Strauss-Kahn guilty or not?

[maaarc]

So what do you think? Is Strauss-Kahn guilty or is it all some vast right wing conspiracy :) :wiggle:




http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110516/ap_on_re_us/us_imf_head_assault

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/may/16/imf-dominique-strauss-kahn-debt-crisis

http://www.cnbc.com/id/43048790

[Dino Velvet]

Wait for the evidence or lack of before deciding. Who knows what happened in that room?

[maaarc]

guilty or not it will be interesting to see what happens with the IMF and the French elections as a result of this little bit of business.

[robertlouis]

guilty or not it will be interesting to see what happens with the IMF and the French elections as a result of this little bit of business.

The IMF seems to be paralysed without him, which makes the next run of funding for euro state bailouts more fraught than ever.

As far as France is concerned, he's already past tense. He hadn't declared for the presidency, but would certainly have been a stronger and more credible candidate for the left than either Segolene Royal or her erstwhile partner Francois Hollande after her disastrous performance in 2007. Nobody loves Sarko - ok, maybe Carla does - so there is a bit of a void. Worry is that the Front Nationale, fundamentally a fascist party, under the new leadership of Marine le Pen, which has carefully moved towards mimicking Sarkozy's policies, will move to fill the space created. Interesting but worrying too.

[muh_muh]

loosely translated from an awesome german satire magazine

Fact: IWF-boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn supposedly attacked a maid while being naked.
Question: Is he going to stop running for the french presidency now and try for the italian presidency instead?

[robertlouis]

loosely translated from an awesome german satire magazine

Fact: IWF-boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn supposedly attacked a maid while being naked.
Question: Is he going to stop running for the french presidency now and try for the italian presidency instead?

Yes, Berlusconi's continuing rule does nothing for Italy's external reputation. He's a right-wing control freak with a svengali like hold over the Italian people as well as a virtual stranglehold on the media. You wonder just what he would actually have to do to be removed.

[hippifried]

Does it matter if he's guilty or not? I certainly don't care one way or the other. But this is really top notch entertainment. I'll be watching with great interest & my usual supply of wise cracks.

I wonder if they're going to deport the maid after they don't need her testimony anymore.

[robertlouis]

Does it matter if he's guilty or not? I certainly don't care one way or the other. But this is really top notch entertainment. I'll be watching with great interest & my usual supply of wise cracks.

I wonder if they're going to deport the maid after they don't need her testimony anymore.

Ooooh cynical. But probably correct.

[Stavros]

I liked this comment from Gilles Savary reported in today's Independent (my underlining):

Nonetheless, the conspiracy talk thrives. Gilles Savary, a friend of DSK and Socialist Euro MP, said that the presidential front-runner was an easy and obvious target.
"To be honest, everyone knows that Dominique Strauss-Kahn is a libertine," he said in his blog. "He is only different from lots of others by not hiding the fact. In puritan America, impregnated with rigorous Protestantism, they tolerate money games but not the pleasures of the flesh. So it is easy to trap a public figure who is so little resistant to feminine charms as DSK."


Is a philanderer a rapist? Tristane Banon, a family friend has described what happened when she went to interview him 9 years ago:
" Ms Banon said she had gone along to interview DSK in an empty flat for her first book. "He [name withheld] wanted to hold my hand, then my arm," she told the TV show. "We ended up scuffling on the ground. I kicked him. He unfastened my bra and tried to take down my jeans."I used the word 'rape' to try to scare him. It didn't scare him. He was like a champanzee in rut."


Puritan Americans, French lotharios, truth and lies, the conspiracy theories...about the ony fact we know is that right now the Head of the IMF is in Rikers Island...

[robertlouis]

I liked this comment from Gilles Savary reported in today's Independent (my underlining):

Nonetheless, the conspiracy talk thrives. Gilles Savary, a friend of DSK and Socialist Euro MP, said that the presidential front-runner was an easy and obvious target.
"To be honest, everyone knows that Dominique Strauss-Kahn is a libertine," he said in his blog. "He is only different from lots of others by not hiding the fact. In puritan America, impregnated with rigorous Protestantism, they tolerate money games but not the pleasures of the flesh. So it is easy to trap a public figure who is so little resistant to feminine charms as DSK."


