Head of IMF arrested and accused of sexual assault

[Jan Klimkowski]

The criminal case against Strauss-Kahn alleges oral and anal "sexual conduct" by "forcible compulsion":

http://www.scribd.com/doc/55548171/Crimi...-Complaint

[Magda Hassan]

Dominique Strauss-Kahn feared that one of his political opponents would pay a woman more than $1million to say he raped her, it emerged today.
The extraordinary revelation emerged in Paris as the International Monetary Fund head remained in a New York police cell accused of launching a sex attack on a hotel maid.
A writer in the French capital has also come forward to say that the 62-year-old attempted to rape her a decade ago.

Revelations: Dominique Strauss-Kahn, centre, walks out of a New York City Police station after being arrested for allegedly sexually attacking a hotel maid

But as Strauss-Kahn faced a 15-year prison sentence - which would signify the end of his ambition to become French president next year - conspiracy theories abounded.
Liberation, the left-wing daily newspaper, published details on off-the-record comments made by Strauss-Kahn as recently as April 28th.
Discussing his plans to challenge Nicolas Sarkozy as Socialist candidate for the presidency in 2012, he said he imagined a woman who had been raped in a car park and who was offered between €500,000 and €1,000,000 to make up such a story.'
Because he was the clear favourite to beat Mr Sarkozy, Strauss-Kahn feared he would be subjected to a smear campaign by the President and his Interior Minister, Glaude Gueant.


More...

• IMF chief submits to DNA exam ahead of New York court date on sex assault charges as police claim he tried to flee the country
  

Such theories were bolstered 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.[my bold]

Strauss-Kahn could just as easily been set up by rivals inside the IMF, as well as by rivals within the French political establishment.

Contenders: Strauss-Kahn was the clear favourite to beat Mr Sarkozy in the challenge to become Socialist candidate for the 2012 president

Michelle Sabban, a senior councillor for the greater Paris region and a Strauss-Kahn loyalist said: I am convinced it is an international conspiracy.'
She added: It's the IMF they wanted to decapitate, not so much the Socialist primary candidate.
It's not like him. Everyone knows that his weakness is seduction, women. That's how they got him.'
Even some of Strauss-Kahn's rivals said they could not believe the news. It is totally hallucinatory,' said centrist Dominique Paille.

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.'
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.'
Referring to recent allegations that Strauss-Kahn was chauffered around Paris in a Porsche and wore 20,000 plus suits, Mr De Raincourt added: I note that this has happened just after the affair of the car and the suit in a short space of time.
I am not ruling anything out. If this turns out to have been a trap, let me tell you that it would not be to the credit of those who set it.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...z1MZHqIKk0

[Ed Jewett]

"... t would appear that at least some leading economists and financial organizations believed that Strauss-Kahn was in the process of changing at least some of the more aggressive policies of the IMF at a time when he was about to go meet with world financial leaders regarding the pending neoliberalization of Greece.
Also extremely curious is the fact that the man who has been tapped to replace Strauss-Kahn, former JPMorgan Chase exec and extreme globalist John Lipsky (appointed by the United States into the number two position), announced his retirement from the IMF just a few days before all of this took place.
It would seem that there was an internal struggle taking place in the IMF and that prior to Strauss-Kahn's arrest, he just might have been winning, at least to some degree. Now with him out-of-the-way, the Rockefeller linked Lipsky is taking over and my guess is he won't be quitting the IMF anytime soon.
Also curious that the likes of Prison Planet and Ron Paul seem to have missed all of this. But, when you think about their recent behavior, is it really all that strange?"

http://willyloman.wordpress.com/2011/05/...-a-set-up/

[Peter Lemkin]

Well, just more proof / demonstration that when a black op is run, it has more than one objective to be accomplished, behind it. Here to keep France out of the hands of the Socialists and to keep the IMF from being reformed, even a little. Looks like the right [which overwhelmingly runs the world's black ops, dirty tricks et al.] won 'bigtime' with this one.

Sexual assassinations are very difficult to defend against - as it is 'he said' vs. 'she said', usually with little in the way of witnesses nor proofs. Forensic evidence can easily be faked, as well - so easy to obtain a few hairs or flakes of skin, etc. in the time prior. There is a natural bias to believe the woman....why else would she claim to have been assaulted?....few think of politics, deep black ops or millions of money to stage the event.

Interestingly, many in France now suspect this was a set-up; while few in America do. :joystick:

[James Lewis]

Well, Peter, it just goes to show that there's more than one way to "assassinate" someone besides the obvious bullet in the head. And it figures that he was seriously talking about redistribution of wealth, for people and countries who may actually need it. If you want a refresher course on what happens to people who propose such things, I give you the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. And, to a lesser extent, RFK...

