The IMF:
Violating Women since 1945
As Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the world’s most powerful financial institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), spends a few nights in Rikers Island prison awaiting a hearing, the world is learning a lot about his history of treating women as expendable sex objects. Strauss-Kahn has been charged with rape and forced imprisonment of a 32-year-old Guinean hotel worker at a $3,000-a-night luxury hotel in New York.
While the media dissects the attempted rape of a young African woman and begins to dig out more information about Strauss-Kahn’s past indiscretions, we couldn’t help but see this situation through the feminist lens of the “personal is political.”
For many in the developing world, the IMF and its draconian policies of structural adjustment have systematically “raped” the earth and the poor and violated the human rights of women. It appears that the personal disregard and disrespect for women demonstrated by the man at the highest levels of leadership within the IMF is quite consistent with the gender bias inherent in the IMF’s institutional policies and practice.
Systematic Violation of Women’s Human Rights
The IMF and the World Bank were established in the aftermath of World War II to promote international trade and monetary cooperation by giving governments loans in times of severe budget crises. Although 184 countries make up the IMF’s membership, only five countries—France, Germany, Japan, Britain, and the United States—control 50 percent of the votes, which are allocated according to each country’s contribution.
The IMF has earned its villainous reputation in the Global South because in exchange for loans, governments must accept a range of austerity measures known as structural adjustment programs (SAPs). A typical IMF package encourages export promotion over local production for local consumption. It also pushes for lower tariffs and cuts in government programs such as welfare and education. Instead of reducing poverty, the trillion dollars of loans issued by the IMF have deepened poverty, especially for women who make up 70 percent of the world’s poor.
IMF-mandated government cutbacks in social welfare spending have often been achieved by cutting public sector jobs, which disproportionately impact women. Women hold most of the lower-skilled public sector jobs, and they are often the first to be cut. Also, as social programs like caregiving are slashed, women are expected to take on additional domestic responsibilities that further limit their access to education or other jobs.
In exchange for borrowing $5.8 billion from the IMF and World Bank, Tanzania agreed to impose fees for health services, which led to fewer women seeking hospital deliveries or post-natal care and naturally, higher rates of maternal death. In Zambia, the imposition of SAPs led to a significant drop in girls’ enrollment in schools and a spike in “survival or subsistence sex” as a way for young women to continue their educations.
But IMF’s austerity measures don’t just apply to poor African countries. In 1997, South Korea received $57 billion in loans in exchange for IMF conditionalities that forced the government to introduce “labor market flexibility,” which outlined steps for the government to compress wages, fire “surplus workers,” and cut government spending on programs and infrastructure. When the financial crisis hit, seven Korean women were laid off for every one Korean man. In a sick twist, the Korean government launched a "get your husband energized" campaign encouraging women to support depressed male partners while they cooked, cleaned, and cared for everyone.
Nearly 15 years later, the scenario is grim for South Korean workers, especially women. Of all OECD countries, Koreans work the longest hours: 90% of men and 77% of women work over 40 hours a week. According to economist Martin Hart-Landsberg, in 2000, 40 percent of Korean workers were irregular workers; by 2008, 60 percent worked in the informal economy. The Korean Women Working Academy reports that today 70 percent of Korean women workers are temporary laborers.
Selling Mother Earth
IMF policies have also raped the earth by dictating that governments privatize the natural resources most people depend on for their survival: water, land, forests, and fisheries. SAPs have also forced developing countries to stop growing staple foods for domestic consumption and instead focus on growing cash crops, like cut flowers and coffee for export to volatile global markets. These policies have destroyed the livelihoods of small-scale subsistence farmers, the majority of whom are women.
“IMF adjustment programs forced poor countries to abandon policies that protected their farmers and their agricultural production and markets,” says Henk Hobbelink of GRAIN, an international organization that promotes sustainable agriculture and biodiversity. "As a result, many countries became dependent on food imports, as local farmers could not compete with the subsidized products from the North. This is one of the main factors in the current food crisis, for which the IMF is directly to blame."
In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), IMF loans have paved the way for the privatization of the country’s mines by transnational corporations and local elites, which has forcibly displaced thousands of Congolese people in a context where women and girls experience obscenely high levels of sexual slavery and rape in the eastern provinces. According to Gender Action, the World Bank and IMF have made loans to the DRC to restructure the mining sector, which translates into laying off tens of thousands of workers, including women and girls who depend on the mining operations for their livelihoods. Furthermore, as the land becomes mined and privatized, women and girls responsible for gathering water and firewood must walk even further, making them more susceptible to violent crimes.
