Wankers of the Week, Special Edition: Dominique Strauss-Kahn

More mood music is in order for this one. Take it away, Bruce:

Ah. That was lovely. Great Canadian singer/songwriter, folks–and with the added distinction of having had this song banned from the radio airwaves in the US because it had the audacity to call the IMF by its right name and describe its actions in harsh detail. And very germane to the subject of this post, too.

A couple of hours after my last post went up, I got wind that one of the biggest MFs of the IMF (dirty MF!) has been nabbed in New York. Here’s Reuters with that:

IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn was taken into custody on Saturday at JFK airport in New York and was being questioned in regard to a sexual assault, a New York police spokesman told Reuters.

Spokesman Paul Browne said the woman who filed the complaint against Strauss-Kahn, 62, was a 32-year-old chambermaid who fled the room after the incident.

Strauss-Kahn, a possible Socialist candidate in the French presidential election next April, left the hotel after the incident and boarded an Air France aircraft scheduled to depart for Paris, the police spokesman said.

“The NYPD realized he had fled, he had left his cell phone behind,” Browne said. “We learned he was on an Air France plane. They held the plane and he was taken off and is now being held in police custody for questioning.”

Browne said Strauss-Kahn had not been charged.

Police said the alleged incident took place at the upscale Sofitel hotel on West 44th Street near Times Square.

The chambermaid “was brought by EMS (emergency medical services) to the Roosevelt Hotel, where she was treated for minor injuries,” Brown said.

The New York Post goes into greater detail, if you’d care to read it. (Warning: take your anti-nausea pills first.)

Yeah, you can kind of see how this arrogant prick lost the party primaries to Ségolène Royal the last time, eh? Guess his chances are shot to hell now. And a good thing, too. I’m kind of taken aback that he was actually a Socialist. The IMF is capitalist to the hilt, and very predatorily so. How that (and his fancy-pants lifestyle) squares with French socialism, I do not know.

But I do know how it squares with capitalism: very neatly, alas. Apparently Strauss-Kahn has a long and sordid history of putting his coq where it doesn’t belong. Some more consensual than others, but all of them oh, so wrong. He’s such a gigantic wanker that I decided to give him this post, all to his widdle wonesome.

So, Dominique, enjoy your moment of disgrace. And may your lovely, long-suffering wife soccer-dribble your sorry ass all around the house when you finally get back home. Serves you right that you finally got caught doing to a lady what you’ve been doing to the poor nations of the world for years, you international motherfucker.

PS: Oh boy. Another woman has come forward, this one with some truly appalling details:

A local official of the Socialist party claimed that Strauss-Kahn had attacked her daughter, who is goddaughter to Strauss-Kahn’s second wife, in 2002.

Tristane Banon was in her 20s and writing a book when she approached Strauss-Kahn for an interview in 2002. In a TV programme in 2007, in which Strauss-Kahn’s name had been bleeped out, Banon allegedly described him as a “rutting chimpanzee” and described how she was forced to fight him off. “It finished badly … very violently … I kicked him,” Banon said. “When we were fighting, I mentioned the word ‘rape’ to make him afraid, but it didn’t have any effect. I managed to get out.”

Banon consulted a lawyer, but did not press charges. “I didn’t want to be known to the end of my days as the girl who had a problem with the politician.”

Banon’s mother, Anne Mansouret, told journalists on Sunday night she had dissuaded her daughter from legal action because she believed Strauss-Kahn’s behaviour had been out of character and because of close links with his family. “Today I am sorry to have discouraged my daughter from complaining. I bear a heavy responsibility,” she said.

Look like Strauss-Kahn’s misbehavior is entirely IN character. He has a reputation for what’s politely known as “zipper trouble”:

But in 2008, after a well-documented affair with Piroska Nagy a Hungarian economist and a junior colleague at the IMF, he was forced to publicly apologise for “an error of judgment”, but was cleared of abusing his position. He insisted the relationship was consensual, but when his wife, journalist Anne Sinclair, described it as a “one-night stand”, an indignant Nagy wrote to investigators saying: “I was not prepared for the advances of the IMF director general. I didn’t know what to do … I felt damned if I do, damned if I don’t.” Nagy left her job at the IMF after the affair, and hinted at harassment of female staff, adding that her boss had “without question” used his position to seduce her.