Is a philanderer a rapist? Tristane Banon, a family friend has described what happened when she went to interview him 9 years ago:
" Ms Banon said she had gone along to interview DSK in an empty flat for her first book. "He [name withheld] wanted to hold my hand, then my arm," she told the TV show. "We ended up scuffling on the ground. I kicked him. He unfastened my bra and tried to take down my jeans."I used the word 'rape' to try to scare him. It didn't scare him. He was like a champanzee in rut."


Puritan Americans, French lotharios, truth and lies, the conspiracy theories...about the ony fact we know is that right now the Head of the IMF is in Rikers Island...

All I can usefully add to that is that it's a great pity that most of Wall St wasn't already there.

[robertlouis]

From today's Guardian. No smoke without fire, it would seem. And France's remarkable tolerance for sexual misbehaviour is in the spotlight. It's like a plot strand from the excellent French series Spiral:

Less than three weeks ago, Dominique Strauss-Kahn sat down in a Paris restaurant for an off-the-record lunch with two journalists from the daily Libération. The IMF chief outlined the three biggest personal hurdles in his relentless campaign to become president of France: "Money, women and being a Jew."

He started with women. "Yes I like women, so what?" he asked. "For years, there's been talk of photos of a giant orgy, but I've never seen them come out," he added, challenging his opponents to produce long-rumoured pictures of a night at a posh swingers' club dating back decades. He said he had warned President Nicolas Sarkozy (while they stood side by side at the urinals of the gents during a recent international summit) to stop smearing him over his private life. Strauss-Kahn then volunteered to the journalists a hypothetical example of something that could bring him down: "A woman raped in a parking lot who is promised half a million euros to make up her story."

Before Strauss-Kahn's opponents began throwing what one socialist described as "stink bombs" at him, he was keen to present himself as the victim of a potentially ruthless campaign.

Everyone in French political and media circles knew Strauss-Kahn's achilles heel was his attitude to women. Even his closest political allies admitted he was an inveterate seducer, an unashamed libertine. But what makes the scandal new and unprecedented in a presidential race is the crossing of the line to sexual violence, attempted rape and brutal assault.

Strauss-Kahn denies the charges, and his allies call him a seducer without the "profile of a rapist". But if, as the extreme-right Marine Le Pen affirms, all of Paris had long been abuzz with talk of his "rather pathological relationship" with women, why wasn't Strauss-Kahn pulled up on it before in France? He had already been chastised by the IMF over one affair with a junior in 2008.

It raises the uncomfortable question in the French media and politics of two parallel worlds: what is printed, and what is behind it, gossip, and what must officially remain "unsaid".

Consensual extramarital sex is a non-story in France, part of the right to a private life protected by fearsome libel and privacy laws. Having a mistress, philandering, even routinely propositioning journalists have been brushed aside for countless political figures. "How many senior male French politicians aren't either a groper, a cheater, a charmer or a serial seducer? And it goes right to the top of the political class," sighed one news editor. "France is still a kind of monarchy that kept the aristocratic morals of the 18th century. The lord of the manor has a right to the women; the king has his mistresses." If more allegations against Strauss-Kahn come to light and lead to criminal charges, it will call into question a taboo in France about speaking out.

Tristane Banon, the novelist and journalist is, according to her lawyer, preparing to go to police alleging Strauss-Kahn sexually assaulted her in 2002. Her mother, Anne Mansouret, a senior Socialist figure, said that she advised her daughter not to file a lawsuit at the time because Strauss-Kahn was a politician with a bright future, as well as a friend of the family. But she said that even the fact that her daughter later spoke out publicly about the attack on TV had left her "traumatised" by the subsequent "harassment" in her professional life over having dared to speak out.

