Is the Head of the IMF a Sex Criminal?

They should not have looked the other way regarding reports of sexual harassment or sexual assault concerning DSK. Those things suggest he was crossing lines that should not have been crossed--even in France.

We are much more honest and open--our investigative journalists constantly dig up dirt about our political figures private lives.

...Nearly everyone at the dinner had known them, and it was the handful who knew them best who now spoke most convincingly about his history as an aggressive and incessant groper of women.

According to the stories, he grabbed women in elevators, he cornered them in gardens, and if they resisted he liked to pursue, with phone calls and text messages. Everyone knew, the dinner guests said. For instance, the hostess recalled, there was the time at one of Strauss-Kahn’s homes when he seemed as if he didn’t care who saw him make his moves. Even his wife had to have seen, the hostess said. Surely not, the host said.

Through the windows, the spring evening dimmed to black, and the party moved to the dining room, where the stories continued. Earlier that day at the Café de Flore, Pascal Bruckner, the philosopher, had remarked of Strauss-Kahn, “He wasn’t a womanizer—he was sick.” Everyone at the dinner party agreed, and they, too, spoke of Strauss-Kahn in the past tense.

...“I think his passion was sex, much more than power,” Bruckner said. “I have many women friends in the Socialist Party who have told me stuff about him. It’s dreadful.” He thought Strauss-Kahn’s friends should have encouraged him to seek psychiatric treatment instead of the Presidency.

You were asked what you consider consent to consist of. I have told you mine.

America’s War with Itself
December 21, 2004

Bush’s attempt to wreck the climate talks follows an established pattern of self-destruction


By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 21st December 2004

I have a persistant mental image of US foreign policy, which haunts me even in my sleep. The vanguard of a vast army is marching around the globe, looking for its enemy. It sees a mass of troops in the distance, retreating from it. It opens fire, unaware that it is shooting its own rear.

Is this too fanciful a picture? Both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were groomed and armed by the United States. Until the invasion of Iraq, there were no links between the Baathists and Al Qaeda: now Bush’s government has created the monster it claimed to be slaying. The US army developed high-grade weaponised anthrax in order, it said, to work out what would happen if someone else did the same. No one else was capable of producing it: the terrorist who posted envelopes of anthrax in 2001 took it from one of the army’s laboratories.(1) Now US researchers are preparing genetically modified strains of smallpox on the same pretext, and with the same likely consequences.(2) The Pentagon’s space-based weapons programme is being developed in response to a threat which doesn’t yet exist, but which it is likely to conjure up. The US government is engaged in a global war with itself. It is like a robin attacking its reflection in a window.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in its assaults on the multilateral institutions and their treaties. Listening to some of the bunkum about the United Nations venting from Capitol Hill at the moment, you could be forgiven for believing that the UN was a foreign conspiracy against the United States. It was, of course, proposed by a US president, launched in San Francisco and housed in New York, where its headquarters remain. Its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, characterised by Republicans as a dangerous restraint upon American freedoms, was drafted by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s widow. The US is now the only member of the UN Security Council whose word is law, with the result that the UN is one of the world’s most effective instruments for the projection of American power.

The secret deals in Iraq for which the United Nations is currently being attacked by US senators were in fact overseen by the US government. It ensured that Saddam Hussein could evade sanctions by continuing to sell oil to its allies in Jordan and Turkey.(3) Republican congressmen are calling on Kofi Annan to resign for letting this happen, apparently unaware that it was approved in Washington to support American strategic objectives. The United States finds the monsters it seeks, as it pecks and flutters at its own image.

http://www.monbiot.com/2004/12/21/americas-war-with-itself/

Isn't it something much more than hypocritical for you to describe others as dishonest when this sort of thing is the norm for the US, when it's actually the norm for you too?

Under the old laws DSk would never have been charged

There's a big difference between putting a muzzle on the press and the press not giving a ****.

Quote:

You were asked what you consider consent to consist of. I have told you mine.

And I told you to Google the definition of "consent" that's given in the NYS sexual assault laws. That is the one I accept in the DSK case. That is the only definition that will be recognized in a NYS criminal court.

Katha Pollitt is a columnist for The Nation.

Dear France,

I used to love you, but this is it. We're through. Oh, it was lovely while it lasted, my crush on your big welfare state, with its excellent national health service and its government-funded childcare. I liked your firm separation of church and state, your refusal to buy into the Iraq War, your mass demonstrations in support of workers and against the neoliberal agenda. And let's not forget the long vacations, outdoor markets, flourishing bookstores and high-speed trains! I even liked the fact that all your schools have the same centralized curriculum not like here, where local cranks and preachers get to meddle with history and science and cancel the school play. French kids study philosophy in high school! How cool is that? It made me so happy to think that there was a country where being intelligent and well-read was seen as a good thing, I gladly forgave you for all those boring movies where genial groups of affluent friends sat for hours over lunch in the garden of a country house.

