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by Nordic » Thu May 03, 2012 1:51 am
by Stephen Morgan » Thu May 03, 2012 3:05 am
by kenoma » Fri May 04, 2012 10:40 pm
Nordic wrote:Considering he's a sex addict and apparently acts like Pepe la Pew, and its common knowledge, i don't think the plan had much chance of failure.
by Nordic » Fri May 04, 2012 11:09 pm
kenoma wrote:Nordic wrote:Considering he's a sex addict and apparently acts like Pepe la Pew, and its common knowledge, i don't think the plan had much chance of failure.
I would have thought the distinction between a sex addict and a rapist was one we'd be keen on retaining.
Apparently not.
The two can be collapsed into the loveable caricature of Pepe-le Pew. You're nothing if not hackneyed, nordic, borrowing your cliches from the Murdoch press:
by Jeff » Sun Oct 14, 2012 10:48 pm
Sex Life Was ‘Out of Step,’ Strauss-Kahn Says, but Not Illegal
By DOREEN CARVAJAL and MAÏA de la BAUME
Published: October 13, 2012
PARIS — More than a year after resigning in disgrace as the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn is seeking redemption with a new consulting company, the lecture circuit and a uniquely French legal defense to settle a criminal inquiry that exposed his hidden life as a libertine.
Mr. Strauss-Kahn, 63, a silver-haired economist, is seeking to throw out criminal charges in an inquiry into ties to a prostitution ring in northern France with the legal argument that the authorities are unfairly trying to “criminalize lust.”
That defense and the investigation, which is facing a critical judicial hearing in late November, have offered a keyhole view into a clandestine practice in certain powerful circles of French society: secret soirees with lawyers, judges, police officials, journalists and musicians that start with a fine meal and end with naked guests and public sex with multiple partners.
...
The exclusive orgies called “parties fines” — lavish Champagne affairs costing around $13,000 each — were organized as a roving international circuit from Paris to Washington by businessmen seeking to ingratiate themselves with Mr. Strauss-Kahn. Some of that money, according to a lawyer for the main host, ultimately paid for prostitutes because of a shortage of women at the mixed soirees orchestrated largely for the benefit of Mr. Strauss-Kahn, who sometimes sought sex with three or four women.
...
“I long thought that I could lead my life as I wanted,” he said in an interview with the French magazine Le Point. “And that includes free behavior between consenting adults. There are numerous parties that exist like this in Paris, and you would be surprised to encounter certain people. I was naïve.”
...
by RocketMan » Mon Oct 15, 2012 9:18 am
The investigation into the prostitution ring in Lille ultimately swept up 10 suspects, including Mr. Strauss-Kahn. They knew each other largely through their membership as French Freemasons, according to Karl Vandamme, a defense lawyer who represents Fabrice Paszkowski, the owner of a medical supply company who played a crucial role in organizing the sex parties.
by RocketMan » Mon Oct 15, 2012 9:25 am
“Libertines are people like you and me: people who have a normal life,” said Mr. Vandamme, who said his client invested around $65,000 in party expenses, betting on the political rise of Mr. Strauss-Kahn.
The banker, he said, would typically arrive late for the more than a dozen parties, held over a period of about five years. There was a rhythm to the gatherings, with everyone dressed for a sit-down dinner, he said. Then over time, couples separated, “kisses were exchanged between one woman and another and between a husband and the wife of a friend” until the guests “all ended up nude.”
What emerges is a monarch who has spent a fortune on sex parties and strip club.
At one Stockholm club elaborate dinners were followed by liaisons in a communal whirlpool with scantily clad women, some of them, it seems, aspiring models.
Sometimes, according to the book, the girls would ‘throw off their clothes and sit in the men’s laps’.
by Peachtree Pam » Sun Dec 02, 2012 4:43 am
Reports: Dominique Strauss-Kahn Settles With Maid Who Claimed Sexual Assault
The disgraced former IMF chief has reached a settlement with Nafissatou Diallo, the maid who accused him of assaulting her in a Manhattan hotel, ending her lawsuit against him and his countersuit, The New York Times and AP report.
Can one of the sleaziest tales in modern politics—one that changed the course of French history and titillated audiences around the world—finally be coming to an end? The New York Times and The Associated Press reported Thursday night that former International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the chambermaid who accused him of sexual assault in a Manhattan luxury hotel suite have reached an agreement to end her lawsuits against him and his countersuit.
