This one should piss off all the right wingers!
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When Institutions Rape Nations
Monday 23 May 2011
by: Rebecca Solnit, TomDispatch
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the leader of the International Monetary
Fund, is escorted from a New York Police Department station in
Harlem after being formally arrested, in New York, on May 15,
2011. (Photo: Robert Stolarik - The New York Times)
*Some thoughts on the IMF, global injustice, and a stranger on a
train.*
How can I tell a story we already know too well? Her name was
Africa. His was France. He colonized her, exploited her,
silenced her, and even decades after it was supposed to have
ended, still acted with a high hand in resolving her affairs in
places like Côte d'Ivoire, a name she had been given because of
her export products, not her own identity.
Her name was Asia. His was Europe. Her name was silence. His was
power. Her name was poverty. His was wealth. Her name was Her,
but what was hers? His name was His, and he presumed everything
was his, including her, and he thought he could take her without
asking and without consequences. It was a very old story, though
its outcome had been changing a little in recent decades. And
this time around the consequences are shaking a lot of
foundations, all of which clearly needed shaking.
Who would ever write a fable as obvious, as heavy-handed as the
story we've just been given? The extraordinarily powerful head
of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a global organization
that has created mass poverty and economic injustice, allegedly
assaulted a hotel maid, an immigrant from Africa, in a hotel's
luxury suite in New York City.
Worlds have collided. In an earlier era, her word would have
been worthless against his and she might not have filed charges,
or the police might not have followed through and yanked
Dominique Strauss-Kahn off the plane to Paris at the last
moment. But she did, and they did, and now he's in custody, and
the economy of Europe has been dealt a blow, and French politics
have been upended, and that nation is reeling and
soul-searching.
What were they thinking, these men who decided to give him this
singular position of power, despite all the stories and evidence
of such viciousness? What was he thinking when he decided he
could get away with it? Did he think he was in France, where
apparently he did get away with it? Only now is the young woman
who says he assaulted her in 2002 pressing charges her own
politician mother talked her out of it, and she worried about
the impact it could have on her journalistic career (while her
mother was apparently worrying more about his career).* *
And the Guardian reports that these stories "have added weight
to claims by Piroska Nagy, a Hungarian-born economist, that the
fund's director engaged in sustained harassment when she was
working at the IMF [6]
that left her feeling she had little choice but to agree to
sleep with him at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January
2008. She alleged he persistently called and emailed on the
pretext of asking questions about [her expertise,] Ghana's
economy, but then used sexual language and asked her out."
In some accounts, the woman Strauss-Kahn is charged with
assaulting in New York is from Ghana, in others a Muslim from
nearby Guinea. "Ghana -- Prisoner of the IMF " ran a headline in
2001 by the usually mild-mannered BBC. Its report documented the
way the IMF's policies had destroyed that rice-growing nation's
food security, opening it up to cheap imported U.S. rice, and
plunging the country's majority into dire poverty. Everything
became a commodity for which you had to pay, from using a toilet
to getting a bucket of water, and many could not pay. Perhaps it
would be too perfect if she was a refugee from the IMF's
policies in Ghana. Guinea, on the other hand, liberated itself
from the IMF management thanks to the discovery of major oil
reserves, but remains a country of severe corruption and
economic disparity.
*Pimping for the Global North*
There's an axiom evolutionary biologists used to like: "ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny," or the development of the embryonic
individual repeats that of its species' evolution. Does the
ontogeny of this alleged assault echo the phylogeny of the
International Monetary Fund? After all, the organization was
founded late in World War II as part of the notorious Bretton
Woods conference that would impose American economic visions on
the rest of the world.
The IMF was meant to be a lending institution to help countries
develop, but by the 1980s it had become an organization with an
ideology -- free trade and free-market fundamentalism. It used
its loans to gain enormous power over the economies and policies
of nations throughout the global South.
However, if the IMF gained power throughout the 1990s, it began
losing that power in the twenty-first century, thanks to
powerful popular resistance to the economic policies it embodied
and the economic collapse such policies produced. Strauss-Kahn
was brought in to salvage the wreckage of an organization that,
in 2008, had to sell off its gold reserves and reinvent its
mission.
Her name was Africa. His name was IMF. He set her up to be
pillaged, to go without health care, to starve. He laid waste to
her to enrich his friends. Her name was Global South. His name
was Washington Consensus. But his winning streak was running out
and her star was rising.