We Are Over It
Women’s rights activists around the globe are consistently dumbfounded by how such violations of women’s bodies are routinely dismissed as minor transgressions. Strauss-Kahn, one of the world’s most powerful politicians whose decisions affected millions across the globe, was known for being a “womanizer” who often forced himself on younger, junior women in subordinate positions where they were vulnerable to his far greater power, influence, and clout. Yet none of his colleagues or fellow Socialist Party members took these reports seriously, colluding in a consensus shared even by his wife that the violation of women’s bodily integrity is not in any sense a genuine violation of human rights.
Why else would the world tolerate the unearthly news that 48 Congolese women are raped every hour with deadening inaction? Eve Ensler speaks for us all when she writes, “I am over a world that could allow, has allowed, continues to allow 400,000 women, 2,300 women, or one woman to be raped anywhere, anytime of any day in the Congo. The women of Congo are over it too.”
We live in a world where millions of women don’t speak their truth, don’t tell their dark stories, don’t reveal their horror lived every day just because they were born women. They don’t do it for the same reasons that the women in the Congo articulate – they are tired of not being heard. They are tired of men like Strauss-Kahn, powerful and in suits, believing that they can rape a black woman in a hotel room, just because they feel like it. They are tired of the police not believing them or arresting them for being sex workers. They are tired of hospitals not having rape kits. They are tired of reporting rape and being charged for adultery in Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.
Fighting Back
For each one of them, and for those of us who have spent many years investing in the tenacity of women’s movements across the globe, the courage and gumption of the young Guinean immigrant shines like the torch held by Lady Liberty herself. This young woman makes you believe we can change this reality. She refused to be intimidated. She stood up for herself. She fought to free herself—twice—from the violent grip of the man attacking her. She didn’t care who he was—she knew she was violated and she reported it straight to the hotel staff, who went straight to the New York police, who went straight to JFK to pluck Strauss-Kahn from his first-class Air France seat.
In a world where it often feels as though wealth and power can buy anything, the courage of a young woman and the people who stood by her took our breath away. These stubborn, ethical acts of working class people in New York City reminded us that women have the right to say “no.” It reminded us that “no” does not mean “yes” as the Yale fraternities would have us believe, and, most importantly that no one, regardless of their position or their gender, should be above the law. A wise woman judge further drove home the point about how critically important it is to value women’s bodies when she denied Strauss-Kahn bail citing his long history of abusing women.
Strauss-Kahn sits in his Rikers Island cell. It would be a great thing if his trial succeeds in ending the world’s tolerance for those who discriminate and abuse women. We cannot tolerate it one second longer. We cannot tolerate it at the personal level, we must refuse to condone it at the professional level, and we must challenge it every time it we see it in the policies of global institutions like the International Monetary Fund.
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DNA Said to Link Strauss-Kahn to Maid
By SEAN GARDINER
Tests matched a DNA sample submitted by former International Monetary Fund director Dominique Strauss-Kahn and semen found on the shirt of the hotel maid who told police she had been sexually assaulted by him, law-enforcement officials said.
Tests matched a DNA sample submitted by former IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn and semen found on the shirt of the hotel maid who told police she had been sexually assaulted by him, law-enforcement officials said. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, Pool)
Meanwhile, witnesses provided an account of the minutes just after the alleged assault, one of the officials said. Witnesses told police Mr. Strauss-Kahn passed by the maid, who was visibly upset, outside his room as he made his way to the elevator to leave the hotel.
The former French finance minister and presidential hopeful was indicted Thursday for sexual assault and attempted rape. Mr. Strauss-Kahn subsequently resigned his position with the IMF but has maintained his innocence. The case has been front-page news on both sides of the Atlantic.
One of Mr. Strauss-Kahn's attorneys, Benjamin Brafman, declined to comment.
The indictment was handed down five days after Mr. Strauss-Kahn, 62 years old, was taken off an Air France flight at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport by police. Earlier that day, a 32-year-old maid at the Sofitel New York hotel in Midtown Manhattan reported to officials that she had been sexually abused around noon after she entered Mr. Strauss-Kahn's room to clean it.
Mr. Strauss-Kahn submitted to the DNA test after his arrest and was ordered held without bail after being arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court on May 16. Lawyers for Mr. Strauss-Kahn said in court that the evidence in the case "will not be consistent with a forcible encounter." That may signal his lawyers plan a defense based on consensual sex.
