Gold and Silver Likely to Go Parabolic Due to ‘Global Shockwaves’ if U.S. Defaults

Before it’s News
July 16, 2011

Gold is some 0.5% lower against the U.S. dollar and most currencies today but higher in Australian dollars as the Aussie fell on Australian and global economic growth concerns. Asian equity indices were mixed as are European indices.

Bond markets have seen subdued trading but Greek bonds are again under pressure and the Greek 10-year yield has risen to 17.37% in increasingly illiquid trade.

The dawning reality that the U.S. will be downgraded due to its appalling fiscal position led to new record nominal gold and silver prices yesterday.

Denial regarding the possibility of a U.S. default continues with some analysts denying that such an event is “possible”. Such an event is possible and it grows more likely by the day. US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned overnight that a default on America’s debt will spark a major crisis and send shockwaves through the global economy.

“The Treasury security is viewed as the safest and most liquid security in the world, and the notion it would become suddenly unreliable and illiquid would throw shockwaves through the entire global financial system,” he told a congressional committee.

US CDS has broken out to the upside and there is the potential for sharp moves up here as was seen in the aftermath of the Lehman and global financial crisis.

The fundamentals for gold and silver could not be better as the outlook for most paper currencies and government paper (sovereign debt) is not good. The precious metals are again being seen as safe haven assets to protect from government profligacy and currency debasement. The risks of a “depression” and currency crises in Europe and the U.S. are rising and this is contributing to significant safe haven demand.

The fact that gold and silver have no counter party risk and cannot default and cannot be debased or printed into oblivion makes them crucial diversifications. Gold, global equities and AAA rated, short dated bonds remain the best way for investors to protect themselves from today’s growing sovereign debt and monetary risk.

Gold, silver, good equities and good bonds will be better than depreciating cash or currencies in the coming years. Real diversification will help protect preserve and grow wealth…

FLASHBACK: 21st Century Wire Reports on Summer Gold Parabolic on May 24, 2011

MARKET FLASH: GOLD PARABOLIC COMING THIS SUMMER

By Andrew McKillop
21st Century Wire
Originally published May 24, 2011

Question: Why could gold go parabolic?

Prices for the Yellow Metal have recently suffered, along with silver, from sudden investor retreat using rationales like ‘inflation is beaten’, the global economy is recovering and the US dollar is getting stronger. Against the overvalued euro, maybe, but against gold the US dollar, euro, yen and almost all other paper moneys only have one way to go:  down.

Gold is a very special market and gold plays a key arbiter role in the unending attempt by the IMF and central banks to bolster and defend the value of “fiat moneys”. Their strategy is simple: push down the price of gold, anyway they can.

With the sudden and spectacular fall of the IMF’s Strauss-Kahn, 18 May, a large number of gold shuffling and swap operations between the IMF, central banks, the ultra-secret BIS and the world’s highly restricted number of authorized bullion banks could have been frozen in mid-air. When the balls hit the ground the collateral monetary damage could be a lot more interesting and much more powerful than what Strauss-Kahn did with his personal playthings in a Manhattan hotel room.

Strauss-Kahn’s sudden ouster comes at a key moment for its biggest debt bailout operations in favour of governments like that of Greece or Portugal, Ireland or Spain, the Baltic states, Iceland and others – who have to run a constant financing operation to save their national private banks, insurance companies and mortgage lenders. IMF austerity cures and forced firesale of government assets, under Strauss-Kahn or any body else, only makes the debt-load financing problem worse. To be sure, the IMF line is things have to get worse before they get better

Other so-called rich countries with similar crisis-level debt loads start with the USA, but at such fantastic rates of new financing need that, since late 2008, the USA is in permanent crisis territory…

SEE FULL MAY 24th REPORT HERE
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SEE ALSO:

The Strauss-Kahn Affair: It’s Now Make or Break Time for the IMF

A NEW DAWN FOR THE IMF: SWITCHING DEBTS TO ASSETS

By Andrew McKillop
21st Century Wire
June 30, 2011

In the gallic joy and media hoopla of yet another French elite politician with almost no knowledge of economics getting the IMF top job, confirming the real role and mission of this fragile institution, its bizarre mutation to financial and economic charlatanism- goes almost unnoticed. The Greek debt crisis however shows this stark and clear.

