Head of IMF, DSK, pulled off plane, held by NYPD

[thunderdownunder]

Re: Head of IMF, DSK, pulled off plane, held by NYPD

We'll find out during the trial.
Its a one on one trial, so it will come down to "indisputable fact(s)" evidence over she did - he did
The time lines will be a make or break. What I would do to be able to sit in on this and scan all the evidence.
To see true justice served without interference would be as refreshing as sunlight on cold skin and I hope
'The mills of the Gods grind slowly, but they grind small.'

[don]

Re: Head of IMF, DSK, pulled off plane, held by NYPD

How did they set him up?

Was this woman planted in the hotel years ago as a sleeper agent waiting to strike?

Or was she approached later and trained to carry out this operation? Who trained her to withstand aggressive questioning by the police and later by a hostile defense attorney?

Physical evidence was recovered. Was it planted? Was she trained to give an account the matched the story the physical evidence tells?

Were other hotel employees on board to make sure she had the right room assignment and was available for work on the right days?

I'm retired from the NYPD and on occasion was the covering supervisor for the Manhattan Special Victims Unit earlier in my career. I have no knowledge beyond what I read in the papers but I can assure you that that woman was put through the wringer regarding what happened in that room and a full background check was done on her. Reading the news accounts it appears that the detectives believe their complainant and are not just going through the motions with a complainant they have little faith in because they are required too.

DSK deserves the presumption of innocence. That being said maybe the story is simple: A man did a bad thing to a woman and got caught.

We'll find out during the trial.

Everything you say is above reproach. Whitney is jumping to a conclusion without due (mental) process. That said, context is important. Was Spitzer's use of a high-priced prostitute really the reason the FBI was monitoring his actions? Whitney's sketching in of S-K's actions that could be construed as counter to his class and position will never show up in a court of law, methinks.

[don]

Re: Head of IMF, DSK, pulled off plane, held by NYPD

Maybe you get away with this stuff in France, not here.

I bow before your wicked sense of humor.

[metalman]

Re: Head of IMF, DSK, pulled off plane, held by NYPD

Strauss-Kahn & his lawyer talk over defense plans after Strauss-Kahn caps a long & well established career as a rapist by trying to rape the wrong maid in the wrong country...

Strauss-Kahn's Lawyer: "What the FUCK was that? What were you thinking? Trying to rape a hotel maid in New York? Where did you think you were? Paris!!??"

Strauss-Kahn: "I don't know what came over me. It was as if I was another person. A crazy man!"

Strauss-Kahn's Lawyer: "Don't 'crazy man' to me. Don't even THINK about insanity as a legal theory in your case. Two dozen women are lined up from Brussels to Budapest to testify that you tried to rape them. If even one of them has evidence! Did you give her any money? Did she take anything? Think, Dom, think!"

Strauss-Kahn: "Yes. Yes. That's right. She asked for money. Did she have money on her?"

Strauss-Kahn's Lawyer: "Did you give her money?"

Strauss-Kahn: "She must of stashed it."

Strauss-Kahn's Lawyer: "Did you give her money?"

Strauss-Kahn: "That's not how we do it... you know that's not how I do it. We don't want goddamn prostitutes! I can buy any prostitute."

Strauss-Kahn's Lawyer: "What do you want?"

Strauss-Kahn: "What do I want?"

Strauss-Kahn's Lawyer: "Yes, what do you want?

Strauss-Kahn: "I want, I want... to force her... the weaker."

Strauss-Kahn's Lawyer: "Dom..."

Strauss-Kahn: "I want her to bend... her under my total control... in fear... helpless..."

Strauss-Kahn's Lawyer: "Stop. I've heard enough."

Strauss-Kahn: "I cannot do it otherwise. There is no release."

Strauss-Kahn's Lawyer: "I will call lojhsdlfhsfdidouhsfi at the Justice Department."

Strauss-Kahn: "I deserve! Have I not sacrificed? Did I ever complain? Why am I called out?"

Strauss-Kahn's Lawyer: "I will call lojhsdlfhsfdidouhsfi. We'll work it out. The press will find fresh grist for the mill."

[oddlots]

Re: Head of IMF, DSK, pulled off plane, held by NYPD

It's interesting to line up the examples cited here: Spitzer, Assange and DSK.

In the first two it was consensual (if using non-Swedish standards), DSK not. I mean that a) a callgirl transaction is, by definition, consensual b) the claim of rape in Assange's case seems really "technical" in a way only the Swedes can explain. There just doesn't seem the same latitude for manipulation in DSK's case. It seems to really come down to: a) someone put this woman up to the whole thing beginning to end and it's a lie (which would be extraordinarily risky to my mind) b) it's true and just an example of some powerful person self-imploding and dragging some innocent bystander into their own misery.