Her mother suggested there was a kind of "invisible barrier" put up on her work projects, as if media bosses and publishers feared the consequences of "what she could reveal". Strauss-Kahn's spokesman has previously denied the claim, and said Banon had invented the allegation to generate publicity for herself.

The journalists, Christophe Deloire and Christophe Dubois, broke a taboo in their 2006 book, Sexus Politicus, about politicians' sexual behaviour. They wrote of Strauss-Kahn's tendency to "seduction to the point of obsession", mentioning, but not naming, female journalists who had been irritated by his gestures towards them. They also referred to one senior civil servant who didn't take up his offer to "come up to his office to relax".

It seemed striking that when Strauss-Kahn left for the IMF in Washington in 2007, with many politicians privately wondering how he would cope in a puritan US which frowns upon sexual advances, only one journalist raised the issue. Brussels correspondent for Libération, Jean Quatremer, wrote on his blog: "Strauss-Kahn's only real problem is his relationship to women. Too heavy … it borderlines harassment." Strauss-Kahn's communications team asked him to take the blog down. Quatremer explained to Le Parisien that he had refused, saying if they thought it was libellous, they could sue. They did not.

In 2008, the French press began to more openly touch on the issue of Strauss-Kahn and women after the IMF investigated his affair with a junior colleague, the Hungarian economist Piroska Nagy. He was cleared of abusing his position but was forced to apologise. Nagy said she thought he had a "problem" which affected his ability to work with women. Others in France spoke out. The Socialist party MP Aurelie Filipetti recalled a "very heavy, very pressing" come-on to her by Strauss-Kahn. She said that afterwards: "I made sure I never ended up alone with him in a closed space."

The humorist Stephane Guillon went furthest in 2009, satirising Strauss-Kahn's "obsession with females" on the equivalent of Radio 4's Today programme. Strauss-Kahn accused him on air of "nastiness" and Guillon – already under fire for lampooning several political figures – was sacked shortly afterwards.

In 2006, when Strauss-Kahn failed in his bid to become the Socialist presidential candidate, part of his problem was his publicly haughty and condescending attitude to the eventual winner, Ségolène Royal.

But five years later, as Strauss-Kahn's opinion poll ratings soared and he was tipped to become president, it was clear that a saga like the Nagy affair had no effect on the electorate's view. Sexual violence is another matter entirely. In a country where the leader's sexual habits are officially ignored, allegations of attempted rape have been a severe shock.

[Prospero]

Hmmm... spiral indeed. The first thought that crossed my mind was that this was a fix... and it would not surorise me if the charges ended up being dropped. Not in time for his bid for office of course. Clearly the background stuff suggests he is something of a predatory male. But that doesn't seem to be a bar from office (Sarkozy, Berlusconi etc). His Jewishness had evaded me - but the french record on that is hardly good. (Collaborative French in Vichy france etc - the Dreyfuss affair etc.) Yes - it would be easy for someone to pay a poorly paid chambermaid a large sum of money to make these allegations. So it COULD be a plot - from right or far right. My bet is the charges will be withdrawn - but not in time to save his career.

On and the worst outcome from all this for the wider world is that the French national Front's electoral chances are now boosted.

[Ben]

Former Reagan official Paul C. Roberts has an interestin' take on it:

YouTube - Strauss-Kahn sex scandal obscures real IMF story (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMMkxyYQdjU)

[maaarc]

I suspect Mr. Roberts has hit the proverbial nail on the head.
More of his thoughts on various subjects can be found here:

http://www.vdare.com/roberts/all_columns.htm

[Stavros]

The conspiracy theorists who see the pale hand of 'the bankers' behind all this were blamed for the downfall of Eliot Spitzer who was 'on the verge' of 'shaking up Wall St', but who made the fatal political mistake of applying fierce values to others while dropping his pants and getting found out. DSK has been notorious for years, the actual truth of what happened in New York is probably banal; and I don't doubt DSK will plea bargain -bargain pretty much anything- to avoid a jail term; and he has sacrificed his political career for what? Countries join the IMF, nobody forces them to, if they don't want the 'structural adjustment' medicine it offers, they can always cancel their membership, but they don't because the IMF is there to issue short-term loans, and to corrupt third world regimes any source of money is welcome -its for them after all, not their citizens, so I don't see what the problem was with DSK at the helm and his belief that there should be more regulation of the banks -he needed to be caught in a 'honey trap' for that?

