Paul Craig Roberts

Strauss-Kahn: The Establishment Eliminates A Threat

Paul Craig Roberts D

New York - As a person who had a Washington career, I find other aspects of the case disturbing. Dominique Strauss-Kahn had emerged as a threat to the establishment. Polls showed that as the socialist candidate, he was the odds-on favorite to defeat the American candidate, Sarkozy, in the upcoming French presidential election. Strauss-Kahn indicated that he intended to move the International Monetary Fund away from its past policy of making the poor pay for the mistakes of the rich. He spoke of strengthening collective bargaining, and of restructuring mortgages, tax and spending policies in order that the economy would serve ordinary people in addition to the banksters. Strauss-Kahn said that regulation needed to be restored to financial markets and implied that a more even distribution of income was required.

These remarks, together with a likely win over Sarkozy in the French election, made Strauss-Kahn a double-barreled challenge to the establishment. Another strike against him was the recent IMF report that said China would surpass the US as the world’s first economy within five years.  

People who haven’t spent their professional life in Washington may not understand the threat to Washington that is in the IMF report. Whether deserved or not, the IMF has a lot of credibility. By placing China as the number one economic power by the end of the next US presidential term, the IMF thrust a dagger through the heart of American hegemony. Washington’s power is based on America’s economic supremacy. The IMF report said that this supremacy was at its end.

This kind of announcement tells the political world that, as the headline read, “the age of America is over.” For the first time in decades, other countries can see the prospect of escaping from US domination. They don’t have to be puppet states, part of the hegemonic empire. They see the prospect of serving their own people and their own interests instead of those of Washington. European countries, for example, forced to fight for Washington in Afghanistan and Libya, see light at the end of the tunnel. They can now think about refusing.

Although rich and a member of the establishment, and independently of his behavior toward women, Strauss-Kahn made the mistake of revealing that he might have a social conscience. Either this social conscience or the hubris of power led him to challenge American supremacy. This is an unforgivable crime for which he is being punished.

No high-ranking figure who was serving the establishment would be destroyed on the basis of the word of an immigrant maid living in a sub-let apartment in a building for aids victims. The very notion that the US establishment craves justice to this extent is a total absurdity. Americans are so indifferent to injustice that the American public shrugs off the hundreds of thousands and millions of women, children, and village elders who are murdered, maimed, dispossessed, and displaced by the US military in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and wherever Washington and the military/security complex, while feeding on power and profit, can claim to be protecting Americans from “terrorists” or bringing democracy to the heathen.

The American criminal justice system is riddled with wrongful convictions and stinks of injustice. The US has a much higher rate of incarceration than alleged authoritarian regimes, such as China, and routinely destroys the lives of young people, and even mothers of small children, for using drugs.

Strauss-Kahn’s indictment serves emotional needs of conservatives, left-wingers, and feminists as well as establishment agendas. Conservatives don’t like the French, because they did not support the US invasion of Iraq. The left-wing doesn’t like rich white guys and IMF officials, and feminists don’t like womanizers. But even if the government’s case falls apart in the courtroom, Strauss-Kahn has been removed from the French presidential race and from the IMF. This, not justice for an immigrant, is what the case is about.