It was the IMF that created the economic conditions that
destroyed the Argentinian economy by 2001, and it was the revolt
against the IMF (among other neoliberal forces) that prompted
Latin America's rebirth over the past decade. Whatever you think
of Hugo Chavez, it was loans from oil-rich Venezuela that
allowed Argentina to pay off its IMF loans early so that it
could set its own saner economic policies.
The IMF was a predatory force, opening developing countries up
to economic assaults from the wealthy North and powerful
transnational corporations. It was a pimp. Maybe it still is.
But since the Seattle anti-corporate demonstrations of 1999 set
a global movement alight, there has been a revolt against it,
and those forces have won in Latin America, changing the
framework of all economic debates to come and enriching our
imaginations when it comes to economies and possibilities.
Today, the IMF is a mess, the World Trade Organization largely
sidelined, NAFTA almost universally reviled, the Free Trade Area
of the Americas cancelled (though bilateral free-trade
agreements continue), and much of the world has learned a great
deal from the decade's crash course in economic policy.
*Strangers on a Train*
The New York Times reported it
[8] this way: "As the impact of Mr. Strauss-Kahn's predicament
hit home, others, including some in the news media, began to
reveal accounts, long suppressed or anonymous, of what they
called Mr. Strauss-Kahn's previously predatory behavior toward
women and his aggressive sexual pursuit of them, from students
and journalists to subordinates."
In other words, he created an atmosphere that was uncomfortable
or dangerous for women, which would be one thing if he were
working in, say, a small office. But that a man who controls
some part of the fate of the world apparently devoted his
energies to generating fear, misery, and injustice around him
says something about the shape of our world and the values of
the nations and institutions that tolerated his behavior and
that of men like him.
The United States has not been short on sex scandals of late,
and they reek of the same arrogance, but they were at least
consensual (as far as we know). The head of the IMF is charged
with sexual assault. If that term confuses you take out the word
"sexual" and just focus on "assault," on violence, on the
refusal to treat someone as a human being, on the denial of the
most basic of human rights, the right to bodily integrity and
corporeal safety. "The rights of man" was one of the great
phrases of the French Revolution, but it's always been
questionable whether it included the rights of women.
The United States has a hundred million flaws, but I am proud
that the police believed this woman and that she will have her
day in court. I am gratified this time not to be in a country
which has decided that the career of a powerful man or the fate
of an international institution matters more than this woman and
her rights and wellbeing. This is what we mean by democracy:
that everyone has a voice, that no one gets away with things
just because of their wealth, power, race, or gender.
Two days before Strauss-Kahn allegedly emerged from that hotel
bathroom naked, there was a big demonstration in New York City.
"Make Wall Street Pay" was the theme and union workers,
radicals, the unemployed, and more -- 20,000 people -- gathered
to protest the economic assault in this country that is creating
such suffering and deprivation for the many -- and obscene
wealth for the few.
I attended. On the crowded subway car back to Brooklyn
afterwards, the youngest of my three female companions had her
bottom groped by a man about Strauss-Kahn's age. At first, she
thought he had simply bumped into her. That was before she felt
her buttock being cupped and said something to me, as young
women often do, tentatively, quietly, as though it were perhaps
not happening or perhaps not quite a problem.
Finally, she glared at him and told him to stop. I was reminded
of a moment when I was an impoverished seventeen-year-old living
in Paris and some geezer grabbed my ass. It was perhaps my most
American moment in France, then the land of a thousand
disdainful gropers; American because I was carrying three
grapefruits, a precious purchase from my small collection of
funds, and I threw those grapefruits, one after another, like
baseballs at the creep and had the satisfaction of watching him
scuttle into the night.
His action, like so much sexual violence against women, was
undoubtedly meant to be a reminder that this world was not mine,
that my rights -- my liberté, egalité, sororité, if you will
-- didn't matter. Except that I had sent him running in a
barrage of fruit. And Dominique Strauss-Kahn got pulled off a
plane to answer to justice. Still, that a friend of mine got
groped on her way back from a march about justice makes it clear
how much there still is to be done.
