The Dirty Old Man and the IMF

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Saturday was a bad day for the New World Order.

New York police boarded the first-class cabin of an Air France jet bound for Paris to collar Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, a Grand Master of the Universe and the Socialist Party’s hope to defeat President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012.

Strauss-Kahn, or DSK as he is known, was hauled back to New York and identified in a police lineup by an African maid at the Sofitel hotel as the man who emerged stark naked from the bathroom of his $3,000-a-night suite and tried to rape her.


DSK’s political allies are howling entrapment. Yet his rap sheet is long. Called the Great Seducer, he was charged with the sexual harassment of a co-worker at the IMF and accused by a young French novelist of behaving like a “rutting chimpanzee” and trying to rape her when she contacted him about a book she was writing in 2002.

The novelist, Tristan Banon, now 31, is a goddaughter to DSK’s second wife. She took a lawyer’s advice not to file charges then. But, says the Guardian, Banon is about to file them now.

Monday, The New York Times wrote, “As the impact of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s predicament hit home, others, including some in the news media, began to reveal accounts, long suppressed or anonymous, of what they called Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s previously predatory behavior toward women and his aggressive sexual pursuit of them, from students and journalists to subordinates.”

What is this satyr doing running the IMF? How was a man of his Eurotrash reputation approved by the United States government? Such conduct may be pooh-poohed over the pond, but has our country dropped that low?

As is not infrequently the case, Rep. Ron Paul nails it: “These are the kind of people running the IMF, and we want to turn the world’s finances and the control of the money supply (over) to them?”

Indeed, there are issues here far beyond the corruption of character that drives aging compulsive lechers to criminality when their prey resist.

One of those issues is: Why is the IMF still being funded by the United States?

With the World Bank, the IMF was birthed at Bretton Woods, N.H., in 1944. In the monetary order established there, the U.S. dollar would be tied to gold, and the free world’s currencies would be tied to the dollar, all at fixed rates of exchange.

All would contribute funds in their own currency to the IMF. America would make the largest contribution. As its birthday gift, Uncle Sam gave the IMF 103 million ounces of gold.

When member nations faced balance-of-payments problems and had to devalue, the IMF would tide them over with bridge loans. The loans would be repaid as the troubled nations’ reduced exchange rate led to rising exports and reduced imports.

The system worked until 1971, when through a series of guns-and-butter budgets during Vietnam, the world acquired an immense pile of excess dollars. The British decided to cash in several billion for U.S. gold.

No way, said President Nixon. He slammed the gold window shut, cut the dollar loose and let it float against the world’s currencies. The Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates was dead. And the IMF, established to maintain it, should have died with it.

It did not, for as Ronald Reagan reminded us, the closest we come to eternal life on this earth is a government program.

For 40 years, the IMF has soldiered on, backed by both parties, plying its new trade — endless transfers of U.S. and Western wealth to bail out failing non-Western and anti-Western nations.

Under DSK, the IMF took on a new role that enchanted Europe.

It joined with the European Central Bank to provide hundreds of billions to bail out Greece, Ireland and Portugal, so these nations would not default on their debts and bring down the European banks that are stuffed full of Greek, Irish and Portuguese bonds.

Through the IMF, U.S. taxpayers are bailing out European nations to save European banks, just as U.S. taxpayers, through the Federal Reserve, secretly bailed out European banks throughout 2009 and 2010.

This is why the socialist Strauss-Kahn was a hero in the capitals of Europe. He was their agent in our capital.

Consider the winners and losers of this globalist racket.

The people of Greece, Ireland and Portugal endure austerity and recession for years, while the European banks are assured 100 cents on the dollar for their bonds. And the deal-makers like DSK are put up at $3,000-a-night hotel rooms, fly first class and get tax-free salaries larger than those of the president of the United States, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer.

Saturday at the Sofitel, we saw up-close the sense of arrogance and entitlement such privilege induces in our global elite.

Time to shut down the IMF and get back what’s left of our gold.