One of the markers of a conspiracy theory is that it assumes a motive is sufficient to prove a set-up. The world is full of potential stories but a motive is not a story and a non-fiction story has to be true to what happened (which is singular.)

[gnk]

Re: Head of IMF, DSK, pulled off plane, held by NYPD

Such theories were bolstered by the fact that the first person to break the news of Strauss-Kahn’s arrest was an activist in Mr Sarkozy’s UMP party – who apparently knew about the scandal before it happened.

Jonathan Pinet, a politics student, tweeted the news just before the New York Police Department made it public, although he said that he simply had a ‘friend’ working at the Sofitel where the attack was said to have happened.

The first person to re-tweet Mr Pinet was Arnaud Dassier, a spin doctor who had previously publicised details of multi-millionaire Strauss-Kahn’s luxurious lifestyle in a bid to dent his left wing credentials.

Strauss-Kahn could just as easily been set up by rivals inside the IMF, as well as by rivals within the French political establishment....

Source

[flintlock]

Re: Head of IMF, DSK, pulled off plane, held by NYPD

Strauss-Kahn & his lawyer talk over defense plans after Strauss-Kahn caps a long & well established career as a rapist by trying to rape the wrong maid in the wrong country...

Strauss-Kahn's Lawyer: "What the FUCK was that? What were you thinking? Trying to rape a hotel maid in New York? Where did you think you were? Paris!!??"

Strauss-Kahn: "I don't know what came over me. It was as if I was another person. A crazy man!"

Strauss-Kahn's Lawyer: "Don't 'crazy man' to me. Don't even THINK about insanity as a legal theory in your case. Two dozen women are lined up from Brussels to Budapest to testify that you tried to rape them. If even one of them has evidence! Did you give her any money? Did she take anything? Think, Dom, think!"

Strauss-Kahn: "Yes. Yes. That's right. She asked for money. Did she have money on her?"

Strauss-Kahn's Lawyer: "Did you give her money?"

Strauss-Kahn: "She must of stashed it."

Strauss-Kahn's Lawyer: "Did you give her money?"

Strauss-Kahn: "That's not how we do it... you know that's not how I do it. We don't want goddamn prostitutes! I can buy any prostitute."

Strauss-Kahn's Lawyer: "What do you want?"

Strauss-Kahn: "What do I want?"

Strauss-Kahn's Lawyer: "Yes, what do you want?

Strauss-Kahn: "I want, I want... to force her... the weaker."

Strauss-Kahn's Lawyer: "Dom..."

Strauss-Kahn: "I want her to bend... her under my total control... in fear... helpless..."

Strauss-Kahn's Lawyer: "Stop. I've heard enough."

Strauss-Kahn: "I cannot do it otherwise. There is no release."

Strauss-Kahn's Lawyer: "I will call lojhsdlfhsfdidouhsfi at the Justice Department."

Strauss-Kahn: "I deserve! Have I not sacrificed? Did I ever complain? Why am I called out?"

Strauss-Kahn's Lawyer: "I will call lojhsdlfhsfdidouhsfi. We'll work it out. The press will find fresh grist for the mill."

You should be a writer for sitcoms. Or "reality" shows.

[don]

Re: Head of IMF, DSK, pulled off plane, held by NYPD

a little deeper . . .

On the Political Economics of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's Political Death
by Yanis Varoufakis

What follows below is about the economic and political significance of the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK hereafter), the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. It will say nothing about the merits (or lack thereof) of the charges against DSK. All cases of alleged sexual assault brought against high-profile men place two equally important (albeit often counterposed) demands upon the rest of us: the importance of respecting the anguish of the alleged victim (as well as of respecting her struggle with the specter of terror that all women face when it comes to deciding to accuse a powerful man) and the obligation to respect the defendant's presumption of innocence. It is in this spirit that the following will say nothing about the case and concentrate on an important part of contemporary political economics.

Normally, the "elimination" of an IMF Managing Director would have no more than a passing effect on the institution. I suspect that DSK's demise will be different. It is not just that DSK is a heavyweight who has pushed the IMF into a different mode of thinking (taking a more nuanced approach to the deeper causes of crises). Far more significant is the manner in which he seems to understand what makes the global economy tick.

To cut to the chase, I shall give one poignant example -- one whose significance transcends all anecdotes about the greater "leniency" that DSK demonstrated during the EU-IMF-Greek government negotiations over the terms of the massive Greek "bailout" loans. To make my point I shall quote him directly, rather than base my argument on hearsay.

