The head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) forced an African maid to suck his dick. This is what a hotel maid claims happened on May 14, 2011. She, an immigrant from Guinea, an extremely poor West African country, entered a $3,000-a-night room in the Sofitel Hotel in New York City with the intention of doing her shitty little job, cleaning up after rich people. Suddenly, a naked white man was all over her. Suddenly, a French white man was trying to fuck her. Suddenly, an old white man thrust his dick into her mouth. The white man turned out to be running an institution her poor country knows all too well.
If this story turns out to be true—if Dominique Strauss-Kahn sexually assaulted the hotel maid, an accusation that got him pulled out of a plane heading to Paris, charged on May 16, and sent to Rikers Island, and has now cost him his job—then, my God, where do we begin? It’s just too much. You know what I mean? Really, take a moment and imagine this: A theater group stages a play about the head of the IMF forcing a poor African woman to have sex with him. What perfect symbols! He is powerful; she is weak. He is white; she is black. He is a man; she is a woman. He orders her to pleasure his cock; she fights to free herself—she fights for her rights, for her independence, for her dignity. Imagine watching this play on some college campus. Total rubbish. You’d accuse the playwright and the players of lacking any subtlety, imagination, refinement—and you would be correct. This is as bad as didactic drama gets. It’s unrealistic.
Yet it’s very possibly reality—this pinko fantasy power and exploitation might have happened. And not in any old place, but in New York City. In Manhattan. Roughly 50 blocks from Wall Street. This incredible crime allegedly happened in the capital of capitalism, the very hub around which the whole wheel of the economic world turns. Here, right by Times Square, the square that celebrates the glory of free enterprise with the brightest lights and brilliant image, a man who heads the institution that has been central to transforming the planet into one big market and placing Wall Street at the center of that market made an African woman…
You get the picture.
Everyone gets the picture. Cultural theorist Steven
Shaviro: “It is almost too metaphorically apt that the head of the IMF appears to be a serial rapist.” Comedian Jon Stewart: “That’s like a live-action metaphor. The head of the IMF trying to fuck an African?” Columnist Maureen Dowd: “Was the chief of the International Monetary Fund telling other countries to tighten their belts while he was dropping his trousers?”
This is how many people see the IMF: a $1 trillion institution that is favorable to rich nations and very unfavorable to poor ones. Each of its policy prescriptions for loans (keep inflation low, cut government spending, open capital markets, protect intellectual property rights, and so on) is a stick that enforces neoliberal discipline. Who are neoliberals? Basically, wealthy people who have loads of money and want to make loads more money. What do neoliberals want from poor countries? Cheap labor. Disciplined labor. Precarious labor. And no goddamn taxes or any of that regulation shit.
The IMF was not born a monster; it was something of an angel of peace. The IMF and the World Bank were set up in 1944 in Bretton Woods, a New Hampshire resort, to help stabilize and rebuild a world torn apart by years of war. This was the role the IMF pretty much played until the debt crisis of the early 1980s.
South Korean economist and Cambridge professor Ha-Joon Chang explains this transition in his brilliant book Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. Chang explains that after the debt crisis of 1982 in the third world, “the roles of both the IMF and the World Bank changed dramatically. They started to exert a much stronger policy influence on developing countries through their joint operation of so-called structural adjustment programs (SAP). These programs covered a much wider range of policies than what the Bretton Woods Institutions had originally been mandated to do… In the 1990s, there was a further advance in this ‘mission creep’ as they started attaching so-called governance conditionalities to their loans. These involved intervention in hitherto unthinkable areas, like democracy, government decentralization, central bank independence, and corporate governance.”
SAPs—also called Economic Structural Adjustment Programs (ESAP)—essentially force poor countries to tighten their belts, as Maureen Dowd has it. Governments have to balance budgets by laying off workers, cutting wages, killing entitlements, and turning over major industries and financial institutions to private ownership. The result of these cuts is pain for middle-class people and lots of pain for poor people. If the policies don’t work, the IMF tells you that you are not doing enough, that the cuts are insufficient, that you must double, triple, quadruple the economic pain. No pain, no gain. In Zimbabwe, which implemented IMF policies in the early 1990s, ESAP was nicknamed Extra Suffering for African People.