But, France, I don't like you anymore. Because what is the point of having all those smart, cultivated, social-democratically inclined secular people if it turns out they are such self-satisfied creeps? You should listen to yourself sometime: smug, paunchy, powerful middle-aged men parading across the media going on about how Dominique Strauss-Kahn was just engaging in some typically Gallic flirtation in that Sofitel suite in Manhattan. "It was just a quickie with the maid," said the famous journalist Jean-Francois Kahn, using an antiquated idiom (troussage de domestique) that suggests trussing up a chicken. Former culture minster Jack Lang was outraged that DSK was not immediately released on bail since after all, "no man died." (He probably didn't mean to, but he did say "no man" Il n'y a pas mort d'homme not "no one"). And let's not forget Bernard-Henri Levy, whose pretentious drivel has to be the worst thing you've exported to us since pizza-flavored La Vache Qui Rit. Levy can't get over the way the New York justice system is treating his friend: "I hold it against the American judge who, by delivering him to the crowd of photo hounds, pretended to take him for a subject of justice like any other." Treating a master of the universe the same as anyone else even the African immigrant who cleaned his hotel room, quoi isn't that what justice is? Didn't they teach you that in high school philosophy, M. Levy?

Almost as repellent as the sexual entitlement of French men, with their insistence on their seigneurial right to "heavy flirting," is the docility and feminine-mystique-ization of the French women who enable them. Well, maybe it's not entirely their fault: not only do they never get to eat a square meal (oh, so that's why French women don't get fat), masses of them are on tranquilizers twice as many as French men, and one of the highest rates in the world (hmm, about that national health service...). But how pathetic is it to see them rising in defense of their right to be pawed by their bosses ("in France we don't want war between the sexes.... Everybody knows that in America a young boy is not allowed to touch a girl," writes Laurence Masurel, former political editor of Paris Match). Or applauding men for betraying them as if it's proof of their manly greatness, as did Anne Sinclair, DSK's zillionaire wife: "I am quite proud! For a political man, it is important to seduce." This was in 2006, by the way, long after it was well-known in his circle that DSK allegedly attempted to rape the young writer Tristane Banon, one of his daughter's closest friends and the goddaughter of his second wife. And why did Banon not go to the police? She was dissuaded by her mother! No wonder the poor girl went into a depression that lasted for years and ended up telling the story of her near-rape as a kind of hysterical joke on TV ("J'adore!" exclaimed one of the male guests on the show). How out of it are French women? In one poll, they were even a little bit more likely than men to believe that DSK was the victim of a plot (a view held by a majority of both sexes) and less likely than men to believe he was definitely not a victim of a plot.

To listen to the French you would think their system of justice was a model of defendants' rights, while we throw innocent people to the lions on the mere say-so of an accuser. I won't defend the handcuffs and the perp walk or our crazy tabloid press, but I'd argue that the US system has the better presumption of innocence. In France, under the inquisitional criminal justice system, there's no jury in the American sense, just a panel of judges and "lay assessors" citizens chosen at random who cannot be questioned for bias. The investigating judge functions both as fact-finder and legal authority, the defendant's lawyer plays a fairly passive role, and a two-thirds majority is enough for a conviction. You're rightly horrified by our jails and prisons, France, but given that you have one of the most inhumane prison systems in the world, are you really in a position to criticize?

A word about race: for decades, France, you've prided yourself on your lack of racism. But really what that means is you like African-American jazz musicians and writers. You're actually quite racist toward your own ex-colonized immigrants of color, most notably Muslims from North Africa. The way you talk about Muslim immigrant women, you would think France was a gender-egalitarian paradise for everyone else, and the biggest feminist issue was whether or not to ban the burqa.

Ironically, the DSK affair has given the small and internally conflicted French feminist movement new visibility and a great organizing issue. Petitions are going round against sexual harassment and male privilege. There's rage and mockery at DSK's pals and their dominance in the media. On May 22, hundreds of women demonstrated in Paris under banners with slogans like Men lose it Women pay for it.

Liberte, Egalite, Sororite when you make that your motto I might start taking you seriously again.

Quite right. In the good old days, shtupping the help was considered one of the essential elements of the employer-employee relationship.

Was the maid really on $60k for cleaning rooms?