Back in January 2011, DSK was interviewed by a BBC Radio 4 journalist in the context of a documentary on the history of the IMF.¹ Toward the end of the program, I heard the distinctive voice of DSK responding to a journalist's question about how the global economy ought to be reconfigured in the aftermath of the 2008 Crisis. His astonishing answer was:

Never in the past has an institution like the IMF been as necessary as it has been today . . . Keynes, sixty years ago, already foresaw what was needed; but it was too early. Now is the time to do it. And I think we are ready to do it!

This was, in my estimation, a bombshell of a programmatic statement, coming from the IMF's Managing Director. What was he referring to? He was, of course, referring to Keynes' powerfully put argument (in the context of the 1944 Bretton Woods conference) that a system of fixed exchange rates cannot survive for long without an automated mechanism that treats (a) systematic trade surpluses and (b) systematic trade deficits as the two sides of the same problematic coin.

Keynes' recommendation was that, to deal with the system-destabilizing effect of deficits and surpluses, the world needed a mechanism that would rebalance them by transferring surpluses from the surplus to the deficit countries. In short, the world needed a Surplus Recycling Mechanism (SRM) (click here for an extensive, though academic, account of the arguments in favor of an SRM).

This was, quite naturally, a radical suggestion. The Unites States, as expected, rejected the proposal -- not, however, because the New Dealers in power at that time did not recognize the importance of an SRM at a global level, but because they did not like the idea of the automaticity of recycling (which Keynes was proposing).²
As I have explained the function of an SRM (and consequences of its absence) in some detail elsewhere (see here for example), I shall desist from repeating it here. Suffice to point out the political and economic significance of DSK's endorsement of Keynes' suggestion and, in particular, his statement that Keynes was ahead of his time but is timely now after the Crash of 2008: "Now is the time to do it. And I think we are ready to do it!"

If the reader requires a little more persuasion on the significance of that statement, consider this: In the European context, DSK's declaration means that, in his viewfinder, Germany is as much of a problem for the eurozone as Greece is. For if systematic surpluses have the capacity to undermine a common currency (or fixed exchange) area, then Germany's development model is undermining the eurozone just as much as Greece's chronic deficits are.

I think that DSK has a good point. But whether the reader agrees with me is not the issue. The issue is that DSK's political death (the announcement of which may turn out to be premature) carries with it unprecedented significance both inside and outside Europe.

Within Europe, the prospect of a French President who believes strongly (and is prepared to back up his conviction with a formidable analytical panoply) that the eurozone cannot survive without a Surplus Recycling Mechanism (which channels German surpluses to the deficit countries in the form of productive investment) has the potential to radically alter the political and economic agenda of the continent. Such a presidency would, in particular, offer an invigorating counterpoint to the current mental incapacity to come to terms with the deeper causes of the euro crisis and to, at long last, recognize that the debt crisis is a symptom, not the cause, of the string of failures that threaten the eurozone's very existence.

More broadly, the global debate about what to do with China's increasing surpluses is also bound to take a different course depending on whether the IMF's Managing Director believes, as DSK declared he does, in the importance of creating automated, supranational mechanisms for recycling surpluses (as opposed to Tim Geithner's insistence that global imbalances be dealt with only by adjustments to the exchange rates).

In short, DSK is one of the very rare officials heading an extremely powerful institution while holding refreshing views atypical of grey, number-crunching bureaucrats. His political passing may go unnoticed simply because his tenure at the IMF has been short and his French Presidency is now unlikely to materialize. However, I suspect strongly that he may well turn out to be the most significant French President we never had, as well as the most influential IMF Managing Director we nearly had.

1 BBC Radio 4, Inside the IMF, Part Two, broadcast on 17th January 2011.

2 The United States proved that it did not reject the idea of surplus recycling itself, by implementing the Marshall Plan (a fabulous example of massive surplus recycling) and taking myriad other steps between 1947 and 1970 to recycle a large percentage of American surpluses into Europe and Japan. What it did reject was the idea of a supranational institution that would do the recycling outside Washington's political control.

---

Yanis Varoufakis is Professor of Economic Theory and Director of the Department of Political Economy in the Faculty of Economic Sciences of the University of Athens. Varoufakis' books include: The Global Minotaur: The True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy (Zed Books, 2011); (with S. Hargreaves-Heap) Game Theory: A Critical Text (Routledge, 2004); Foundations of Economics: A Beginner's Companion (Routledge, 1998); and Rational Conflict (Blackwell Publishers, 1991).