Respected French daily Le Monde, citing unnamed sources close to Strauss-Kahn, reported Friday that the settlement agreed to is $6 million, of which $3 million will have to be raised by a bank loan and $3 million will be loaned to him by his wife, Anne Sinclair, an heiress and prominent journalist who now edits the French edition of The Huffington Post. Although she and Strauss-Kahn have been separated since last summer, she stood by him throughout the ordeal in 2011, posting his bail and helping to pay his attorneys and private investigators. The arrangement is not due to be signed officially until the end of next week. Three of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's lawyers in France said in a press release on Friday that neither they nor their client intend to comment on the U.S. case. The lawyers add that they "vigorously refute, however, the fanciful and erroneous information put forward by the newspaper Le Monde."
The original criminal charges lodged against Strauss-Kahn in May 2011 were dropped after a few weeks because the Manhattan district attorney’s office did not think the maid would be a credible witness if the case went to trial. According to the AP, citing a single unnamed source close to the civil case, Bronx Supreme Court Justice Douglas McKeon facilitated the as yet unsigned settlement with Strauss-Kahn, as well as an agreement in principle to end the chambermaid’s suit against the New York Post for stories alleging she had taken money for sex in the past.
Before Strauss-Kahn’s sensational arrest last year, he was one of the most powerful men in the world. As head of the IMF, he played a vital role shoring up the faltering global economy, and he was about the declare himself a candidate for the presidency of France—a post many analysts thought he was sure to win.
But Strauss-Kahn, 63, was leading the private life of a “libertine,” as he has since admitted. When Nafissatou Diallo, a 33-year-old, illiterate African-immigrant maid entered his suite at the Manhattan Sofitel just as he stepped out of the shower, he appears to have thought she was just another player in his ongoing game of sex.
According to Diallo’s account in court records and an exclusive interview with Newsweek, Strauss-Kahn brutalized her and forced her to perform fellatio, which she finally consented to do, in part because, she claimed, she was afraid that if she hit him and hurt him she would lose her job.
Strauss-Kahn and his defenders have tried to suggest that he was set up, either by his political enemies to eliminate him from the presidential race or by Diallo for monetary reasons. But as other cases lodged against Strauss-Kahn in France unfolded in the wake of the arrest in Manhattan, the encounter at the Sofitel began to seem almost superfluous.
DSK, as the French call him, allegedly participated in orgies with women who turned out to be prostitutes—which he has not denied—and in the company of men seeking political influence. DSK’s main political rival, then-president Nicolas Sarkozy, was well aware of the police dossiers compiled against him. DSK had earlier admitted to an affair with a subordinate at the IMF and told reporters privately, long before his arrest, that his compulsive relations with women might hurt him in a presidential campaign.
No evidence has ever been presented to suggest that Diallo knew who Strauss-Kahn was before the alleged assault. Soon after news of the case broke, one of her boyfriends, who was incarcerated on drug-related charges in Arizona, was recorded on the phone suggesting to her that she might sue Strauss-Kahn, but there is nothing surprising about that in the highly litigious culture of the United States.
Ample DNA evidence and circumstantial testimony appeared to support Diallo’s allegations, and Manhattan prosecutors consistently said her story of the encounter itself was plausible. But because Diallo, a single mother, had a record of lying on her immigration-asylum request as well as on other papers and had associated with petty criminals, the prosecutors did not think they could make a case “beyond a reasonable doubt” against Strauss-Kahn in a criminal trial. A civil case, however, could have been decided on the basis of a preponderance of evidence.
Strauss-Kahn has acknowledged that there was a sexual encounter with Diallo, but has always insisted there was no question of force.
by American Dream » Wed Feb 04, 2015 9:52 am
The divine right of the bourgeoisie
Filed under: capitalist pig — louisproyect @ 8:48 pm
It seems that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the disgraced former head of the IMF who was charged but ultimately cleared of raping a maid in a Washington hotel, is in the news again. This time it looks like the charges might stick as the Washington Post reported yesterday:On Monday, the man many thought would one day be president of France will stand trial in the city of Lille in northern France. He’s faced with charges he helped procure sex workers for sex parties from Paris to Brussels to Washington. Dubbed the Carlton affair because it involves the Hotel Carlton in Lille, the case stars luxury hotel managers, Freemasons, Viagra, purple carpet and even a brothel owner called “Dodo the Pimp” (Dodo la Saumure). In a charging document that runs 240 pages, French authorities said Strauss-Kahn may have helped organize the affairs, during which female attendants were allegedly paid to have sex with businessmen.
This juicy tidbit reminded me that I had intended to write something about Jeffrey Epstein, the superrich American financier who spent time in prison seven years ago for soliciting prostitutes. The charge hardly does justice to the actual crime, which involved lavishing large amounts of money on impressionable teenage girls, one only fourteen years old, to tempt them into what first looked like a glamorous world. Needless to say, the prospects of giving Alan Dershowitz a blow job must have disabused them of that notion rather quickly.