So much hysteria, for nothing.

[Prospero]

No the honeytrap - if indeed it was that - might have more to do with french electoral politics. But it is easy to fall into the trap of seeing conspiracies everywhere. (But after the WMD business in Iraq you can see why)

[Stavros]

Conspiracy theories appeal to people who feel powerless, and who ascribe this to the complete opposite: the overwhelming power of the state. In fact they are merely registering an emotional form of isolation, a lack of control in their own lives, and using the existence of layers of meaning in language, images, and other modes of communication not as proof that there is no single reality, but to convince themselves there is a hidden and overwhelming power that controls -Tony Tanner discusses some of this in his book on American literature in the 20thc, City of Words- there is a website which is full of conspiracy theory junk, some of which, of course, contains partial truths but always distorted to suit the conspiracy.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=home

The X Files owed its success to good writing, and the residual fear that people have, that if the politicians are lying it is to cover up -not something banal, but something enormous, universal and earth-shattering.

DSK wanted to come, its that simple. But a man with an erection must be the most irrational force in the universe...

[Prospero]

I'm amused to see that you assume DSK's guilt. Do you reject the possibility of entrapment? You are quite correct that conspiracy theories appeal to those without power and that the vast majoroty are utterly spurious. But not ALL are to be dismissed. The decision by the US and UK Governments to take us to war in Iraq is essentially proven - and their reasons for it fiction. The conspiracy theory that passes the test of truth become fact - and is absorbed into what we know of the world. Consider as one example the killing of Georgy Markov, the Bulgarian dissident killed on a London street when an assassin used a poisoned umbrella to stab him. This might easily have been seen as a nonsensical conspiracy theory had it failed. (An umbrella with a poison dart? Pure james Bond. But true!) Georgi Markov - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Markov_umbrella.PNG" class="image"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/05/Markov_umbrella.PNG/220px-Markov_umbrella.PNG"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/0/05/Markov_umbrella.PNG/220px-Markov_umbrella.PNG (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgi_Markov)

Or the admitted plots by the CIA to eliminate Castro by - variously - an exploding cigar, a plot to discredit him by making his beard fall out or, most remarkably, a notion (never actually tried) to stage a second coming of Christ to appeal to Catholic cubans. All in the historical record. So the most astonishing can sometimes prove to be true.i

[NYBURBS]

Conspiracy theories appeal to people who feel powerless, and who ascribe this to the complete opposite: the overwhelming power of the state. In fact they are merely registering an emotional form of isolation, a lack of control in their own lives, and using the existence of layers of meaning in language, images, and other modes of communication not as proof that there is no single reality, but to convince themselves there is a hidden and overwhelming power that controls -Tony Tanner discusses some of this in his book on American literature in the 20thc, City of Words- there is a website which is full of conspiracy theory junk, some of which, of course, contains partial truths but always distorted to suit the conspiracy.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=home

The X Files owed its success to good writing, and the residual fear that people have, that if the politicians are lying it is to cover up -not something banal, but something enormous, universal and earth-shattering.

DSK wanted to come, its that simple. But a man with an erection must be the most irrational force in the universe...

I doubt that this is a conspiracy, but people do indeed engage in conspiracies for various reasons, and to cast all conspiracy theories as being without merit would be to do a disservice to the truth.