[…]

Strauss-Kahn’s alleged womanising appears to have been an open secret in French political circles for years. Thierry Saussez, a former adviser to Sarkozy, who took part in the TV show with Banon, said: “All this stupefaction from people is sheer hypocrisy. Everyone in Paris has known for years he had something of a problem. Not many female journalists are prepared to interview him alone these days.”

In 2009, the radio satirist Stephane Guillon dedicated his morning comedy slot on France Inter to Strauss-Kahn’s “obsession with females”. Some commentators suggested his behaviour was a reflection of French culture. In 2000 French writers Vincent Giret and Véronique Le Billon wrote almost presciently in their biography of him: “There is only one thing this famous man has avoided … a fall from grace.”

Looks like he finally got it…and not a moment too soon. But too late for more than one young woman, unfortunately.

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2 Responses to Wankers of the Week, Special Edition: Dominique Strauss-Kahn

  1. jwrightpotter says:

    Strauss-Kahn’s interview in “The Inside Job” and this article in Counterpunch http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney05162011.html indicates that he was actually championing the idea that the IMF needed a complete change of direction and was working toward that end. First, Elliot Spitzer. Then Julian Assange. And now Strauss-Kahn. Amazing how easy it is to take down men for sexual sins when they are challenging the status quo. If only the injuries of all the women in all the world were taken as seriously as those alleged to have happened at the hands of someone in a position to actually bring about change in the criminal behaviour of the global financial and military system. This reminds me of the documentary about Ralph Nader’s work as consumer advocate during the 1970s and how the car manufacturers tried to lure him into traps with an array of attractive young graduate students at the time that he was testifying to Congress about the unnecessary slaughter on American highways.

    • Sabina Becker says:

      There are a number of things wrong with this “honey trap” theory, unfortunately, as it might be seen to apply here:

      1. Strauss-Kahn went for years and years and years with his “sexual sins” (i.e. assaults) completely overlooked, and with active complicity from the power structure around him, because in France, lots of powerful men are doing the exact same things.

      2. Even the mother of one of his own victims urged her not to press charges against him, in order to shield the young woman’s reputation from the gossip-hungry media.

      3. Nine years is an awfully long time to wait to spring a trap, but is very typical of the behavior of an embarrassed assault victim trying to hide her shame.

      4. Not sure what statutes of limitation there are on these things in France, but if there are any, they’re probably expired by now.

      5. It’s incredibly hard to imagine a hotel deliberately sending a chambermaid to clean a suite that hasn’t been vacated yet but which has falsely been reported to be empty, just as the inhabitant happens to be lurking, naked and aroused, in the bathroom, but all packed and ready to hop the next Air France flight, which, due to his high position in the IMF, he is somehow entitled to do (in first class, no less). At the very least, it requires that the perp be aware of the times the housekeeping staff make the rounds, so that he would be in a position to take advantage, and for the hotel management to know his rapacious proclivities and obligingly “dangle” one of their maids at just that precarious moment. The odds against such a plan coming off so precisely are astronomical. Ten more minutes, and that jet would have been up in the air…and with it, all chance of entrapping Strauss-Kahn. Meanwhile, back on the ground, there’d be one battered and traumatized chambermaid, very likely to sue the Sofitel corporation for criminal negligence. Not a satisfactory honey trap scenario, to say the least.

      6. Strauss-Kahn is hardly a revolutionary thinker, like Julian Assange; at best he is only a superficial reformist. After all, he wasn’t arguing for total abolition of the World Bank and IMF (which might really have gotten him into hot water), but only for new ways to keep the institutions profitable when the debt-plagued “natives” were getting restless all around the world.

      7. Strauss-Kahn could very well have been pushed into the IMF by Sarkozy in an effort to eliminate him as a political rival, maybe, but there’s no guarantee that he would have won the election anyway. And if he did, there’d still be the danger that he’d abuse his position to chase frightened girls around the mulberry bush with virtual impunity.

