Larry Klayman’s non-profit watchdog group Freedom Watch has filed a lawsuit against the Organization of Petroleum Exporting States, charging the cartel with engaging in “economic terrorism” by fixing the price of oil.
The suit was filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida in Miami, and announced by Klayman, a former U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division prosecutor who helped break up AT&T in the early 1980s.
It alleges that OPEC — whose 13 members include Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran — has raised the price of oil to levels intended to severely harm the economies of the United States and its Western allies “as a latent means of economic terrorism by nation states who are bent on spreading communism and radical Islam throughout the world,” according to a statement from Freedom Watch.
The lawsuit states that OPEC is engaged in “illegal actions” and views the U.S. and its Western allies “as opposed to their interests in spreading, in the case of Hugo Chavez and Venezuela, communism throughout Latin America, and in the case of the Arab members of OPEC such as Saudi Arabia, radical Whahabe (sic) and derivative strains of radical Islam in its centuries-old struggle for domination over Jews and Christians and Judeo-Christian interests.”
The “illegal conduct” of OPEC “is also intended to influence the American Presidential and Congressional elections of 2008 by destabilizing the economy to further their anti-Western and anti-Christian agendas.
“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.”
OPEC’s “conspiracy” against the West includes “agreed-upon limits and restrictions on the production of oil and other petroleum products by OPEC’s 13 member nations,” which “dramatically” increase the price of gasoline and have brought the economy of the U.S. and the West “to its economic knees,” according to Freedom Watch.
The lawsuit asks the court to rule that OPEC’s actions constitute “an unreasonable restraint of trade or commerce,” and to order any “legal or equitable relief that this Honorable Court may deem just and proper.”
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