bank reconciliation: file under… checks and balances

DSK. A kind of brand name French luxury good that has been a bit tarnished lately. Like when automobile anti-freeze was found in Perrier mineral water. But, in the case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn these are the kinds of train wrecks that market economies and global capital will create. DSK is just another inevitable bubble bursting.His downfall almost seems like an engineered image: the relationship between sexual frustration and mass society and “the rebel” as architect of our consumerism.

James Gillray.---Most of the time, Frenchwomen conform to expectations that they will be "sophisticated" and not take any of this "seriously", i.e. not complain. In the case of Strauss-Kahn, his womanising, with or without forceful persuasion, got far enough that his spin doctors, a four-person team with a manner to rival Alastair Campbell's, have had to threaten, bully and intimidate a number of his "conquests". Banon, for instance, saw her book bowdlerised, had job offers suddenly retracted and nasty unfounded rumours started on her alleged lifestyle. No wonder that she shies from lodging a formal lawsuit against Strauss-Kahn. ---Read More:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/dominique-strauss-kahn/8528512/Dominique-Strauss-Kahn-why-French-women-put-up-with-it.html image:v

We live in a society that engages in an almost absurd orgiastic relation with luxury goods; an indulgence in fetish objects bordering on the obsessional. The best-seller lists are chocked with titles critical of consumers such as No Logo, Fast Food nation, etc. a tradition going back to perhaps Rachel Carson, Betty Friedan and even Abbie Hoffman. Its a contradiction of course, like DSK, a socialist involved in the making and breaking national economies. Is this coherent? Yes and no. He doesn’t own the IMF, he is simply shilling for them. We live in a society that are true experts at criticizing mass culture. Naomi Klein et al. have very little to bleat or tweat into their loud hailers regarding consumerism.

---Lévy says in the article that the man he calls a friend of 20 years, "bears no resemblance to this monster, this caveman, this insatiable and malevolent beast now being described nearly everywhere. Charming, seductive, yes, certainly; a friend to women and, first of all, to his own woman, naturally, but this brutal and violent individual, this wild animal, this primate, obviously no, it's absurd."---read more:http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/18/bernard-henri-levy-defends-dominique-strauss-kahn

In other words, socialists and leftist discourse, policy, objectives, do not really undermine consumerism and the status quo, they actually act to reinforce its most grotesque tendencies and give full expression to the bile produced from an excessive dose of liberal rationalism: patriarchy, unbridled technology, environmental destruction. The underlying belief is that our societal problems are caused by psychic self-gratification, where reason and common sense is sacrificed for the irrational. The behavior of institutions like the IMF are seen as being beyond human control, and having a life of their own. Is all this wealth creation and destruction; economic warfare, a matter of sex and psychology or is it waged with a stated goal by rational individuals? It has nothing to do with culture, or sexual chaaracteristics, or genetic code. Sex for DSK is not a thing in itself, it is shaped by the politics of his institution.

Thomas Rowlandson.---"Why all the fuss? It's merely a bit of hanky-panky with the help," said Jean-François Kahn, the crusading editor of the Left-wing Marianne weekly. Jack Lang, a law don famous for having been François Mitterrand's high-profile, graffiti-loving, diversity-fostering Culture Minister, dismissed it all rather infelicitously as an "overblown" affair: "Really, nobody died in that hotel room." --- Read More:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/dominique-strauss-kahn/8528512/Dominique-Strauss-Kahn-why-French-women-put-up-with-it.html image:http://atherdiscretion.wordpress.com/2007/11/26/thomas-rowlandson-dirty-old-man/


The economic war going on, and its sexual abuse as a by-product is a continuation of policy by other means in the consumer society. Every action, major move, of the IMF is the product of deliberate, calculated decision. Their activities are not conducted political purpose. DSK is not hardballing because of a given culture or sex, but because he is an instrument of a reasoned and deliberate policy of his superiors. If you want to understand the IMF and economic war, look at politics. We now live with the twentieth-century prejudice that economic war is guided by the inhuman and the insane. It is easy to comprehend why most want to deny the deliberate character of this modern warfare. After all, it has nothing positive about it.

---In that context, DSK’s notorious penchant (and more) for a legion of pretty women did him no harm at all. “If anything,” Taubmann recalls, “he was the one harassed, not the reverse — I’ve seen time and again women MPs, party workers, etc brazenly passing on notes, hoping he would notice them.” ---Read More:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/8515714/Dominique-Strauss-Kahn-A-Frenchman-sunk-by-a-sex-scandal.html image:http://www.omgfunnypictures.com/scandale-politique-217989.html

The unstoppable sexual maniac beast theory of DSK has the practical effect of denigrating politics within the IMF, and absolving those who may be worse offenders from blame.DSK will be whisked aside, but the institution and its politics remain unmoved.Like Tony Hayward of B.P. Economic wars do not begin accidentally by themselves. they start because external political interests decide war is expedient to the powers that be. DSK has the effect of displacing aggression way from the aggressors and onto a cog, a piece of machinery that DSK has become. The still unsolved and untackled global financial crisis is blamed on a variety of esoteric financial products and not the national governments that permitted this crisis to simmer over a generation. The role of DSK as an outsider running the IMF reminds of the colonized who sees that language, this private language of money has been hijacked and protected by those with the most power. He must choose between rejection and subversion. It reads like the expression “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.’( Audre Lord). Perhaps appropriation for DSK had its limits.