      8. If sexual sins were really enough to bring everyone down who is dancing out of line, Silvio Berlusconi would have been toast a long time ago, especially since he consorted with Gaddafi.

      9. There was ample opportunity to take Strauss-Kahn down when he went after an underling at the IMF, and nobody bothered, even though the great global recession of ’08 was already underway.

      10. Julian Assange has yet to go to trial for his “sexual sins”, and I fully expect that he won’t, because there’s no “there” there. They want him for espionage and they have nothing on him there, but as soon as they can find an espionage to make stick, the rape charges will magically evaporate. They are just a way of keeping him in custody and under some semblance of control in the meantime.

      11. Dominique Strauss-Kahn is hardly a Ralph Nader, either. He was not about to derail anyone’s gravy train; at worst, he could only switch it to another track. The global loan sharks still stood to benefit enormously from him, a so-called socialist, fronting for them. It’s hard to imagine them arranging a “honey trap” just because they don’t like him singing from the wrong page in their globalist hymn book. They have more to fear from Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro, who do represent real threats to their racket. But then, they are outsiders to global finance, and genuine innovators, to boot. Strauss-Kahn is a conservative compared to them. And we have yet to hear a single peep of sexual complaint against either of them.

      12. Elliott Spitzer may no longer be a state attorney general, but he’s not languishing in jail for any criminal wrongdoing, either. He has his own nationwide TV show now, and is thus arguably in an even better position to bring down the rich and powerful than he was before. Also, there is no evidence that he was trapped by anything but his own dumb gonads. While a married attorney general cavorting with high-priced call-girls is somewhat disgusting, he’s not exactly a sexual predator. For one thing, consent was still there, even if it was only purchased. And there is no evidence that the girls were dangled to bring him down, either.

      13. The whole crude “honey trap” concept is actually no match for anyone who is smart enough, in control of himself, and motivated enough to succeed at his own agenda. In the early days following the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, Che Guevara was invited, along with some compañeros, to a private dinner by a wealthy Cuban businessman with strong Miami ties, who was looking to co-opt him somehow. The man made sure to seat his fantastically beautiful daughter right next to Che, presumably dressed to kill. (Che’s much-beloved wife, Aleida March, was not invited.) One might think that being a “fiery” Latin American with a high sex drive and a weakness for pretty girls would surely have done Che in, but he begged off. Whether out of loyalty to Aleida or a suspicion that he was being entrapped (or both), he didn’t fall for it. There is always a chance that even the sweetest of honeys won’t catch the “fly”, and it’s probably greater than a lot of would-be conspirators imagine. Especially if the “fly” is a Che, who is clearly cut from a whole other bolt of cloth than the average man. I don’t hear that Ralph Nader fell into it, either; he’s still out there stirring the shit.

      14. True, whoever is slated to replace Dominique Strauss-Kahn at the IMF will probably be more of a “yes-man”, but then they would probably pick one anyway. And since he was looking to return to France to lead the Socialists in the next election, he was already on his way out and therefore in no position to do further damage to the IMF’s orthodoxy.

      15. There is also no guarantee that Strauss-Kahn would have won the French elections if he had stood in them; for all we know, the same situation as occurred here in Canada would have played itself out over there, and the conservative incumbent would retain his seat. Sarkozy’s a spiteful little jerk whom I wouldn’t trust any further than I could toss him, but it’s not clear that playing the Tonya Harding to Strauss-Kahn’s Nancy Kerrigan would have helped him here. If anything, it would more likely have torpedoed his chances amid an already volatile economic situation. He’s treading very carefully right now.

      The only conclusion I can reach, in the face of all this, is that this is no honey trap. Strauss-Kahn was your typical high-rank predator, so sure of his power and position that he actually counted on not getting caught. His arrogant surprise when the cops pulled him off the plane is a dead giveaway, in my eyes. It would be very tempting to see a pattern of conspiracies and take-downs here, but it’s a stretch at best. I could be wrong, but I think I’ll wait until the chambermaid confesses that she was put up to it before going anywhere near that conclusion.

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