Is the Head of the IMF a Sex Criminal?

Former International Monetary Fund leader Dominique Strauss-Kahn has been moved to a new, more permanent location in New York City while awaiting trial in his attempted rape case.


A person familiar with his housing arrangements said he went to a stately 4-bedroom townhouse in neighboring Tribeca. The person was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to The Associated Press condition of anonymity.

We are doing without his expertise now because of an allegation which he denies.

IMF Rates Up Dictatorships Just Before Revolutions

by Michael Collins

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) made an embarrassing error just two days before the start of the Libyan people's revolution on February 17. This quote from an IMF country study appeared in a previous article: "The outlook for Libya’s economy remains favorable." IMF Feb 15 This advice was 180 degrees off target. The Libyan economy has ceased functioning as protests and popular demands imploded the Gaddafi regime. (Image)
Further investigation unearthed a specific pattern of positive IMF endorsements for each of the nations experiencing popular uprisings that are sweeping the region. When the IMF blesses a nation's progress for conforming to the economic policies underlying globalism, watch out! There is a popular rebellion in the wings.

http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/imf-rates-dictatorships-just-revolutions

Many developing nations are in debt and poverty partly due to the policies of international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

Their programs have been heavily criticized for many years for resulting in poverty. In addition, for developing or third world countries, there has been an increased dependency on the richer nations. This is despite the IMF and World Bank’s claim that they will reduce poverty.

Following an ideology known as neoliberalism, and spearheaded by these and other institutions known as the “Washington Consensus” (for being based in Washington D.C.), Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) have been imposed to ensure debt repayment and economic restructuring. But the way it has happened has required poor countries to reduce spending on things like health, education and development, while debt repayment and other economic policies have been made the priority. In effect, the IMF and World Bank have demanded that poor nations lower the standard of living of their people.

http://www.globalissues.org/article/3/structural-adjustment-a-major-cause-of-poverty

When the gold standard was abandoned in 1971, it was replaced by a "floating" exchange rate system that allowed currencies to fluctuate in value. Bereft of its old mission, the IMF chose a new one: to act as a development bank for poor countries. The data for the past three decades, however, demonstrate conclusively that most of the less developed countries receiving IMF loans have the same or lower per capita wealth today than they had before receiving these loans. Many actually are worse off economically:
Of the 89 less developed countries that received IMF loans between 1965 and 1995, 48 are no better off economically today than they were before receiving IMF loans;
Of these 48 countries, 32 are poorer than they were before receiving IMF loans; and
Of these 32 countries, 14 have economies that are at least 15 percent smaller than when they received their first IMF loans.3
Many of the missions the IMF has chosen to undertake do not require any involvement by the Fund. Congress should examine the IMF's overall effectiveness in accomplishing its stated purposes, as well as its impact on poor and developing countries. If it does, it will find that the IMF more often than not has failed to advance the purposes for which it was founded and has contributed little to improving the economies of less developed countries. It is time for Congress to develop a legislative strategy to end the contribution to the IMF. Specifically, Congress should:

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/1997/05/bg1113-the-international-monetary-fund

Perhaps, 'expertise' was a poor choice of words.

The arresting officers and others seem to have compelling reason to think otherwise.

Blood at Scene Becomes Pivotal Issue for Strauss-Kahn Defense in Rape Case
By Karen Freifeld and Greg Farrell
May 25, 2011

Evidence that Dominique Strauss- Kahn’s encounter with a hotel maid may have involved force, including reports of blood at the scene, might damage any defense contention that she consented, former prosecutors said.

Strauss-Kahn is accused in a seven-count indictment of forcibly trying to have intercourse with the woman at the Sofitel hotel in midtown Manhattan, and of making her have oral sex with him. Strauss-Kahn, who resigned as head of the International Monetary Fund after being charged with sexual assault and attempted rape, plans to plead not guilty, his lawyers have said.

Since Strauss-Kahn’s May 14 arrest, news organizations, such as the Associated Press and Fox News, have reported the discovery of physical evidence, including semen and a cut on the defendant’s back, that suggest contact between the accuser, a 32-year-old West African immigrant, and Strauss-Kahn, 62. Strauss-Kahn hasn’t confirmed or denied there was an encounter. His attorneys stopped just short of saying that, if there was one, it was consensual.

“If the DNA evidence is straightforward and there are no big surprises along the way here, plea negotiations would seem inevitable,” Samuel Buell, a former federal prosecutor, said in a phone interview. “It may be a matter of some time before the defendant can be brought to understand the necessity of those discussions.”