[don]

Re: Head of IMF, DSK, pulled off plane, held by NYPD

Paul Craig Roberts thoughts:

Strauss-Kahn was the first IMF director in my lifetime, if memory serves, who disavowed the traditional IMF policy of imposing on the poor and ordinary people the cost of bailing out Wall Street and the Western banks. Strauss-Kahn said that regulation had to be reimposed on the greed-driven, fraud-prone financial sector, which, unregulated, destroyed the lives of ordinary people. Strauss-Kahn listened to Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz, one of a handful of economists who has a social conscience.

Perhaps the most dangerous black mark in Strauss-Kahn’s book is that he was far ahead of America’s French puppet, President Sarkozy, in the upcoming French elections. Strauss-Kahn simply had to be eliminated.

It is possible that Strauss-Kahn eliminated himself and saved Washington the trouble. However, as a well-travelled person who has often stayed in New York hotels and in hotels in cities around the world, I have never experienced a maid entering unannounced into my room, much less when I was in the shower.

In the spun story, Strauss-Kahn is portrayed as so deprived of sex that he attempted to rape a hotel maid. Anyone who ever served on the staff of a powerful public figure knows that this is unlikely. On a senator’s staff on which I served, there were two aides whose job was to make certain that no woman, with the exception of his wife, was ever alone with the senator. This was done to protect the senator both from female power groupies, who lust after celebrities and powerful men, and from women sent by a rival on missions to compromise an opponent. A powerful man such as Strauss-Kahn would not have been starved for women, and as a multi-millionaire he could certainly afford to make his own discreet arrangements.

As Henry Kissinger said, “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” In politics, sex is handed out as favors and payoffs, and it is used as a honey trap. Some Americans will remember that Senator Packwood’s long career (1969-1995) was destroyed by a female lobbyist, suspected, according to rumors, of sexual conquests of Senators, who charged that Packwood propositioned her in his office. Perhaps what inspired the charge was that Packwood was in the way of her employer’s legislative agenda.

Even those who exercise care can be framed by allegations of an event to which there are no witnesses. On May 16 the British Daily Mail reported that prior to Strauss-Kahn’s fateful departure for New York, the French newspaper, Liberation, published comments he made while discussing his plans to challenge Sarkozy for the presidency of France. Strauss-Kahn said that as he was the clear favorite to beat Sarkozy, he would be subjected to a smear campaign by Sarkozy and his interior minister, Glaude Gueant. Strauss-Kahn predicted that a woman would be offered between 500,000 and 1,000,000 euros (more than $1,000,000) to make up a story that he raped her. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...lege-rape.html

The Daily Mail reports that Strauss-Kahn’s suspicions are supported by the fact that the first person to break the news of Strauss-Kahn’s arrest was an activist in Mr Sarkozy’s UMP party – who apparently knew about the scandal before it happened. Jonathan Pinet, a politics student, tweeted the news just before the New York Police Department made it public, although he said that he simply had a ‘friend’ working at the Sofitel where the attack was said to have happened. The first person to re-tweet Mr Pinet was Arnaud Dassier, a spin doctor who had previously publicised details of multi-millionaire Strauss-Kahn’s luxurious lifestyle in a bid to dent his left wing credentials.

Strauss-Kahn could just as easily been set up by rivals inside the IMF, as well as by rivals within the French political establishment.

Michelle Sabban, a senior councillor for the greater Paris region and a Strauss-Kahn loyalist said: ‘I am convinced it is an international conspiracy.’

She added: ‘It's the IMF they wanted to decapitate, not so much the Socialist primary candidate.

‘It's not like him. Everyone knows that his weakness is seduction, women. That's how they got him.’
Even some of Strauss-Kahn’s rivals said they could not believe the news. ‘It is totally hallucinatory,’ said centrist Dominique Paille.

‘If it is true, this would be a historic moment, but in the negative sense, for French political life. I hope that everyone respects the presumption of innocence. I cannot manage to believe this affair.’

And Henri de Raincourt, minister for overseas co-operation in President Nicolas Sarkozy's government, added: ‘We cannot rule out the thought of a trap.’

Michelle Sabban is on to something when she says the IMF was the target. Strauss-Kahn is the first IMF director who is not lined up on the side of the rich against the poor. Strauss-Kahn’s suspicions were of Sarkozy, but Wall Street and the US government also had strong reasons to eliminate him. Wall Street is terrified by the prospect of regulation, and Washington was embarrassed by the recent IMF report that China’s economy would surpass the US economy within five years. An international conspiracy is not out of the question.