This year Epstein is in the news again because one of the women who have launched a civil suit seeking damages has identified Prince Andrew and Alan Dershowitz as two of the men that were serviced by Epstein’s harem. I will have something to say about Prince Andrew and Dershowitz after putting Epstein under a microscope. He, like Dominique Strauss-Kahn, symbolizes the affinity between economic power and sexual domination that rarely gets discussed in a mainstream media, which sees such scandals as the failings of an individual rather than an economic system.
The best all-round article on Epstein can be found in New York Magazine, a weekly geared to the lifestyles of the middle class and that is ubiquitous to the waiting rooms of doctors and dentists. On December 8, 2007 Philip Weiss’s “The Fantasist” appeared. It was subtitled: “Accused of paying underage girls for sex, superrich money manager Jeffrey Epstein is finding that living in a dream world is dangerous—even if you can pay for it.” Does the name Philip Weiss ring a bell? It should. He is our estimable comrade from Mondoweiss who made his living as a journalist for glossy magazines before taking on the Israeli lobby.
Epstein had a mansion on 71st street between Fifth and Madison of gargantuan proportions. At one time it was a private school but after Epstein took it over, its 9 stories and 51,000 square feet became devoted to his vulgar Playboy tastes. In addition to Weiss, I recommend Vicky Ward’s March 2003 profile on Epstein in Vanity Fair, a magazine with the same sort of gossipy fare as New York, where she revealed a nouveau riche middle-aged man whose tastes would remind you of MTV Cribs, the show in which rock stars or professional athletes walk you through their garish McMansions.
Her article was shrewdly titled “The Talented Mr. Epstein”, a nod to Patricia Highsmith’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley” that took aim at a lower middle-class youth’s homicidal ambitions to break into the world of the superrich. Like Ripley, Epstein came from a humble background in Brooklyn and became consumed with the desire to live like royalty. As we shall see, a crime far less serious than murder allowed him to break into the bourgeoisie.
Ward might not have Epstein’s wealth when she was his guest on 71st street but her tastes were far more refined. She notices that the entrance hall was decorated with rows of individually framed prosthetic eyeballs originally intended for wounded British soldiers. Next came an immense foyer where a twice-life-size sculpture of an African warrior was on display. Epstein fielded her questions in the “Leather Room”, where she saw a painting of “a huge, Oriental fantasy of a woman holding an opium pipe and caressing a snarling lionskin”. Later on, Epstein took her on a tour of the mansion that included a look at the “Computer Room”. There she was stunned to see a stuffed black poodle atop a Steinway grand piano. He told her “No decorator would ever tell you to do that. But I want people to think what it means to stuff a dog.”
I imagine that Epstein barely made a distinction between stuffing a poodle and his dick into a fourteen-year-old girl. At the time Ward was doing her research, she got word about his turning teenage girls into his sex slaves and submitted an article that exposed his crimes. But editor Graydon Carter decided to exclude the passages that dealt with that. In a January 6, 2015 article in “The Daily Beast” tilted “I tried to warn you about sleazy billionaire Jeffrey Epstein” in 2003”, she assesses the consequences of Carter’s failure of nerve:Today, my editor at The Daily Beast emailed Graydon to ask why he had excised the women’s stories from my article. A Vanity Fair spokeswoman responded: “Epstein denied the charges at the time and since the claims were unsubstantiated and no criminal investigation had been initiated, we decided not to include them in what was a financial story.”
But this wasn’t a financial story, it was a classic Vanity Fair profile of a society figure. I don’t know—because I never asked him—if Graydon still believed Epstein when in 2007 Epstein was sentenced to jail time for soliciting underage prostitutes. But it has often struck me that if my piece had named the women, the FBI might have come after Epstein sooner and perhaps some of his victims, now, in the latest spate of allegations, allegedly either paid off or too fearful of retribution to speak up, would have been saved.
Honoré de Balzac, Karl Marx’s favorite novelist, introduced “Le Pére Goriot” with this epigraph: “Behind every great fortune there is a crime”. That was apparently the case with Epstein, who was fired from his first job at Bear Stearns in 1981 after he was discovered making “illegal operations”. Like so many others on Wall Street, he used insider information to make trades on St. Joe Mineral Corporation, a Canadian firm. Getting fired from Bear Stearns for improprieties is quite an accomplishment given this firm’s history. Along with Lehman Brothers, its heavy investment in collateralized mortgage securities brought it down. In a Vanity Fair article on Bear-Stearns, a Wall Street executive said, “If I had to pick the biggest financial crime ever perpetuated, I would say, ‘Bear Stearns.’ ”
Eventually Epstein started his own firm that was confident enough in its own abilities to stipulate that the only customers would be those worth more than a billion dollars. Only $750 million? Sorry, you need to go to Goldman Sachs.