[Stavros]

Look, I dont know exactly what happened, and neither does anyone else. I also have already said there are some conspiracy theories which contain a degree of truth, but if 'the corporation' wants DSK out of the IMF and knew he was likely to seek the Socialist Party's endorsement as Presidential candidate, he was going to resign from the IMF so why push a man who is half-way out of the door?-Castro wasn't about to resign when the CIA plotted to kill him; Markov's death as I recall did not generate much of a conspiracy theory, indeed that one and the murder of Alexander Litvinenko merely exposed the incompetence in KGB and its successor agency in the way they bump people off. There is already a theory that the maid from Guinea was offered approx $1 milion to make the allegation; there are the hotel key cards which apparently have timed records which will show if DSK was really having lunch with his daughter when the incident was said to have taken place -etc etc. I see no conspiracy, but will concede if there was one. And no, I wont put money on it! Perhaps the most worrying rumour in all this, is that Gordon Brown is tipped to replace DSK; now there's a thread waiting to unravel...

[Ben]

I doubt that this is a conspiracy, but people do indeed engage in conspiracies for various reasons, and to cast all conspiracy theories as being without merit would be to do a disservice to the truth.

I agree.
I wasn't entirely sure before. But it seems doubtful that it was a setup. He had a similar incident in 2002.
He could be, by all accounts, a serial rapist. I know. Don't rush to judgment. But: there will be a trial. As there should be -- :)
And we'll see what happens.
Leave it to a court of law to decide on his innocence or guilt. I mean, the Justice System works. I mean, it, correctly, found OJ Simpson NOT guilty. Because he didn't do it. Everyone knows that -- ;)

[hippifried]

:party:

It was either yesterday or the day before that Jon Stewart pointed out the irony that the head of the IMF got busted for trying to fuck another African. This is some of the best comedy fodder to come around in decades. Now they have him on suicide watch? Oh boy!

[Prospero]

I think Cameron and co have already made it clear that Brown will be unnacceptable to run the IMF.

[robertlouis]

I think Cameron and co have already made it clear that Brown will be unnacceptable to run the IMF.

Fuck them. "Call me Dave" is quite a spiteful bastard, isn't he?

And whatever other faults he may have, Gordon Brown would never be caught in flagrante with a chambermaid. He's a true son of the manse.

And having socialised with him quite a few years ago now, I can assure you that the only things he is dour about are politics and economics. He's really good fun and a very nice guy. And the deadliest one-eyed tennis player I've ever come up against!

[Prospero]

The press reports today that DSK' defence is consensual sex - which to me - indicates that the event did take place, so I withdraw my suggestion that it might be a conspiracy. It's not a defence you' use if you were totally innocent . Why would a young chambermaid agree to have sex with a fat middle aged french guy who he'd just met while "doing" his room!

[Yvonne183]

Maybe she thought he was this fat middle aged Frenchman.


Wait a minute, I believe this guy is Belgium,, eh? same thing.

[hippifried]

I always thought Flemish had something to do with a runny nose.

[Stavros]

But he is Walloon, not Flemish...

[Ben]

How did they know he was at the airport? Well, apparently, he'd misplaced his cell phone and phoned the hotel and told them where he was.
Now why would a man who is "fleeing" a crime scene phone the hotel to tell them where he was?
Right. The conspiracy theory is rearing its ugly head again -- ha! ha! ha!

[hippifried]

So, instead of being Phlegmish, he's a Waloonatic? Okay, that still works.

Ben,
There's no conspiracy. He's already copped to the sex. He's claiming it was consentual because... Well... Who wouldn't want to get fucked by him? He wasn't worried about any kind of criminal problems because he's just so damn important, nobody'd dare complain. Oops! I guess that attitude only works if somebody knows who you are & cares.

[Ben]

So, instead of being Phlegmish, he's a Waloonatic? Okay, that still works.

Ben,
There's no conspiracy. He's already copped to the sex. He's claiming it was consentual because... Well... Who wouldn't want to get fucked by him? He wasn't worried about any kind of criminal problems because he's just so damn important, nobody'd dare comkplain. Oops! I guess that attitude only works if somebody knows who you are & cares.