Indeed, the plot is unfolding as a conspiracy. Authorities have produced a French woman who claims she was a near rape victim of Strauss-Kahn a decade ago. It would be interesting to know whether this allegation is the result of a threat or a bribe. As in the case of Julian Assange, there are now two women to accuse Strauss-Kahn. Once the prosecutors get the odds of two females against one male, they win in the media.

It has not been revealed how the authorities knew Strauss-Kahn was on a flight to France. However, by arresting him aboard his scheduled flight just as it was to depart, the authorities created the image of a man fleeing from a crime.

The way Amerikan justice (sic) works is that prosecutors in about 96 percent of the cases get a plea bargain. US prosecutors are permitted by judges and the public to pay for testimony against the defendant and to put sufficient pressure on innocent defendants to coerce them into making a guilty plea in exchange for lesser charges and a lighter sentence. Unless the hotel maid has a spell of bad conscience and admits she was paid to lie, or gets cold feet about perjuring herself, Strauss-Kahn is likely to find that Amerikan criminal justice (sic) is organized to produce conviction regardless of innocence or guilt.

On May 16, the day following Strauss-Kahn’s arrest, the US Supreme Court threw its weight behind the Amerikan police state by destroying the remains of the Fourth Amendment with an 8-1 ruling that, the U.S. Constitution notwithstanding, Amerika’s police do not need warrants to invade homes and search persons.

This ruling is more evidence that every American is regarded as a potential enemy of the state, not only by Airport Security but also by the high muckety-mucks in Washington. The conservatives’ “war on crime” has created a police state, and conservatives, who originally stood for limited government and civil liberty, are euphoric over the expanded and unaccountable powers that a conservative Supreme Court has handed to the police.

On the same day the federal government reached the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling, which forced the Treasury to “borrow” money from federal employee pensions in order to continue funding Amerika’s illegal wars and crimes against humanity. The breached debt ceiling serves as an appropriate marker for a country that has squandered its constitutional heritage and has arrived at moral as well as fiscal bankruptcy.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.p...t=va&aid=24840

[BigBagel]

Re: Head of IMF, DSK, pulled off plane, held by NYPD

Never read anything in which the author spells America as "Amerika". It's so 1960's radical chic.

[Shakespear]

Re: Head of IMF, DSK, pulled off plane, held by NYPD

Jonathan Pinet, a politics student, tweeted the news just before the New York Police Department made it public, although he said that he simply had a ‘friend’ working at the Sofitel where the attack was said to have happened.

A "student" just happens to have a friend at the Sofitel Hotel !!!! This one smells funny, maybe its Brie or "Cheater" Cheese.

[jk]

Re: Head of IMF, DSK, pulled off plane, held by NYPD

people do have friends, and glitzy hotels like to have an international staff. we'll never know what really happened.

[Munger]

Re: Head of IMF, DSK, pulled off plane, held by NYPD

!!!!

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[Serge_Tomiko]

Re: Head of IMF, DSK, pulled off plane, held by NYPD

How did they set him up?

Was this woman planted in the hotel years ago as a sleeper agent waiting to strike?

Or was she approached later and trained to carry out this operation? Who trained her to withstand aggressive questioning by the police and later by a hostile defense attorney?

Physical evidence was recovered. Was it planted? Was she trained to give an account the matched the story the physical evidence tells?

Were other hotel employees on board to make sure she had the right room assignment and was available for work on the right days?

I'm retired from the NYPD and on occasion was the covering supervisor for the Manhattan Special Victims Unit earlier in my career. I have no knowledge beyond what I read in the papers but I can assure you that that woman was put through the wringer regarding what happened in that room and a full background check was done on her. Reading the news accounts it appears that the detectives believe their complainant and are not just going through the motions with a complainant they have little faith in because they are required too.

DSK deserves the presumption of innocence. That being said maybe the story is simple: A man did a bad thing to a woman and got caught.

We'll find out during the trial.

I highly doubt you are retired NYPD. I'm sorry, but unless the man had a gun to her head, there is no way anyone can be forced to perform fellatio.

But of course, there is the one issue that should clearly stick out to any police officer of this city. How many times in the past century has a white man raped a black woman within the city limits? Once? Twice?

That should make you take pause.

Now, the man is awful, and I'm thrilled that his arrest will pave the way for Le Front National to gain an even stronger voice - particularly as Khan is probably the most vocal figure for further dispossessing the French people of their homeland while protecting his own - but the story is simply bizarre as recounted.

[don]

Re: Head of IMF, DSK, pulled off plane, held by NYPD

Never read anything in which the author spells America as "Amerika". It's so 1960's radical chic.

Paul Craig Roberts is a newbie "radical" critic. Cut him some slack