On Friday after spending most of the week being held without bail at Rikers Island jail, Mr. Strauss-Kahn was released on a bail package that required him to post $1 million cash, a $5 million bond and be placed under 24-hour, guarded-home confinement. He is currently in an apartment in lower Manhattan.
Meanwhile, a law-enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation provided a narrative based on witness accounts on what happened in the minutes after the alleged assault. The official said that the maid was found by other hotel employees crouching in the hall. She was shaken up, the official said, "quite upset" and "had to be consoled." At some point while the maid was being consoled by the other hotel workers, Mr. Strauss-Kahn walked out of his hotel room, down the hallway and onto the elevator.
The official said Mr. Strauss-Kahn passed by the maid and the two made eye contact.
Police discovered that Mr. Strauss-Kahn, was scheduled to get on a flight to Europe when he called the hotel and asked if he left one of his cell phones there. Up until his arrest, Mr. Strauss-Kahn, had been expected to declare his candidacy on the Socialist Party ticket and run against President Nicolas Sarkozy.
A spokeswomen for the district attorney declined comment on the witness accounts. In court last week, prosecutor John McConnell said that the maid has "offered a compelling and unwavering story" and that she "made immediate outcries to multiple witnesses, both hotel staff and to police."
—Chad Bray and Michael Rothfeld contributed to this article.
Write to Sean Gardiner at sean.gardiner@wsj.com
>via: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304066504576341792306560386.html
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Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the union maid
A little-reported fact of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case is that his accuser is a union member – with rights the IMF opposes
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- guardian.co.uk,
- Tuesday 24 May 2011 15.30 BST
- Article history
One very important fact has been largely absent from the coverage of the sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and, until latterly, leading candidate to be the next president of France. The hotel housekeeper whom he allegedly assaulted was represented by a union.
The reason that this is an important part of the story is that it is likely that Strauss-Kahn's alleged victim might not have felt confident enough to pursue the issue with either her supervisors or law enforcement agencies, if she had not been protected by a union contract. The vast majority of hotel workers in the United States, like most workers in the private sector, do not enjoy this protection.
This matters because under the law in the United States, an employer can fire a worker at any time for almost any reason. It is illegal for an employer to fire a worker for reporting a sexual assault. If any worker can prove that this is the reason they were fired, they would get their job back and probably back pay. (The penalties tend to be trivial, so the back pay is, unfortunately, not a joke.)
However, it is completely legal for an employer to fire a worker who reports a sexual assault for having been late to work last Tuesday or any other transgression. Since employers know the law, they don't ever say that they are firing a worker for reporting a sexual assault. They might fire workers who report sexual assaults for other on-the-job failings, real or invented.
In this way, the United States stands out from most other wealthy countries. For example, all the countries of western Europe afford workers some measure of employment protection, where employers must give a reason for firing workers. Workers can contest their dismissal if they think the reason is not valid, unlike the United States where there is no recourse.
Imagine the situation of the hotel worker had she not been protected by a union contract. She is a young immigrant mother who needs this job to support her family. According to reports, she likely did not know Strauss-Kahn's identity at the time she reported the assault, but she undoubtedly understood that the person staying in the $3,000-a-night suite was a wealthy and important person. In these circumstances, how likely would it be that she would make an issue of a sexual assault to her supervisors?
Housekeepers are generally among the lowest-paid workers at hotels, often earning little more than the minimum wage. It is a high turnover job, meaning that any individual housekeeper is likely to be viewed as easily replaceable by the management. If this housekeeper did not enjoy the protection of a union contract, is it likely that she would have counted on her supervisors taking her side against an important guest at the hotel? Would she have been prepared to risk her job to pursue the case?
We can never know how this particular woman would have responded otherwise – as, fortunately, she did have the protection of a union. However, it is likely that many similar assaults go unreported because the victims do not feel they can risk their jobs to pursue the case. They simply have to accept sexual harassment and even sexual assault as "part of the job".
There is a special irony to this situation given Dominique Strauss-Kahn's prior position. The IMF, along with other pillars of the economic establishment, has long pushed for reducing the rights of workers at their workplace. Specifically, they have pushed countries around the world to adopt measures that weaken the power of unions. The IMF has also urged western European countries to eliminate or weaken laws that prevent employers from firing workers at will. These laws, along with unions, are seen as "labour market rigidities" that prevent labour markets from operating efficiently.