Before I read the post above [about his proposed IMF changes] I thought it was likely a Honey Trap; now I'm 100% sure! It's modeled on the Eliot Spitzer take-down. The police parading him in handcuffs was unnecessary and part of the script to destroy him....it is more than obvious. That maid, if there was a maid really attacked, was a plant - and an actor in a larger drama. Politics (sic) as usual. :kraka:

[Magda Hassan]

Bankers Cheer as IMF Head Faces Sexual Assault Charges

By MIKE WHITNEY
Dominique Strauss-Kahn is effectively finished as a political force, even if he doesn't draw a guilty verdict in New York, where a 32-year-old maid says she was attacked and forced to perform oral sex on him.
He's finished as IMF chief and his candidacy against Sarkozy also looks to be in ruins.
The IMF chief certainly has enemies in high places who will be cheering his predicament. He had recently broke-free from the "party line" and was changing the direction of the IMF. His road to Damascus conversion was championed by progressive economist Joesph Stiglitz in a recent article titled "The IMF's Switch in Time". Here's an excerpt:

"The annual spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund was notable in marking the Fund's effort to distance itself from its own long-standing tenets on capital controls and labor-market flexibility. It appears that a new IMF has gradually, and cautiously, emerged under the leadership of Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
Slightly more than 13 years earlier, at the IMF's Hong Kong meeting in 1997, the Fund had attempted to amend its charter in order to gain more leeway to push countries towards capital-market liberalization. The timing could not have been worse: the East Asia crisis was just brewing a crisis that was largely the result of capital-market liberalization in a region that, given its high savings rate, had no need for it.
That push had been advocated by Western financial markets and the Western finance ministries that serve them so loyally. Financial deregulation in the United States was a prime cause of the global crisis that erupted in 2008, and financial and capital-market liberalization elsewhere helped spread that "made in the USA" trauma around the world....The crisis showed that free and unfettered markets are neither efficient nor stable." ("The IMF's Switch in Time", Joseph Stiglitz, Project Syndicate)

So, Strauss-Kahn was trying to move the bank in a more positive direction, a direction that didn't require that countries leave their economies open to the ravages of foreign capital that moves in swiftly--pushing up prices and creating bubbles--and departs just as fast, leaving behind the scourge of high unemployment, plunging demand, hobbled industries, and deep recession.
Strauss-Kahn had set out on a "kinder and gentler" path, one that would not force foreign leaders to privatize their state-owned industries or crush their labor unions. Naturally, his actions were not warmly received by the bankers and corporatists who look to the IMF to provide legitimacy to their ongoing plunder of the rest of the world. These are the people who think that the current policies are "just fine" because they produce the results they're looking for, which is bigger profits for themselves and deeper poverty for everyone else.
Here's Stiglitz again:

"Strauss-Kahn is proving himself a sagacious leader of the IMF.... As Strauss-Kahn concluded in his speech to the Brookings Institution shortly before the Fund's recent meeting: Ultimately, employment and equity are building blocks of economic stability and prosperity, of political stability and peace. This goes to the heart of the IMF's mandate. It must be placed at the heart of the policy agenda.'
Right. So, now the IMF is going to be an agent for the redistribution of wealth.... (for) strengthening collective bargaining, restructuring mortgages, restructuring tax and spending policies to stimulate the economy now through long-term investments, and implementing social policies that ensure opportunity for all'"? (according to Stiglitz)

Good luck with that.
Check this out from World Campaign and judge for yourself whether Strauss-Kahn had become a "liability" that had to be eliminated so the business of extracting wealth from the poorest people on earth could continue apace:

"For decades, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been associated among anti-poverty, hunger and development activists as the poster child of everything wrong with the rich world's fiscal management of the rest of the world, particularly of poor nations, with its seemingly one-dimensional focus on belt-tightening fiscal policies as the price of its loans, and a trickle-down economic philosophy that has helped traditional wealthy elites maintain the status quo while the majority stayed poor and powerless. With a world increasingly in revolution because of such realities, and after the global financial crisis in the wake of regulatory and other policies that had worked after the Great Depression being largely abandoned, IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn has made nothing less than stunning observations about how the IMF and the world need to change policies.
"In an article today in the Washington Post, Howard Schneider writes that after the 2008 crash led toward regulation again of financial companies and government involvement in the economy, for Strauss-Khan the job is only half done, as he has been leading the fund through a fundamental rethinking of its economic theory. In recent remarks, he has provided a broad summary of the conclusions: State regulation of markets needs to be more extensive; global policies need to create a more even distribution of income; central banks need to do more to prevent lending and asset prices from expanding too fast. 'The pendulum will swing from the market to the state,' Strauss-Kahn said in an address at George Washington University last week. 'Globalization has delivered a lot . . . but it also has a dark side, a large and growing chasm between the rich and the poor. Clearly we need a new form of globalization' to prevent the 'invisible hand' of loosely regulated markets from becoming 'an invisible fist.'"