Crime Scene Unit
A New York Police Department crime scene unit gathered evidence from Strauss-Kahn’s hotel suite, Assistant District Attorney John “Artie” McConnell told a judge last week. While the results of tests performed on material taken in the searches weren’t available as of the May 19 hearing, preliminary indications “support the victim’s version of events,” the prosecutor said.

Strauss-Kahn’s body was examined and photographed after his May 14 arrest. Defense lawyers Benjamin Brafman and William Taylor said their client agreed to a government request for a physical examination.

News organizations including the Wall Street Journal have reported that a DNA sample from Strauss-Kahn matched semen found on the maid’s shirt. The Associated Press reported carpet samples taken from the room may contain semen traces and blood was found on the sheets. Fox News said Strauss-Kahn cut his back on a piece of furniture in the room during a struggle with the victim, who told him that she didn’t want to have sex with him. All the reports cited unidentified sources.

Reports of Evidence
Erin Duggan, a spokeswoman for the New York District Attorney’s office, declined to comment on the reports. Paul Browne, a spokesman for the police department, didn’t return calls seeking comment. Brafman, who declined to comment on the reports, told a judge last week that the evidence was in his client’s favor.

“The forensic evidence, we believe, are not consistent with forcible encounter,” he said at Strauss-Kahn’s first appearance in Manhattan criminal court, stopping short of directly saying it was consensual. “This is a very, very defensible case.”

If convicted, Strauss-Kahn faces as long as 25 years in prison. He has been free on $1 million cash bail and under home detention and armed guard since May 20. His arraignment is scheduled for June 6. In arguing against bail, McConnell said the accuser’s actions and the results of a physical examination supported her account.

‘Multiple Witnesses’
“She made outcries to multiple witnesses immediately after the incident, both to hotel staff and law enforcement,” McConnell said at the May 16 hearing. “She was then taken to the hospital and was given a full sexual assault forensic examination. The observations and findings during that exam corroborate her accounts,”

Any blood from a cut on Strauss-Kahn or the woman that was consistent with her resisting would subvert a defense that the sex had been consensual, said Paul Callan, a former New York prosecutor.

“Blood would be critical to prove physical force. If indeed there is an injury to his back, it corroborates a specific detail in her story,” Callan said in a phone interview. “Corroboration is very important. In a case where it’s he-said, she-said, it gives the jury something to rely on.”

Plea Not Likely
Still, a plea is unlikely, said Callan, who represented the estate of Nicole Brown Simpson in a civil lawsuit against O.J. Simpson. The former football player was found liable for his ex- wife’s wrongful death after being acquitted on charges of murdering her and Ron Goldman.

With a plea, Strauss-Kahn “would become a registered sex offender and it would stain him for the rest of his life,” Callan said. “It’s going to be won or lost at trial.”

Defense lawyers may try to claim the maid exchanged sex for money, Callan said.

“I don’t see the defense being able to make a compelling case” that the woman was “overcome by lust,” Callan said. “The details of the defense are going to be supplied as the case goes along, and it’s not going to be pretty for the victim.”

Callan said he was in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office the day the maid was reported to have testified before the grand jury.

“She had a hat on, large sunglasses and a silk scarf pulled across her face, which she put down as she walked past me,” Callan said. “She was surrounded by police detectives.”

Gained Credibility
Prosecutors said that the woman’s story gained credibility because she immediately reported the alleged incident to fellow workers. She also picked Strauss-Kahn out of a police lineup within 24 hours of the alleged attack. McConnell said Strauss- Kahn could be seen on a hotel video making an “unusually hasty” exit after the attack allegedly occurred.

Defense lawyers said their client was in a hurry to have lunch with his daughter before heading to a scheduled Air France flight. Also, they said, he later called the hotel looking for a mobile phone he thought he had left in his room and told the security staff where to find him. Police used that information to arrest him minutes before his plane was due to take off.

“If you just committed crime at a hotel in New York, the last thing I would want to do is report to hotel security where I am,” Brafman said at a bail hearing.

Brafman told French television’s TF1 on May 22 that, based on the evidence he had seen, his client would be acquitted at a fair trial.

Hard to Convict
Linda Fairstein, a former Manhattan prosecutor who specialized in cases involving sexual attacks, said that while the evidence reported so far seems to favor the prosecution, a conviction will be difficult to obtain.

Strauss-Kahn, a former French finance minister and member of France’s opposition Socialist Party, had been among the most popular possible candidates to contest France’s 2012 presidential election, according to opinion polls.

“I think it’s a tough case -- because of the facts and circumstances and the power dynamic between the witness, who is probably an uneducated or less educated employee doing a menial job, and a powerful, well-respected brilliant politician,” Fairstein said.