The IMF and the European Central Bank, with an outgoing French director and an incoming Italian chief, are basically struggling for survival – due to the debt crisis of a country with 11 million inhabitants whose GDP comes in at about 5 percent of EU-27 GDP.

Whoever says IMF and ECB also says ‘US Federal Reserve’, although Ben Bernanke would likely nuance that and distance himself from failed “quantitative tightening” in south-east Europe, to concentrate on failed QE at home.

What the IMF and ECB have cooked up in Europe’s PIIGS, with the second I-for-Italy moving upstage in a dangerous way as the Berlusconi empire and media circus crumbles, is nothing short of ultra Keynesian deficit medicine mixed with ultra Neoliberal austerity cures of the IMF 1980s Third World type. The net result is simple: debt has to become assets. Never mind the ideology because if this gambit fails, the euro will fall and a string of European, US, Japanese and other banking houses will shudder and tremble, 2008-style.

OLD AND NEW

The doctrinal mix-and-mingle running through the veins of global central bankers and their bridges to the political deciding elite – the IMF playing master of ceremonies – has become so confused, so bizarre we could call it an ice cream cocktail with chopped gherkins put through a mixmaster. It was not even born to fail – it was simply not biologically possible, but like dinosaurs… it happened. Using Greece as an online, real time exhibit of leading edge financial engineering, the IMF and ECB, along with the European Union and a few Greek politicians, watched by the US Fed and some very engaged private bankers and finance sector players, are creating one of the most massive debt explosions the world has ever seen. All this with the small assets, and big debts of a small country edging along the Balkans.

But the Greek Ponzi-style debt pyramid grows every day; most media reporting gives rather fakely, exact numbers of the type: “As of 9am Wednesday morning, Greek sovereign debt is 365.2 billion euros”, and a slightly less fantasist number for how much Greece has to receive to cover the 31 days of July: 12 billion euro, roughly $ 1500 for every man, woman and child in the country. With borrowing like that, why work ? The second income has arrived, but of course with strings attached.

All eyes are turning towards French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, the first woman to run the IMF or any large financial institution.

The latest 12-billion dollop is the last part of the first debt package masterminded by the IMF and the Europeans, with the ECB in the lead but also including the European Commission and major government players, led by Germany’s Angela Merkel who has publicly said she got on fine with Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and will get on fine with Christine Lagarde: it is official.

GREEK FINANCE: WITH STRINGS ATTACHED

The strings attached include the Dr Jekyll part of the two-headed IMF monster: Greece has to perform. It has to achieve 50 billion euro of asset sales, not so easy in a country of 11 million inhabitants operating in the oversupplied Mediterranean package tour business against bankrupt Tunisia and bankrupt Egypt, now selling 8-day holidays at modern hotels, with food and air flights, at around $ 400 per person. With the July monthly instalment from the IMF and the Europeans, the entire Greek nation could ship itself out to Egypt for the month and find something creative to do with the unused assets, back home.

Greece of course also has other assets, like lignite fuelled power plants, toll highways, ports, tanker shipping lines and even a few semi-bankrupt airlines.

The real potential of achieving 50-billion-euro of asset sales in Greece, anytime at all, let alone soon is however rather low – but that doesn’t matter. What is needed is a public attempt at doing it, and here the IMF and its European friends, with their uncertain and perhaps wavering US allies, have stepped back in time to the 1980s Third World debt pantomine, complete with funny noses: all that is needed is a remake of the Club of Paris, bringing worried banks and reassuring IMF officials together, for a debt and asset slaughter, where assets were turned into debts rather fast.