Repeat: "...a fundamental rethinking of economic theory".... (a greater) "distribution of income"...(more) "regulation of financial companies", "central banks need to do more to prevent lending and asset prices from expanding too fast".
There's not going to be any revolution at the IMF. That's baloney. The institution was created with the clear intention of ripping poor nations off and it's done an impressive job in that regard. There's not going to be any change of policy either. Why would there be? Have the bankers and corporate bilge-rats suddenly grown a conscience and decided to lend a helping hand to long-suffering humanity? Get real.
Strauss-Kahn has been replaced by the IMF's number 2 guy, John Lipsky, former Vice Chairman of the JPMorgan Investment Bank. How's that for "change you can believe in"?
Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com

[Jan Klimkowski]

Senator Geary gets, ahem, levered in the brothel scene from The Godfather Part II:

CUT TO: Inside a Fredo's club. FREDO and TOM walk in and shake hands with the manager.

MANAGER
Freddie, good to see ya.

TOM
How is he?

MANAGER
He's okay -- he's in the back.

[They walk to the back of the club.]

Come on girls, take a hike.

(then)

In this room here.

TOM
I want to talk to him alone first.

MANAGER
Come on; Huh.

[TOM walk in to a room alone.]

TOM
I thought I could help you SENATOR.

GEARY
Hagen.

[TOM nods.]
Listen, I did not --

TOM
I know, you're alright.

GEARY
I didn't do anything.

TOM
It's okay. You're very lucky -- my brother FREDO operates this place, he was called before anyone. If this had happened someplace else, we couldn't've helped you..

GEARY
I -- when I woke up, I was on the floor -- and I don't know how it happened.

TOM
You can't remember?

GEARY
I passed out.

[He stands up and moves over the bed where we see a bloody dead girl.]

I -- I'll fix it.

[He unties the girl's hand from the bed post.]

Just a game.

[He takes a towel and begins to wipe up the blood that is all over her. He looks at the towel and wipes off his hands.]

Jesus, Jesus.

[He begins to cry. As he does, TOM looks over at NERI who is wiping his hands in the bathroom.]

Jesus, God -- Oh, God. I don't know -- and I can't understand -- why I can't remember.

TOM
You don't have to remember -- just do as I say. We're putting a call into your office -- explain that you'll be there tomorrow afternoon -- you decided to spend the night at Michael Corleone's house in Tahoe -- as his guest.

GEARY
I do remember that she was laughing...we'd done it before -- and I know that I couldn't've hurt -- that girl

TOM
This girl has no family -- nobody knows that she worked here. It'll be as if she never existed. All that's left is our friendship.

[James Lewis]

Ah, life imitating art...or maybe it's the other way around??

Senator Geary gets, ahem, levered in the brothel scene from The Godfather Part II:

CUT TO: Inside a Fredo's club. FREDO and TOM walk in and shake hands with the manager.

MANAGER
Freddie, good to see ya.

TOM
How is he?

MANAGER
He's okay -- he's in the back.

[They walk to the back of the club.]

Come on girls, take a hike.

(then)

In this room here.

TOM
I want to talk to him alone first.

MANAGER
Come on; Huh.

[TOM walk in to a room alone.]

TOM
I thought I could help you SENATOR.

GEARY
Hagen.

[TOM nods.]
Listen, I did not --

TOM
I know, you're alright.

GEARY
I didn't do anything.

TOM
It's okay. You're very lucky -- my brother FREDO operates this place, he was called before anyone. If this had happened someplace else, we couldn't've helped you..

GEARY
I -- when I woke up, I was on the floor -- and I don't know how it happened.

TOM
You can't remember?

GEARY
I passed out.

[He stands up and moves over the bed where we see a bloody dead girl.]

I -- I'll fix it.

[He unties the girl's hand from the bed post.]

Just a game.

[He takes a towel and begins to wipe up the blood that is all over her. He looks at the towel and wipes off his hands.]

Jesus, Jesus.

[He begins to cry. As he does, TOM looks over at NERI who is wiping his hands in the bathroom.]