According to Kay, lining up Leslie Wexner as his first account was critical. Wexner was the CEO of a garment conglomerate called the Limited. Among its most profitable companies was Victoria’s Secret, a woman’s underwear manufacturer that is notorious for its televised fashion shows in which models traipse down the runway with wings on their back. Apparently Epstein enjoyed sitting in the front row at these events, where he could pick out models young enough for his tastes.
Epstein and Wexner shared a passion besides making money. They were both rightwing Zionists. In another important article titled “How Alan Dershowitz bullied rape victims to protect a serial child molester”, written for Electronic Intifada on January 10, 2015, Rania Khalek makes it clear how big-time Jewish money works on behalf of Palestinian oppression:The Wexner Foundation is deeply involved in Israel advocacy mostly through its Israel Fellowship Program, which brings ten Israeli public officials to Harvard for a fully funded Master’s degree program in public administration at the Kennedy School of Government.
With the participation of The Wexner Foundation, Republican pollster and rightwing propaganda consultant Frank Luntz produced the “Wexner Analysis: Israeli Communications Priorities 2003,” a “road map” for linking the US’ so-called war on terror in Iraq to Israel’s war on Palestinians.
The foundation also funds a number of pro-Israel organizations, including Birthright Israel, a sectarian indoctrination program that sends young American Jews on a free ten-day trip to Israel to lure them into immigrating to bolster a Jewish majority and participate in the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians.
Wexner himself is a key supporter and sits on the board of governors of Hillel International, the national network of campus organizations devoted to policing criticism of Israel and attacking the increasingly popular boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement under the guise of “enriching the lives of Jewish students.” In 2008, Hillel awarded its annual Renaissance Award to Wexner for giving “critical support and counsel to Hillel.”
After Epstein was arrested in 2006, a number of charities and institutions returned the money he had donated but not Harvard University where his $30 million had been used to create a department for Martin Nowak, a scientist whose research in genetics and society impressed Epstein, who has cultivated the support of big-time researchers and politicians alike.
When Nowak invited evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers to speak at a symposium, Epstein intervened to get the invitation revoked as the Harvard Crimson reported:Some have opined that, with the passing of the Summers administration in 2006, these threats to free speech about Israel have ended. However, in 2007, long after Summers’ departure, Martin A. Nowak—Professor of Mathematics and Biology and Director of Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (PED) —invited Rutgers biologist Robert L. Trivers to speak on the occasion of his receipt of the prestigious Crafoord Prize in biosciences from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Hours before the scheduled speech and party, according to Trivers, Nowak abruptly rescinded the invitation and said that he was doing so under the orders of someone he would not identify. Also according to Trivers, Jeffrey Epstein later admitted ordering the cancellation and said that he had done so under pressure from Dershowitz. Epstein, a legal client of Dershowitz, had donated the funds used to establish PED, which, according to other sources, depends for its future effectiveness on further funding from him.
Dershowitz, who is also a Faculty Affiliate of PED, had complained of a letter to the Wall Street Journal in which Trivers described Israel’s attacks on Lebanese civilians during the 2006 invasion as “butchery.” He also called Dershowitz a “Nazi-like apologist” for justifying it, and told Dershowitz to “look forward to a visit” from him if his public justifications continued. Trivers denied any intent to threaten or harm Dershowitz physically. In 2008, it was a professor from outside of PED who ultimately invited Trivers anew. Notwithstanding Dershowitz’ dramatic claim to have posted his karate-expert secretary at his office door to protect him, Trivers delivered a brilliant and well-attended speech, which took him nowhere near Dershowitz or his office. That Trivers was disinvited in the first place remains an unwashed disgrace to Harvard, unprecedented since the McCarthy era with regard to any issue other than Israel-Palestine.
Prince Andrew, like Alan Dershowitz, was a bosom buddy of Jeffrey Epstein and a man not inclined to question his obvious predilection for underage prostitutes. Both men vigorously deny having had sex with the women although Prince Andrew has more of a job explaining away the photo that shows him with his arm wrapped around a “Jane Doe” in the civil suit.
I had never paid much attention to the royal family but Andrew is a remarkably sleazy character, not just when it comes to preying on young women. Known as the Duke of York, he was a good pal of Muammar Gaddafi’s son Saif. British tabloid The Mirror reported:In November 2007 Andrew had the first of several meetings with Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam, later indicted on charges including torture. And in 2008 he enjoyed a four-day holiday in Tunisia paid for by Tarek Kaituni (a convicted Libyan gun smuggler) before going to Libya and visiting Colonel Gaddafi himself, known as a murderous tyrant and rapist during his 42-year reign of terror.
