by Mike Whit­ney of GlobalResearch.ca

I have no way of know­ing whether the 32-year-old maid who claims she was attacked and forced to per­form oral sex on IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, is telling the truth or not. I’ll leave that to the bray­ing hounds in the media who have already assumed the role of judge, jury and Lord High Exe­cu­tioner. But I will say, the whole mat­ter smells rather fishy, just like the Eliot Spitzer story smelled fishy. Spitzer, you may recall, was Wall Street’s biggest adver­sary and a likely can­di­date to head the SEC, a posi­tion at which he would have excelled. In fact, there’s no doubt in my mind that if Spitzer had been appointed to lead the SEC, most of the top invest­ment bankers on Wall Street would presently be mak­ing license plates and rope-soled shoes at the fed­eral pen­i­ten­tiary. So, there was plenty of rea­son to shadow Spitzer’s every move and see what bit of dirt could be dug up on him. As it turns out, the ex-Governor of New York made it easy for his ene­mies by engag­ing a high-priced hooker named Ash­ley Dupre for sex at the Mayflower Hotel. When the news broke, the media descended on Spitzer like a swarm of locusts por­ing over every sala­cious detail with the ebul­lient fer­vor of a randy 6th-grader. Mean­while, the crooks on Wall Street were able to breathe a sigh of relief and get back to doing what they do best; fleec­ing investors and cheat­ing peo­ple out of the life savings.

Strauss-Kahn had ene­mies in high places, too, which is why this whole mat­ter stinks to high-Heaven. First of all, Strauss-Kahn was the likely can­di­date of the French Social­ist Party who would have faced Sarkozy in the upcom­ing pres­i­den­tial elec­tions. The IMF chief clearly had a leg-up on Sarkozy who has been bat­tered by a num­ber of per­sonal scan­dals and plung­ing approval ratings.

But if Strauss-Kahn was set up, then it was prob­a­bly by mem­bers of the west­ern bank coali­tion, that shad­owy group of self-serving swine whose poli­cies have kept the greater body of human­ity in vary­ing state of poverty and des­per­a­tion for the last two cen­turies. Strauss-Kahn 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, this time impart­ing the “kiss of death” to his friend Strauss-Kahn:

“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.

Can you imag­ine how much this kind of talk pisses off the Big Money guys? How long do you think they’d put up with this clap­trap before they decided that Strauss-Kahn needed to take a per­ma­nent vacation?

Not long, I’d wager.

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.’” (http://wcampaign.org/issue.php?mid=625&v=y )

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”.

Are you kid­ding me? Read that pas­sage again and I think you’ll agree with me that Strauss-Kahn had signed his own death warrant.

There’s not going to be any rev­o­lu­tion at the IMF. That’s baloney. The insti­tu­tion was cre­ated with the clear inten­tion of rip­ping peo­ple 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 broke ranks and ven­tured into no man’s land. That’s why he was set up and then crushed like a bug.

(Note: 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”?)

by Mike Whitney