Again, I don't think it's a conspiracy. Plus: if he's guilty of the alleged assault, well, he should be thrown in a cage for a very long time. (But it is indeed how you bring down powerful people, as it were.
Take, say, John Edwards. Totally different, of course. But he should've admitted to it. Say, Yes, I had an affair. It's a private matter. I mean, his political career is finished.
Bill Clinton. There was indeed a right wing conspiracy (a secret plan by the likes of Ken Starr) to bring down the president. Because - of - sex. How asinine.
I mean, Gary Hart, in '88, didn't run because he had an affair.... Silly.
I guess, at some point, they'll start looking into Obama's sex life. Maybe he has a secret yearning for shemales -- ha! ha! ha! (Actually, I've read, and no idea if this is true or not, that he had an affair when he was an Illinois Senator.)

[Ben]

Friday, May 20, 2011 by The Guardian/UK (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/may/19/imf-dominique-strauss-kahn) The IMF after DSK


With Dominique Strauss-Kahn's resignation, it's time to take stock of his legacy – and the limits of his reform of the fund

by Mark Weisbrot (http://www.commondreams.org/mark-weisbrot)

Now that Dominique Strauss-Kahn (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/dominique-strauss-kahn) has resigned from his position as managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/imf)), it is worth taking an objective look at his legacy there. Until his arrest last week on charges of attempted rape and sexual assault, he was widely praised as having changed the IMF (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/15/dominique-strauss-kahn-arrest-imf), increased its influence and moved it away from the policies that – according to the fund's critics – had caused so many problems for developing countries in the past. How much of this is true?
Strauss-Kahn took the helm of the IMF in November of 2007, when the IMF's influence was at a low point. Total outstanding loans at that time were just $10bn, down from $91bn just four years earlier. By the time he left this week, that number had bounced back to $84bn, with agreed-upon loans three times larger. The IMF's total capital had quadrupled, from about $250bn to an unprecedented $1tn. Clearly, the IMF had resources that it had never had before, mostly as a result of the financial crisis and world recession of 2008-2009.
However, the details of these changes are important. First, the collapse of the IMF's influence in the decade prior to 2007 was one of the most important changes in the international financial system since the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates in 1971. Prior to the 2000s, the IMF headed up a powerful creditors' cartel that was able to tell many developing country governments what their most important economic policies would be, under the threat of being denied credit not only from the fund but also from other, then larger lenders such as the World Bank, regional lenders and sometimes even the private sector. This made the fund not only the most important avenue of influence of the US government in low- and middle-income countries – from Rwanda to Russia – but also the most important promoter of neoliberal economic "reforms" that transformed the world economy from the mid 1970s onward. These reforms coincided with a sharp slowdown of economic growth (http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/the-scorecard-on-development-1960-2010-closing-the-gap) in the vast majority of low- and middle-income countries for more than 20 years, with consequently reduced progress on social indicators such as life expectancy and infant and child mortality.
The IMF's big comeback during the world recession did not bring the middle-income countries that had run away from it back to its orbit. Most of the middle-income countries of Asia, Russia, as well as Latin America, stayed away, mostly by piling up sufficient reserves so that they did not have to borrow from the fund, even during the crisis. As a result, even a low-income country like Bolivia, for example (http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/bolivian-economy-during-morales-administration), was able to renationalise its hydrocarbon industry, increase social spending and public investment, and lower its retirement age from 65 to 58 – things it could never do while it was living under IMF agreements continuously for 20 years prior. Most of the IMF's new influence and lending would land in Europe, which accounts for about 57% of its current outstanding loans.
As for changes in IMF policy, these have been relatively small. A review of 41 IMF agreements (http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/imf-supported-macroeconomic-policies-and-the-world-recession) made during the world financial crisis and recession found that 31 of them contained "pro-cyclical" policies: that is, fiscal or monetary policies that would be expected to further slow the economy. And in Europe, where the IMF has most of its lending, the policies attached to the loan agreements for Greece (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/greece), Ireland and Portugal are decidedly pro-cyclical – making it extremely difficult for these economies to get out of recession. The IMF's influence on Spain (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/spain), which does not yet have a loan agreement, is similar. And in Latvia, the IMF presided over an Argentine-style recession (http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/latvias-recession-cost-of-adjustment-internal-devaluation) that set a world historical record for the worst two-year loss of output (about 25%) – a complete disaster.