Jesus, God -- Oh, God. I don't know -- and I can't understand -- why I can't remember.

TOM
You don't have to remember -- just do as I say. We're putting a call into your office -- explain that you'll be there tomorrow afternoon -- you decided to spend the night at Michael Corleone's house in Tahoe -- as his guest.

GEARY
I do remember that she was laughing...we'd done it before -- and I know that I couldn't've hurt -- that girl

TOM
This girl has no family -- nobody knows that she worked here. It'll be as if she never existed. All that's left is our friendship.

[Magda Hassan]

More information but also very murky with lots of political implications. Even if he raped this woman as stated it does not follow that he raped the hotel maid. But it does make it easier to pin things on him.

The other dark chapter of Strauss-Kahn's life

Even Hollywood couldn't have made this story up. Overnight, Dominique Strauss-Kahn has gone from IMF master and commander, steering the world through the storm of financial ruin, to "Le Perv" who was dragged by police into a Harlem jail on charges of sexually assaulting a hotel maid.

Now a dramatic twist has been added by a French novelist, who's threatening to reopen a similar dark chapter from Strauss-Kahn's history.

Tristane Banon, an attractive 31-year-old writer, said on Monday she was sexually assaulted by Dominique Strauss-Kahn nine years ago. Speaking through her lawyer, Banon added that she was previously dissuaded from filing a suit by none other than her own mother a regional Socialist Party official.



"We are considering filing suit. I'm working with her on this," her lawyer told journalists.

Since news broke of Strauss-Kahn's arrest, there has been widespread suspicion of conspiracy among the French. Before this weekend, opinion polls indicated that Strauss-Khan was the frontrunner in next year's presidential election, and that could have made him the target of foul play by almost anyone.

But Banon's story, and the image of Strauss-Kahn as the sexually-insatiable Big Bad Wolf, is likely to quickly gain traction in France.

In 2007 Banon was a guest on a popular TV show hosted by presenter Thierry Ardisson, in which she described a sexual assault on her by a politician. The man's name was beeped out of the show. Describing the incident the young novelist said: "When we were fighting, I cried out rape' to scare him, but that didn't seem to scare him much."

"I didn't want to go through with [a lawsuit]. I didn't want to forever be known as the girl who had a problem with a politician'," she said to explain her reluctance to press charges. (Watch video)

The final chapter of the Strauss-Kahn drama has yet to be written, but Banon's next words will have French readers riveted. http://josephbamat.blogs.france24.com/ar...n-s-life-2

[James Lewis]

Why the title "Deja Vu"? Simple...doesn't this remind you of the Tiger Woods incident?

More information but also very murky with lots of political implications. Even if he raped this woman as stated it does not follow that he raped the hotel maid. But it does make it easier to pin things on him.

The other dark chapter of Strauss-Kahn's life

Even Hollywood couldn't have made this story up. Overnight, Dominique Strauss-Kahn has gone from IMF master and commander, steering the world through the storm of financial ruin, to "Le Perv" who was dragged by police into a Harlem jail on charges of sexually assaulting a hotel maid.

Now a dramatic twist has been added by a French novelist, who's threatening to reopen a similar dark chapter from Strauss-Kahn's history.

Tristane Banon, an attractive 31-year-old writer, said on Monday she was sexually assaulted by Dominique Strauss-Kahn nine years ago. Speaking through her lawyer, Banon added that she was previously dissuaded from filing a suit by none other than her own mother a regional Socialist Party official.



"We are considering filing suit. I'm working with her on this," her lawyer told journalists.

Since news broke of Strauss-Kahn's arrest, there has been widespread suspicion of conspiracy among the French. Before this weekend, opinion polls indicated that Strauss-Khan was the frontrunner in next year's presidential election, and that could have made him the target of foul play by almost anyone.

But Banon's story, and the image of Strauss-Kahn as the sexually-insatiable Big Bad Wolf, is likely to quickly gain traction in France.

In 2007 Banon was a guest on a popular TV show hosted by presenter Thierry Ardisson, in which she described a sexual assault on her by a politician. The man's name was beeped out of the show. Describing the incident the young novelist said: "When we were fighting, I cried out rape' to scare him, but that didn't seem to scare him much."

"I didn't want to go through with [a lawsuit]. I didn't want to forever be known as the girl who had a problem with a politician'," she said to explain her reluctance to press charges. (Watch video)

The final chapter of the Strauss-Kahn drama has yet to be written, but Banon's next words will have French readers riveted. http://josephbamat.blogs.france24.com/ar...n-s-life-2