The New York Post, citing an unnamed French businesswoman, reported that friends of Strauss-Kahn offered money to the maid’s family in Guinea to make the case go away.

‘Fully Exonerated’
“Reports that Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s attorneys or representatives are in contact with the complaining witness or her family are false,” Taylor and Brafman said today in a statement distributed by PR Newswire. “We continue to believe that Mr. Strauss-Kahn will be fully exonerated.”

“There will be enormous pressure on her family in Africa, and undoubtedly her reputation will be vigorously attacked by supporters of Strauss-Kahn,” Callan said. “The biggest thing the prosecutor has to do is keep her available for trial.”

Without the victim, Fairstein said, “there is no case.”

The case is People v. Strauss-Kahn, 1225782, Criminal Court of the City of New York (New York County).

To contact the reporters on this story: Karen Freifeld at Manhattan Criminal Court at [email protected]; Greg Farrell in New York at [email protected]
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-25/strauss-kahn-evidence-supporting-forcible-sex-seen-as-key-defense-obstacle.html

You've made more pronouncements of innocence

Dominique Strauss-Kahn did not act alone. Throughout France, hands are as dirty as those of a chambermaid tasked with scrubbing a $3,000 Sofitel suite.
The upstairs-downstairs saga of the Big Shot who allegedly sexually brutalized the maid did not hatch out of the ether. It is as if the majority of the citizens of France -- locked into 1950s-style notions of sexism, misogyny and racism -- was complicit in the horrific, accused deed.
This is more than a tale about the (now-ex) International Monetary Fund chief and the working gal who cried rape. The sordid affair brings into sharp relief the vast cultural, legal and moral differences between a young United States and a cowardly and decayed France. A nation where the word of a poor, black immigrant is inferior to that of a rich, white knucklehead.

And it has further strained already tenuous relations between the United States and France, that primary spoke in the America-loathing Axis of Weasel, a moniker France earned in 2003 when it betrayed the US and our allies by refusing to support foreign policies.
Yet the French displayed a twisted kind of backbone when its citizens aided and abetted Strauss-Kahn, from his rise as a horny politician to his starring role as alleged perpetrator of a crime that, in this country, is considered a diabolically violent abuse of power.
But to many in France, attempted rape is something quite different: Free love gone bad.
A joke.
If you want to be revolted by a national mindset proudly on display in the Gallic nation, look no further than this hideous nugget penned by social commentator Sophie de Menthon. A woman.
Frenchmen of all political stripes and social castes, she wrote, have "stood there aghast," confronted with images of DSK, as he's affectionately known, handcuffed and under arrest in New York. She went further.
"It creates feelings and reactions which go far beyond what is, essentially, after all just another minor alleged crime."
Minor. Alleged. Crime.
Good Lord. So sexual abuse is but a small hiccup. Like sticking gum under a subway seat. In this worldview, DSK's guilt or innocence is of little consequence. That's because the sexual assault of a poor, powerless lady is nothing at all. But arresting a rich, powerful man is, by definition, the more egregious offense.
Last weekend, a few French feminists -- though the phrase sounds like a contradiction in terms -- came out to protest the misogyny on display in the case of DSK, and victims of sexual assault have just begun to speak up. They won't speak out for long.


Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/sexist_dsk_had_france_in_his_pants_RiAMAsbSsV9594enNROtqM#ixzz1NRJs7AJH

Well, Spendius seems to think that whatever the allegations are, if the suspect denies them, the charges should be dropped.

So every male in the US or at least New York State need to be aware that your life can now be ruin on a female whim.

but isnt forcing a woman to give you fellatio somewhat risky ? And how do you force them to do it properly ?

Bullshit, defense will claim that all he did was come in her mouth, which she did not like, but that the act itself was consensual, which the jury will buy.

Criminal Sexual Act (Oral or Anal Sexual Conduct): does not require any penetration and occurs upon contact between penis and mouth, penis and anus (rectum), mouth and anus, or mouth and vaginal area.
http://www.svfreenyc.org/survivors_legal.html

Why will the jury just "buy" the idea that any of this was consensual--particularly when the prosecution will present evidence that force was used? This case is based on "forcible compulsion"--that he used physical force and/or threat, and that can be corroborated by signs of struggle or injury on her body and/or his body.

He was pull off a plane on a way to important internatioand meetings and arrested on the word of a maid.

No proof was needed beyond this woman word to interfere with his life by having him thrown into a cell and being shown worldwide in handcuffs.

your life can now be ruin on a female whim.

So good luck in selling the theory that he even rubbed his dick over her lips for example to any male juror.

I do not think that.

. They believed, on the basis of all of the evidence available to them, that Strauss-Kahn had commited crimes of sexual assault--and that was why they arrested him.