To be fair, some changes at the fund during the tenure of Strauss-Kahn were significant. For the first time ever, during the world recession of 2009, the IMF made available some $283bn-worth of reserves for all member countries, with no policy conditions attached. The fund also made some limited credit available without conditions, though only to a few countries. The biggest changes were in the research department, where there was tolerance for more open debate. For example, there were IMF papers that endorsed the use of capital controls by developing countries (http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/capital-controls-monetary-policy-developing-countries) under some circumstances, and questioning whether central banks were unnecessarily slowing growth with inflation targets (http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/spn/2010/spn1003.pdf) that may be too low.
But as can be seen from what is happening in the peripheral Eurozone countries, the IMF is still playing its traditional role of applying the medieval economic medicine of "bleeding the patient". To be fair to both Strauss-Kahn and the fund, neither the managing director nor anyone else at the IMF is ultimately in sole charge of policy, especially with respect to countries that are important to the people who really run the institution. The IMF is run by its governors and executive directors, of whom the overwhelmingly dominant authorities are the US treasury department, which includes heavy representation from Goldman Sachs, and, secondarily, the European powers.
Until decision-making at the IMF undergoes a dramatic change, we can expect only very small changes in IMF policy. This can be seen most clearly in the current case of Greece: Strauss-Kahn was aware that the fiscal tightening ordered by the European authorities and the IMF was preventing Greece from getting out of recession (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/10/opinion/10weisbrot.html?_r=1&emc=eta1); but while he pushed for "softer" conditions, he was powerless to change the lending conditions from punishment to actual help (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/may/13/greece-paul-krugman-euro). That's ultimately because the European authorities (European Commission and European Central Bank), not the IMF, are calling the shots – although Strauss-Kahn encountered plenty of resistance within the fund itself, too.
The voting shares of the IMF have changed only marginally, despite all the reforms of the last five years. The share of "emerging market and developing countries" – with the vast majority of the world's population – has gone from 39.4% to 44.7%, while the G7 countries have 41.2%, including 16.5% for the US (down from 17.0% pre-reform).
But the voting and governance structure is not currently the main obstacle to changing IMF policy. At this point, the developing countries – and we should add in the victimised countries of the eurozone – are not using their potential influence within the fund. Their representatives are mainly going along with the decisions of the G7. If any number of these countries were to band together in a sizeable bloc for change within the fund, there could be some real reforms at the IMF.
Such an outcome can be seen from the last decade of struggle within the World Trade Organisation, where developing countries have often not accepted the G7 consensus, and have successfully blocked the negotiation and implementation of rules that would hurt them – despite the fact that the WTO rules have been, from the outset, stacked against developing countries. It is true that the WTO operates by consensus rather than a quota-based voting structure, but that is not the key difference between it and the IMF. The key difference is in the role of developing countries and their representatives.
There is talk now of replacing Strauss-Kahn with an open, merit-based process of selection, breaking with the 67-year tradition of reserving the position for a European – most often, a French – official. At the moment, such change does not appear likely to happen. It would be a step forward, but it would be only a symbolic change, and the odds are good that the next managing director – of whatever nationality – will be to the right of Strauss-Kahn. Real change at the IMF is in the hands of the governments of most of the world – but only if they dare to organise it.

© 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited
http://www.commondreams.org/sites/commondreams.org/files/imagecache/author_photo/mark_weisbrot.jpg (http://www.commondreams.org/mark-weisbrot)
Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (http://www.cepr.net/) (CEPR), in Washington,

[Stavros]

1) He came...he went

2) Message to victims of rape and/or sexual assault -if your reputation is not spotless, you will be the loser...again.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/joan-smith/joan-smith-why-rape-victims-must-have-flawless-pasts-to-get-justice-2342566.html