threats to this country,” Mukasey said in a speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. He cited recent cases, many with links to the former Soviet bloc.
“They touch all sectors of our economy, dealing in everything from cigarettes to oil; clothing to pharmaceuticals,” Mukasey said.

Of course they touch all sectors of our economy. The entire multinational corporate structure is, at it’s core, criminal. How could it be any other way. Only the most ruthless and unconscionable have any chance of rising to the top of the dog-eat-dog competitive world of multibillion dollar corporations. Only the highly gifted psychopath have the prerequisites of character to rise to the top of these rapacious structures.
Martha Stout in “the sociopath next door” says the psychopath is one who is devoid of any sense of conscience and incapable of feelings of remorse or guilt. That leaves their decision making free from any encumbrances other than the primary goal of profit and power over all others. What more ripe ground could there be for the success of only the most psychopathic and exploitive criminals?
So probably most if not all corporations competing in world market dominance are involved in some criminal activities. That puts Attorney General Mukasey statement, “These international criminals pose real national security threats to this country,” in proper context and we can see that the biggest thug on the block, I mean in the world, is going for a bigger slice of the global pie and going to knock over the competition to get it. Nothing and no one will stand in the way of our manifest destiny.
Seems to me to fit an agenda that would divert attention away from one’s own criminal culpability, which is becoming more and more transparent every day, and get richer at the same time

Posted by: Juannie | Apr 24 2008 14:05 utc | 12

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