- The International Monetary Fund's director, Dominique
Strauss-Kahn, was arrested last Sunday in New York City on the allegation
of an immigrant hotel maid that he attempted to rape her in his hotel room.
A New York judge has denied Strauss-Kahn bail on the grounds that he might
flee to France.
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- President Bill Clinton survived his sexual escapades,
because he was a servant to the system, not a threat. But Strauss-Kahn,
like former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, was a threat to the system,
and, like Eliot Spitzer, Strass-Kahn has been deleted from the power ranks.
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- Strauss-Kahn was the first IMF director in my lifetime,
if memory serves, who disavowed the traditional IMF policy of imposing
on the poor and ordinary people the cost of bailing out Wall Street and
the Western banks. Strauss-Kahn said that regulation had to be reimposed
on the greed-driven, fraud-prone financial sector, which, unregulated,
destroyed the lives of ordinary people. Strauss-Kahn listened to Nobel
economist Joseph Stiglitz, one of a handful of economists who has a social
conscience.
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- Perhaps the most dangerous black mark in Strauss-Kahn's
book is that he was far ahead of America's French puppet, President Sarkozy,
in the upcoming French elections. Strauss-Kahn simply had to be eliminated.
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- It is possible that Strauss-Kahn eliminated himself and
saved Washington the trouble. However, as a well-travelled person who has
often stayed in New York hotels and in hotels in cities around the world,
I have never experienced a maid entering unannounced into my room, much
less when I was in the shower.
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- In the spun story, Strauss-Kahn is portrayed as so deprived
of sex that he attempted to rape a hotel maid. Anyone who ever served on
the staff of a powerful public figure knows that this is unlikely. On a
senator's staff on which I served, there were two aides whose job was to
make certain that no woman, with the exception of his wife, was ever alone
with the senator. This was done to protect the senator both from female
power groupies, who lust after celebrities and powerful men, and from women
sent by a rival on missions to compromise an opponent. A powerful man such
as Strauss-Kahn would not have been starved for women, and as a multi-millionaire
he could certainly afford to make his own discreet arrangements.
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- As Henry Kissinger said, "power is the ultimate
aphrodisiac." In politics, sex is handed out as favors and payoffs,
and it is used as a honey trap. Some Americans will remember that Senator
Packwood's long career (1969-1995) was destroyed by a female lobbyist,
suspected, according to rumors, of sexual conquests of Senators, who charged
that Packwood propositioned her in his office. Perhaps what inspired the
charge was that Packwood was in the way of her employer's legislative agenda.
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- Even those who exercise care can be framed by allegations
of an event to which there are no witnesses. On May 16 the British Daily
Mail reported that prior to Strauss-Kahn's fateful departure for New York,
the French newspaper, Liberation, published comments he made while discussing
his plans to challenge Sarkozy for the presidency of France. Strauss-Kahn
said that as he was the clear favorite to beat Sarkozy, he would be subjected
to a smear campaign by Sarkozy and his interior minister, Glaude Gueant.
Strauss-Kahn predicted that a woman would be offered between 500,000 and
1,000,000 euros (more than $1,000,000) to make up a story that he raped
her. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1387625/IMF-chief-Dominique-Strauss-Kahn-
- feared-political-enemy-pay-woman-allege-rape.html
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- The Daily Mail reports that Strauss-Kahn's suspicions
are supported
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- by the fact that the first person to break the news of
Strauss-Kahn's arrest was an activist in Mr Sarkozy's UMP party who
apparently knew about the scandal before it happened. Jonathan Pinet, a
politics student, tweeted the news just before the New York Police Department
made it public, although he said that he simply had a 'friend' working
at the Sofitel where the attack was said to have happened. The first person
to re-tweet Mr Pinet was Arnaud Dassier, a spin doctor who had previously
publicised details of multi-millionaire Strauss-Kahn's luxurious lifestyle
in a bid to dent his left wing credentials.
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- Strauss-Kahn could just as easily been set up by rivals
inside the IMF, as well as by rivals within the French political establishment.
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- Michelle Sabban, a senior councillor for the greater
Paris region and a Strauss-Kahn loyalist said: 'I am convinced it is an
international conspiracy.'
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- She added: 'It's the IMF they wanted to decapitate, not
so much the Socialist primary candidate.
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- 'It's not like him. Everyone knows that his weakness
is seduction, women. That's how they got him.'
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- Even some of Strauss-Kahn's rivals said they could not
believe the news. 'It is totally hallucinatory,' said centrist Dominique
Paille.
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- 'If it is true, this would be a historic moment, but
in the negative sense, for French political life. I hope that everyone
respects the presumption of innocence. I cannot manage to believe this
affair.'
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- And Henri de Raincourt, minister for overseas co-operation
in President Nicolas Sarkozy's government, added: 'We cannot rule out the
thought of a trap.'
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- Michelle Sabban is on to something when she says the
IMF was the target. Strauss-Kahn is the first IMF director who is not lined
up on the side of the rich against the poor. Strauss-Kahn's suspicions
were of Sarkozy, but Wall Street and the US government also had strong
reasons to eliminate him. Wall Street is terrified by the prospect of regulation,
and Washington was embarrassed by the recent IMF report that China's economy
would surpass the US economy within five years. An international conspiracy
is not out of the question.
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- Indeed, the plot is unfolding as a conspiracy. Authorities
have produced a French woman who claims she was a near rape victim of Strauss-Kahn
a decade ago. It would be interesting to know whether this allegation is
the result of a threat or a bribe. As in the case of Julian Assange, there
are now two women to accuse Strauss-Kahn. Once the prosecutors get the
odds of two females against one male, they win in the media.
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- It has not been revealed how the authorities knew Strauss-Kahn
was on a flight to France. However, by arresting him aboard his scheduled
flight just as it was to depart, the authorities created the image of a
man fleeing from a crime.
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- The way Amerikan justice (sic) works is that prosecutors
in about 96 percent of the cases get a plea bargain. US prosecutors are
permitted by judges and the public to pay for testimony against the defendant
and to put sufficient pressure on innocent defendants to coerce them into
making a guilty plea in exchange for lesser charges and a lighter sentence.
Unless the hotel maid has a spell of bad conscience and admits she was
paid to lie, or gets cold feet about perjuring herself, Strauss-Kahn is
likely to find that Amerikan criminal justice (sic) is organized to produce
conviction regardless of innocence or guilt.
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- On May 16, the day following Strauss-Kahn's arrest, the
US Supreme Court threw its weight behind the Amerikan police state by destroying
the remains of the Fourth Amendment with an 8-1 ruling that, the U.S. Constitution
notwithstanding, Amerika's police do not need warrants to invade homes
and search persons.
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- This ruling is more evidence that every American is regarded
as a potential enemy of the state, not only by Airport Security but also
by the high muckety-mucks in Washington. The conservatives' "war on
crime" has created a police state, and conservatives, who originally
stood for limited government and civil liberty, are euphoric over the expanded
and unaccountable powers that a conservative Supreme Court has handed to
the police.
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- On the same day the federal government reached the $14.3
trillion debt ceiling, which forced the Treasury to "borrow"
money from federal employee pensions in order to continue funding Amerika's
illegal wars and crimes against humanity. The breached debt ceiling serves
as an appropriate marker for a country that has squandered its constitutional
heritage and has arrived at moral as well as fiscal bankruptcy.
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