In fact, the country the hotel maid came from, Guinea (formerly called French Guinea—
yes, this business of a Jewish Frenchman allegedly raping a Muslim African woman also has a colonial layer), implemented not one but two ESAPs—from 1989 to 1991 and 1991 to 1994. I have yet to read anything positive about either of these adjustment programs. They seem to have made things worse. Not only because they put lots of people out of work and local consumption fell, but also because they exposed the little country to great global economic storms: the crashing of the economy after 9/11, the Wall Street crash of 2008, the collapse of world prices for aluminum in the late 1990s (apparently, all Guinea is in the eyes of Europeans/Americans/Chinese is a big pile of cheap bauxite), and so on. Poor African nations are not the only ones hit hard by IMF policies; developed countries also have to bend over and receive blows—South Korea in 1997, Greece in 2010.
On May 9, 2010, almost exactly a year before Strauss-Kahn walked out of a bathroom naked and allegedly forced a poor woman to suck his French prick, he said, “The IMF has demonstrated its commitment to doing what it can to help Greece and its people.” He added, “The road ahead will be difficult,” but the government of Greece had put forth a “credible program” for its economy that included “protection for the most vulnerable groups.”
The country he was fucking, Greece, had to meet the IMF’s loan conditionality: make dramatic cuts in public spending. This, of course, has brought extra suffering for people who had nothing to do with the debt crisis and the financial crash on Wall Street.
Once again: The man who runs the organization that has been in the business of fucking over desperate or impoverished countries for three decades might have attempted to forcefully fuck a woman from an African country. This is the institutional unconscious, this is a live-action metaphor, this is just too much. 
This article has been subtly corrected since its original publication.
i have a africam man who hangs out at connections on third and james….
Wow Kevin W. That is incredibly loathsome. What kind of a sick world do you wallow in where this is an acceptable thing to write?
@1 My, my. You do know how to elegantly critique an argument. You santorum-smeared pink slob.
The reason Greece is in such difficulty is that the government has for many years maintained ambitious spending programs (viz., the 2004 summer Olympics) without the domestic revenues. The Greek hoi polloi are principled tax evaders. So how to fund public programs? Borrow abroad, issue bonds, promise the moon. Now some of these bonds are coming due and there are no drachmas, er, euros, to pay them.
@1 Kevin I didn’t know your mom worked at Sofitel.
This article is silly. It is very similar to the “Last Days” section where they mentioned 2 different crimes and mentioned race (perps were white) in both cases. They also mentioned several crimes where the perp was black, but of course made no mention of race.
I would have loved to see the Stranger do an article like this about the Tuba man and how Seattle refused to raised their voice in anger when the black perps got 3 months for stomping someone to death. There have been a dozen serious assaults and robberies on metro against vulerable people- a blind woman, an elderly man, a preganant woman, etc. It would be refreshing if the Stranger did an article about this and pointed out that almost all of them were perpetrated by young African Americans. Why the taboo? If it was the other way around Charles would have written 6 articles about it by now.
Chuck,
You left out a layer of the story (intentionally, I assume). While Dominique Strauss-Kahn may, or may not, be a rapist, he most emphatically is a Socialist and was a Communist.
So the real story is:
Rich European Socialist With Communist Affiliations Rapes Poor African On The Altar Of American Capitalism
Now that plot rings true enough to life to be believable.
At least we can be certain M. Strauss-Kahn has read his Sade. Philosophy in the Hotel Room, truly inspirational.
The problem with the IMF isn’t neoliberalism. The problem is that they loan the money exclusively to criminal strongmen, largely based on the perception that they are in fact strong enough to defeat any attempts at rebellion. Most of that money then heads straight back to Europe into secret bank accounts. Some of the biggest IMF recipients over the decades have achieved the least in terms of real infrastructure. If it was actually spent on the infrastructure necessary to develop a functioning economy, it might do some good. Instead, it (and the more “humanitarian” forms of international aid) are used to manipulate and even kill already marginalized populations.
“lacking any subtly” should be subtlety.
“The problem with the IMF isn’t neoliberalism” apparently it’s Neo-Libertine-ism. Sorry couldn’t resist the pun.
@8 Dominique Strauss-Kahn is most emphatically NOT a socialist. The Parti Socialiste doesn’t stand on a socialist platform. If Strauss-Kahn was a socialist he would never have been appointed head of the IMF.
@11 Fixed! Thanks.
Have you seen this pic of Strauss-Kahn floating around? He likes the black ladies for sure.
This business of live-action metaphors reminds me of the introduction to Paul Constant’s piece on the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. It’s a good era for literalists, I suppose.
Probably guilty.
I just ordered Chang’s Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism today and am looking forward to the read, thank you.
