Politics & Power Quote by Howard Berman

“Organized crime” is a loaded phrase: it drags the image of street syndicates into the marble hallways of state power. Howard Berman’s line works because it refuses the polite vocabulary of trade disputes and instead frames intellectual property theft as moral rot with a flag on it. Not “unfair competition,” not “violations,” but a government behaving like a cartel.

The specific intent is prosecutorial. Berman isn’t merely condemning piracy; he’s building a justification for hard tools: sanctions, seizures, trade retaliation, expanded enforcement mandates. By calling it “the very essence,” he collapses complexity into clarity. If it’s organized crime, then extraordinary countermeasures start to sound like basic law-and-order.

The subtext is strategic: he’s laundering economic anxiety into ethical certainty. “Intellectual property” can feel abstract to the public, even when it maps to jobs, leverage, and technological advantage. “Theft,” by contrast, is visceral. Add “by a government,” and the outrage becomes existential: the offender isn’t a bad actor on the margins, but a rival system using state capacity to extract value. That framing also sidesteps messy questions about patent regimes, access, and innovation by placing the debate on the terrain of criminality.

Contextually, this reads like Washington’s era of escalating IP hawkishness, when accusations aimed at state-backed firms (often implicitly China) were used to rally bipartisan consensus. It’s rhetoric designed to make a trade fight feel like a fight against racketeering: cleaner, tougher, and easier to sell.