---Everyone suddenly had stories to tell. The actress who was ordered in a very few rude words by the legendary actor-director Jean-Louis Barrault to perform a sex act on him before he would even deign to allow her to audition for him (she walked out). The radiojournalist who, some years back, kneeling on the carpet of the Mayor of Rouen and one-time presidential hopeful, Jean Lecanuet, to plug in her Nagra recorder, found him close behind her in an expectant pose. The women political correspondents who recalled L'Express's famous editor, Françoise Giroud, advising them on how to dress and to make up in order to "make politicians talk."....I, too, remember all too well my junior reporting days for a French news-weekly, a couple of decades ago, when the late Gaullist MP Robert-André Vivien called me "my little honeyrabbit" one minute into our interview; or when the former Socialist Paris Senator Claude Estier offered to drive me home since I lived in his constituency, only to "mistake" my knee for the stick shift at every red light....Read More:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/dominique-strauss-kahn/8528512/Dominique-Strauss-Kahn-why-French-women-put-up-with-it.html

Tabatha Southey:I don’t know why, in the same way that I can’t begin to fathom why serial killers kill. And, as with many crimes, the question of whether they’ll get away with it often appears to go virtually unasked by the perpetrators…. Even men who are sexually unfulfilled mostly don’t rape, and men who have lots of consensual sex sometimes do. …When someone writes that a man has raped because he’s in a position of power, they rather imply that, given the opportunity – that is, given great jobs, good lawyers and friends beholden to them – most men would at least consider raping. There’s no evidence that this is true: Rape isn’t a larger version of pilfering office stationery. Read More:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/tabatha-southey/sexual-assault-vs-an-affair-one-of-these-thi


is-not-like-the-other/article2030304/ Henri Bernard Levy:He writes: “I do not know what actually happened … in the room of the now famous Hotel Sofitel in New York … I do not know – no one knows, because there have been no leaks regarding the declarations of the man in question – if Dominique Strauss-Kahn was guilty of the acts he is accused of committing there, or if, at the time, as was stated, he was having lunch with his daughter.”

---Investigators are examining claims that Strauss-Kahn either removed his lover from the IMF because her position within the organisation might embarrass him, or else sacked her as an act of retribution when she refused to continue their relationship. ...Strauss-Kahn had a high-flying political career during which, as finance minister from 1997-99, he was credited for the economic revival of France. He was then forced to resign from Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's government after he was caught up in a corruption scandal. Despite clearing his name, he failed to win the Socialist Party's nomination for the 2005 presidential election. Commentators have always pointed to the flamboyant Strauss-Kahn's reputation as a ladies' man. Viewed in Paris as a 'champagne socialist', he has been linked with a number of glamorous women over the years. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1078830/Sex-scandal-hits-IMF-French-chief-probed-payoff-lover.html#ixzz1NMZFTSjM

Lévy goes on to question how a chambermaid could have gone alone, “contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York’s grand hotels of sending a ‘cleaning brigade’ of two people, into the room of one of the most closely watched figures on the planet”. He also casts doubt on the account of Tristane Banon, the French writer who claims Strauss-Kahn sexually assaulted her nine years ago. The philosopher says he holds it against those who “complacently” accept the account of “this other young woman, this one French”, who “pretends to have been the victim of the same kind of attempted rape, who has shut up for eight years but, sensing the golden opportunity, whips out her old dossier and comes to flog it on television”. Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/18/bernard-henri-levy-defends-dominique-strauss-kahn aaa

Thomas Rowlandson. Catherine the Great.---The other is France's leading feminist, Elisabeth Badinter, acknowledged as Simone de Beauvoir's intellectual successor, who is married to the former Socialist justice minister, Robert Badinter. As it happens, the Badinters and the Strauss-Kahns, in addition to being political buddies, are close enough friends that they take holidays together and keep in regular touch. Breakfast conversation may remain strained for the foreseeable future... Read More:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/dominique-strauss-kahn/8528512/Dominique-Strauss-Kahn-why-French-women-put-up-with-it.html

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2 Responses to bank reconciliation: file under… checks and balances

  1. Inès Ortega (Clauni) says:

    Nobody knows what happened in that hotel room, but the fame of the guy as a ladies`s man allowed the set-up; that`s my hunch, they framed him and lynched him in the media scene with the handscuffed photo, in a society so easy to manipulate as the American one.

    The woman has been working in that hotel for 3 years; it seems she speaks French well; DSK visited 5 times that hotel in 2010; maybe there was consensual sex,maybe they have known each other for some time.

    He is an atractive man, only 5`7″ and overweight, but women have always liked him.

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