In the dream world of the economists' textbook policies, all employers would have the ability to fire employees at will. There would be no protective legislation and no unions to get in the way. In that economist's dream world, then, powerful executives could be fairly certain that they would have licence to molest hotel workers with impunity.
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Strauss-Kahn's pals bid to pay off woman's kin
Last Updated: 11:55 AM, May 24, 2011
Posted: 1:29 AM, May 24, 2011
EXCLUSIVE
Friends of alleged hotel sex fiend Dominique Strauss-Kahn secretly contacted the accusing maid's impoverished family, offering them money to make the case go away since they can't reach her in protective custody, The Post has learned.
The woman, who says she was sexually assaulted by the disgraced former head of the International Monetary Fund, has an extended family in the former French colony of Guinea in West Africa, well out of reach of the Manhattan DA's Office.
"They already talked with her family," a French businesswoman with close ties to Strauss-Kahn and his family told The Post. "For sure, it's going to end up on a quiet note."
Prosecutors in Manhattan have done their best to keep the cleaning woman out of the reach of Strauss-Kahn's supporters, but the source was already predicting success for the Parisian pol's pals.
"He'll get out of it and will fly back to France. He won't spend time in jail. The woman will get a lot of money," said the source, adding that a seven-figure sum has been bandied about.
While the DA's office has sequestered the maid -- and is even monitoring her phone calls -- her extended family lives in a village that lacks paved roads, electricity and phone lines.
The average monthly income is $45, which is near-starvation, and some of her family members can't even afford shoes.
They live so off-the-grid in a remote village that they didn't know the maid was allegedly nearly raped until reporters trekked to the village to inform them.
The alleged victim, who lives with her 15-year-old daughter in The Bronx, came to the United States from Guinea several years ago after her husband died. She has received some financial help from her sister and brother-in-law living in New York.
AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Extended family members of the woman allegedly assaulted by Dominique Strauss-Kahn live in a remote village in Guinea in West Africa.
The DA's office has warned local family members not to accept calls from associates of Strauss-Kahn. Even without the maid's testimony, however, prosecutors claim they have plenty of damning evidence to prosecute Strauss-Kahn, including her videotaped statement, grand-jury testimony, statements from fellow hotel employees and semen samples found on the hotel room carpet.
Strauss-Kahn, 62, remains under house arrest in a pricey lower Manhattan pad secured by his billionaire wife, Anne Sinclair. He must wear a GPS-enabled ankle bracelet and have armed guards to prevent him from escaping.
Meanwhile, in another development yesterday, it emerged that Strauss-Kahn allegedly shouted, "Do you know who I am?" as he assaulted the victim, according to a new report.
"Don't you know who I am? Don't you know who I am?" Strauss- Kahn repeatedly inquired during the incident, according to Fox News.
"Please, please stop. No!" she cried as he pinned her to the bed, law-enforcement sources said. "Please stop. I need my job, I can't lose my job, don't do this. I will lose my job. Please, please stop!"
In a heartless reply, Strauss-Kahn, allegedly told her, "No, baby. Don't worry, you're not going to lose your job," sources said, adding that he again repeated, "Don't you know who I am?"
While she begged him to stop, he allegedly pressed the attack, dragging her down the hall and forcing her to perform oral sex.
The maid finally escaped by pushing him into a piece of furniture in the $3,000-a-night Sofitel suite, she said. Sources said that the Frenchman has a gash on his back where he hit the armoire and that blood was found on the sheets.
Investigators also confirmed a DNA match between Strauss-Kahn and a semen sample found on the maid's shirt.
Meanwhile, Strauss-Kahn faces a deadline this morning to vacate the apartment at 71 Broadway where he's been under house arrest since he was sprung from Rikers on Friday.
He is now hunting for a townhouse so he doesn't have to deal with belligerent co-op and condo boards, and has a $50,000 monthly budget, sources said.
"He has been calling around, but no broker wants to work with him," a top broker said. "He wants to find a broker who will help secure a place for him with more privacy so he won't be harassed, and he is not particular about the neighborhood."
Additional reporting by Chuck Bennett, Helen Freund, Hannah Rappleye, Jennifer Gould Keil, Larry Celona, Jamie Schram and Post Wire Services
AFP/GETTY IMAGES
The family of the Guinean woman who says the former International Monetary Fund chief, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, tried to rape her in a New York hotel, in their home village of Tchiakoulle.