BY JOSEPH STRAW

The Obama Administration wants to put the screws to foreign organized crime, starting where it hurts most: in the bank.
 
The White House Monday issued its strategy for fighting “transnational” organized crime, which President Obama writes in the 28-page document has become “more complex, volatile, and destabilizing” in today’s wired globalized economy.
 
The administration’s plan starts with better enforcement at home: cut demand for narcotics and stop firearms from leaving the country.
 
To date, government efforts to cut off the “river of steel” that arms combatants in that country’s drug war have resulted in tragedy. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives released close to 2,000 guns into the illicit supply chain in hopes of tracking them, and one was used to kill a U.S. Border Patrol agent last year.
 
Obama also wants Congress to pass legislation authorizing more enforcement, and seeks improved information and intelligence sharing with foreign allies
 
Adding some teeth, President Obama issued  a separate executive order targeting four of the world’s biggest rackets: the Brothers’ Circle, centered in the former Soviet Union; the Camorra, based in Italy’s Campania region; the Yakuza in Japan, and the Los Zetas drug cartel in Mexico.
 
Under the order, U.S. assets of anyone associated with the groups are frozen, and transactions with those associates are barred, said David S. Cohen, undersecretary of the treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence.
 
The executive order reflects a new priority for the Treasury Department, and it puts banks on notice, said Louise Shelley, director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason University in Arlington, Va.
 

By ALISON GENDAR

Building a cement cap over a 90-acre New York City reservoir is not only expensive but unnecessary, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand told environmental officials.
 
New York City is on the hook to build a $1.6 billion cement cover for the Hillview Reservoir.
 
That would likely mean a 3% increase in water rates for New York City residents on top of a 90% increase over the last five years, Gillibrand said.
 
The city is required to build the lid to protect the water supply from cryptosporidium, a parasite that gets into waterways from human and animal waste.
 
But the city Health Department found only 100 cases of cryptosporidium a year among New York City’s 8 million residents.
 
And a recent study of the Hillview Reservoir found that it was not plagued by the parasite, which can be fatal in people with weakened immune systems but usually just causes diarrhea.
 
New York City already tests water quality more than 500,000 times a year, and is building the world’s largest ultraviolet wastewater disinfection facility in Westchester County  to kill any parasites before they leach into the reservoir system.
 
Given all this, Gillibrand asked Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson to can the lid project because it was “a redundant system that would have little public health benefit at enormous cost to New York City.”

By ALISON GENDAR

WASHINGTON - Republicans saved their sharpest barbs for each other today as they handicapped the chances of passing a debt package by the Aug. 2 deadline.

“Currently, there is not a single debt limit proposal that can pass the House of Representatives," House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said.

That was a dig at a plan put forth by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, which would have guarantee President Obama the power to increase the government’s debt limit, unless barred by veto-proof majorities.

Such a plan would prevent the country from defaulting on its loans Aug. 2, and politically would mean Obama would catch the flack for raising the country’s debt, not Republicans.

“I refuse to help Barack Obama get re-elected by marching Republicans into a position where we have co-ownership of a bad economy,” Connell said on a radio talk show.

But the measure didn’t gain much traction with either GOP leaders or rank-and-file Republicans.

Freshman Rep. Michael Grimm, R-Staten Island, said unless a debt plan carried substantial spending cuts and structural change, “I can’t raise the debt ceiling.”

“I worked on Wall Street. I know what this will mean - interest rates rise, markets could potentially start to spiral. That’s why we have to get this right, and get a full package of meaningful savings and real structural change,” he said.

And it has to be done fast because House Republicans will not sign-off on a proposal dumped in their laps at 11:59 p.m. on Aug. 1.

“We are not voting on something we didn’t read,” Grimm said. “Let us go through it with staff, call constituents, answer questions, understand it. You are not going to see a midnight vote.”