*The Poor Starve, While the Rich Eat Their Words*
What makes the sex scandal that broke open last week so resonant
is the way the alleged assailant and victim model larger
relationships around the world, starting with the IMF's assault
on the poor. That assault is part of the great class war of our
era, in which the rich and their proxies in government have
endeavored to aggrandize their holdings at the expense of the
rest of us. Poor countries in the developing world paid first,
but the rest of us are paying now, as those policies and the
suffering they impose come home to roost via right-wing
economics that savages unions, education systems, the
environment, and programs for the poor, disabled, and elderly in
the name of privatization, free markets, and tax cuts.
In one of the more remarkable apologies of our era, Bill Clinton
-- who had his own sex scandal once upon a time -- told the
United Nations [10] on World Food Day in October 2008, as the
global economy was melting down: "We need the World Bank, the
IMF, all the big foundations, and all the governments to admit
that, for 30 years, we all blew it, including me when I was
President. We were wrong to believe that food was like some
other product in international trade, and we all have to go back
to a more responsible and sustainable form of agriculture."
He said it even more bluntly last year: "Since 1981, the United
States has followed a policy, until the last year or so when we
started rethinking it, that we rich countries that produce a lot
of food should sell it to poor countries and relieve them of the
burden of producing their own food, so, thank goodness, they can
leap directly into the industrial era. It has not worked. It may
have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has
not worked. It was a mistake. It was a mistake that I was a
party to. I am not pointing the finger at anybody. I did that. I
have to live every day with the consequences of the lost
capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people,
because of what I did."
Clinton's admissions were on a level with former Federal Reserve
Chairman Alan Greenspan's 2008 admission that the premise of his
economic politics was wrong. The former policies and those of
the IMF, World Bank, and free-trade fundamentalists had created
poverty, suffering, hunger, and death. We have learned, most of
us, and the world has changed remarkably since the day when
those who opposed free-market fundamentalism were labeled
"flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions, and yuppies
looking for their 1960's fix," in the mortal words of Thomas
Friedman, later eaten.
AA remarkable thing happened after the devastating Haitian
earthquake [ last year: the IMF under Strauss-Kahn planned to
use the vulnerability of that country to force new loans on it
with the usual terms. Activists reacted to a plan guaranteed to
increase the indebtedness of a nation already crippled by the
kind of neoliberal policies for which Clinton belatedly
apologized. The IMF blinked, stepped back, and agreed to cancel
Haiti's existing debt to the organization. It was a remarkable
victory for informed activism.
*Powers of the Powerless*
It looks as though a hotel maid may end the career of one of the
most powerful men in the world, or rather that he will have
ended it himself by discounting the rights and humanity of that
worker. Pretty much the same thing happened to Meg Whitman, the
former E-Bay billionaire who ran for governor of California last
year. She leapt on the conservative bandwagon by attacking
undocumented immigrants -- until it turned out that she had
herself long employed one, Nickie Diaz, as a housekeeper.
When, after nine years, it had become politically inconvenient
to keep Diaz around, she fired the woman abruptly, claimed she'd
never known her employee was undocumented, and refused to pay
her final wages. In other words, Whitman was willing to spend
$140 million on her campaign, but may have brought herself down
thanks, in part, to $6,210 in unpaid wages.
Diaz said "I felt like she was throwing me away like a piece of
garbage." The garbage had a voice, the California Nurses Union
amplified it, and California was spared domination by a
billionaire whose policies would have further brutalized the
poor and impoverished the middle class.
The struggles for justice of an undocumented housekeeper and an
immigrant hotel maid are microcosms of the great world war of
our time. If Nickie Diaz and the battle over last year's IMF
loans to Haiti demonstrate anything, it's that the outcome is
uncertain. Sometimes we win the skirmishes, but the war
continues. So much remains to be known about what happened in
that expensive hotel suite in Manhattan last week, but what we
do know is this: a genuine class war is being fought openly in
our time, and last week, a so-called socialist put himself on
the wrong side of it.
His name was privilege, but hers was possibility. His was the
same old story, but hers was a new one about the possibility of
changing a story that remains unfinished, that includes all of
us, that matters so much, that we will watch, but also make and
tell in the weeks, months, years, decades to come.
BOB KLAHN bob.klahn@sev.org http://home.toltbbs.com/bobklahn
... Solve America's economic problems, get rid of free trade and republicans.
--- Via Silver Xpress V4.5/P [Reg]
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