Mr. Mudede: For more pedestrian readers, there is “Confessions of an Economic Hit-man” by John Perkins, a story of the malicious economic influence of the U.S./World Bank/IMF on developing nations from the later ’50’s onward.
I’m greatly relieved that this case will not boil down to a “he said/she said”, since so many other women have come forward to bear witness to DSK’s sexually aggressive behavior. This includes the Sofitel receptionist, who claims that after Strauss-Kahn arrived at his room he phoned back to the main desk to ask her if she wanted to come up ‘for drinks’. Yeah, this guy is seriously a predator, no matter what else he may be in the world of finance.
Mr. Mudede:
Wondering why you felt that the religion of the alleged perpetrator and his alleged victim are relevant?
Something off-putting about that Lustlab ad running alongside this article, the one with the woman’s naked ass in the air.
@13 thank you! Plus theres a very special situation in France which makes the easy “he’s a commie!” thing impossible. It is a set norm that as a politician you are from “the better schools” and “the better families”. Doesnt matter if its Parti Socialiste or Le Pens hoods or whomever.
(+ as someone with, I think, some insight into the socialist groups of Europe, Strauss-Kahn is not and have not been very much connected with anyone except leftism at the most. So “liberal” to translate it?)
Did she not have teeth ? I find it highly improbable that he “forced” her to do anything. The maids at the Hyatt do it for fifty bucks and they come from all nations, good cocksuckers all and nary an accusation.
@7Are young Black males responsible for global poverty and pollution?How many young Black males are dictating world policy?The price of gasoline?Food?Governmental budget deficits?Take your shit back to Stormfront,you motherfucker!
@8 DS-K ain’t no socialist (original meaning)!Stop smoking crystal meth,dude!You don’t know socialism/communism/Anarchism from a rat’s ass;go back to Fox Boobs,you noob!
Nice Headline. A bit long, but to the point for sure.
Thanks for jumping on the bandwagon, Stranger… last week would have been more… uh whats the word?
You are one ignorant douchebag. I unfortunately stumbled upon your shitty website by accident. In fact, i had hoped it would be a good one given that you appropriated Camus’ book title. By the way, I am a black African from a poor country, not that it is an essential part of my identity. I signed up to your website, just so I can say “fuck you”.
I unfortunately stumbled upon your website by accident. I had hope it would be a good one given that you have appropriated Camus’ book title for your site. Fuck, I have never read such an ignorant and vile article before. For your information, I am a black, male, African from a poor African country, not that it is an essential part of my identity. Anyway, I signed up to your shitty website just so I can say FUCK YOU.
This article can be boiled down to a single sentence: I don’t like the IMF, so I’m tickled pink to see that its powerful leader is a prick. Is that supposed to come as a surprise?
It would be a lot more persuasive if you knew anything about Guinea, could link its ESAPs of the early 1990s to the global economic calamities that started a decade later (how many Sub-Saharan countries thrived in the 1990s? Botswana and South Africa are 2 of 49), or knew (for example) that the World Bank no longer provides structural adjustment loans. And as someone else noted, Greece hasn’t been able to balance a budget pretty much ever (that’s what you get with a retirement age of 50, recently raised to 55, for much of the population). And South Korea’s 1997 crisis was similarly brought on by massive overborrowing for an economy that, a decade or two prior, was hardly the powerhouse it is today.
Do I hate the IMF? Of course! Do I find this article shrill and repetitive? Of course! Everything you state is obvious and difficult to dispute, but there needs to be more substance to the argument. Otherwise nothing you’ve said isn’t a conclusion any thinking person wouldn’t automatically reach from a headline saying, “IMF Chief Sexually Assaults African Maid.”
Though, for the record, I don’t necessarily think “democracy, government decentralization, central bank independence, and corporate governance” are bad things. For many years most centralized governments, in Africa and elsewhere, have been poster children for despot-led kleptocracies that don’t give a crap about their people, regardless of whether they’re taking IMF money.
good observations about capitalism
and racism.
and fuck sticks like 30 & 31
to those who raised the cultural issue–the gall of DSK’s emotional/thought processes or arrogance shared with IMF and elite culture–there is a name for it. It is called the illusion of the “beautiful soul,” associated with superiorism and dominant/powerful institutions. This “beautiful soul” occurs every time someone believes their social position means they are “better” than….where did you go to school, have your first exhibit, publish your first essay…You can bemoan this, but without effective resistance to it, it continues