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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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