Of course, this might not have raised eyebrows in Great Britain since the Libyan dictatorship had endeared itself to other powerful figures, including Tony Blair who hailed Gaddafi as an ally in the “war on terror” and gave his blessings to joint exploration deals between Shell and the Libyan state-owned oil company.
As the UK’s Special Trade Representative, the Duke had a way of sniffing out lucrative trade deals with oil-rich dictatorships including Kazakhstan. As a wedding gift from Queen Elizabeth, the Duke received a 12-bedroom mansion in Sunninghill Park in 1986. After his divorce with Sarah Ferguson, the Duke moved out and put the property up for sale. Something of a white elephant that architecture critics likened to a Tesco-style supermarket, it languished on the real estate market for five years until Timur Kulibayev picked it up for £15m, £3m more than the asking price.
Timur Kulibayev is the son-in-law of Kazakhstan’s president and reputed to control 90 percent of the country’s economy. A leading Kazakh banker has alleged that the mansion was bought with money laundered from the proceeds of the sale of a Kazakh oil company to the Chinese. There is little doubt that the Duke has been acting as a middleman between British oil companies and Kazakhstan. The shady purchase of his mansion was surely meant to serve as a lubricant.
When he is not brokering oil deals, the Duke is making connections on behalf of British arms manufacturers. One of the more lucrative deals he has overseen is with the Bahrain dictatorship that has tortured men and women who protested in the streets during the nation’s participation in the Arab Spring.
As mentioned above, Prince Andrew will need a good lawyer in the upcoming civil suit based on the testimony that has already been presented under oath. The Mirror reported on January 3, 2015:Prince Andrew holidayed with Epstein in Thailand in 2001 and was snapped surrounded by topless women on a yacht.
A handyman who spent 11 years working for the tycoon claimed Prince Andrew often had massages when he was a guest at his Palm Beach mansion.
Juan Alessi said the Prince enjoyed daily massages from young women and often emerged “smiling” after rub-downs.
He said the massages were carried out in a private part of the mansion only Epstein and selected guests could access.
Alessi also told how he witnessed parties at the waterfront mansion at which the Prince was present while young girls frolicked in the nude.
One can easily imagine Epstein selling the prince on the healthful benefits of massage, considering what it did for him:
Philip Weiss quotes Epstein’s friend Peggy Siegal, a publicist:“He lives in a different environment,” says Siegal. “He’s of this world. But he creates this different environment. He lives like a pasha. The most magnificent townhouse I’ve ever been in, and I’ve been in everything. I’ve seen a model of the house in Santa Fe … a stone fortress. A model of the house in the Caribbean—it is not to be believed. I’ve seen photographs of the apartment in Paris … How did he get himself into that pickle? That’s the mystery of Jeffrey Epstein. He’s very mysterious. Not that many people get close to him. Not that many people know him.”
Indeed, he does live like a pasha although I doubt that Siegal knew enough about Ottoman history to understand how much her words revealed. According to Wikipedia, a pasha is similar to the rank of Duke in British aristocracy. It makes perfect sense that Epstein and the Duke saw the right to buy women for their sexual pleasure as a God-given right. The entire basis of feudalism, after all, is the right of the aristocrat to enjoy a privileged status protected by the Church and the hereditary feudal class system.
“The Marriage of Figaro”, one of my favorite Mozart operas, involves Count Almaviva’s intention to reinstate the feudal right of an aristocrat to sleep with the bride of a servant. This was a world in which the aristocracy still wielded great power in Europe and as such Mozart’s opera was part and parcel of the emerging bourgeois revolution that would abolish such privileges.
In my own view of this hotly contested matter in Marxist theory, I view the bourgeois revolution as one that preserves elements of feudal property relations, particularly in the countryside. The modern two-party system, in my view, is rooted in the compromise between urban manufacturer and rural gentry that was necessary for them to withstand the combined power of worker and peasant. It is the persistence of Labour and Tory in Britain and two-party systems everywhere in the world that demonstrates how bourgeois revolutions are not exactly democratic.
The behavior of a Dominique Strauss-Kahn or a Jeffrey Epstein is just a reminder that men at the top of the capitalist food chain tend to behave like Count Almaviva. The only difference between hereditary rule and bourgeois rule is that in the first case de jure allows what de facto in the second does not. In other words, you better not get caught with your pants down.
by RocketMan » Wed Feb 04, 2015 10:22 am
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