OLD ASSETS, NEW DEBTS

A country like Greece today, or 1980s-style debt strangled Third World countries, or Russia, Argentina and others in the 1990s has so much short-term debt and ever rising interest rates on that growing part of its debt balloon – a lead balloon – that any asset it puts on the block will be depreciated, quick time. The depreciation is rigorously ferocious, something like an aside in a Thorsten Veblen book on cigar puffing, cognac swilling Victorian capitalists. What you thought might bring in 5 billion euros will in fact return 50 million, penny-on-the-dollar style. Under that type of New Reality, austerity has to be Victorian-style, witness a hike in value added tax on Greek restaurant meals from 10 percent to 23 percent: if you have enough cash to eat out, you have enough to pay the IMF and ECB.

Asset sales and state revenue hikes in Greece will therefore, and can only disappoint.

Meanwhile, the debt clock ticks on and up, another bailout will be needed, so more assets have to be sold (even if they dont exist) and the austerity program has to be tightened, again. In the Russian case in the 1990s, national pride took a strange New Capitalist turn: roughly 40 percent of the entire population were de-monetized or moved out of the cash economy for several years. To be sure, this had a rather draconian impact on imports, let alone mortality rates, but even if oil was worth nothing in the 1990s, Russia kept on exporting it along with other Sunset Commodity resources – exactly like Argentina. So Russia pulled through, to a certain extent, leaving Putin with a permanent chip on his shoulder regarding Western capitalist partners and iron will to stay a creditor nation.

Greece isn’t likely to have a resource-led export revenue boom, like Russia, Argentina and almost all the Jekyll-finance 1980s victims of the IMF in low income Africa and other Third World countries. This is Europe, meaning new-style rigour in a new-style post-liberal economy – which as we already said is the most bizarre cocktail crock of loony economic tunes a Martian could imagine. Failure is certain.

Courage has no place at all in that me-too circus, but it could work in the Greek case:  a sudden and dramatic abandonment of the euro with no prior warning would almost certainly succeed, aided by its shock and horror. The reintroduced drachma would spiral to nothing – but then banks, including the global central bank-surrogate, the IMF, and the would-be federal European ECB would understand they had gone too far with their Veblen medicine and themselves were set to lose everything, too. This brings us straight to a fundamental notion embodied in Keynesianism: if you have a big debt and can’t pay, bankers will stay interested in you. If you have a small debt and can’t pay – go away and die or take a stay in prison.

Greece could shift to a street-friendly military regime of the type which (legend says) saved vodka swilling Boris Yeltsin, install a land army agriculture corps and national sea fisheries corps, develop close and friendly relations with other ruined new democracies of the Mediterranean region, and basically refuse to pay its debt.

Playing for time, the new popular regime of Greece would by necessity be populist, and start by ousting all foreign migrant workers from the country, stemming remittance outflows from the country. This again would signal the new popular regime means business. An aggressive financial strategy with all other EU27 nations would also be necessary, carefully using the twin arms of debt default menace, and joint venture asset development promise.

THE POST LIBERAL RECOVERY

The IMF’s present role models and dominant ideology cocktails range from the laughable to the absurd and back again. Even as a gold hoarder and semi-legal trader, operating with the Basle-based BIS, the IMF is a failure and like other new style central banks probably has a lot less physical gold than it claims. All it can offer debt-strapped countries is SDRs and new debt, drawing down and destroying, or depreciating to almost nothing any real assets that happen to fall into its hands.

Recovery is almost officially defined by the IMF as an Act of God, or Inch’allah for the Gulf state petro-monarchies brought onside by the IMF whenever possible.

We can be sure that previous feats of the IMF, especially its decades-long debt financing saga with low income resource exporter Third World countries, would have dragged on even longer – if there had not been a sudden, strong and sustained upsurge in commodity prices. This upsurge was totally expected by almost any analyst able to use a two-dollar calculator, and totally unexpected by the IMF and its ruling elite politician friends. The IMF therefore has a proven track record of being surprised, and will be surprised by what we can call post-liberal recovery.

In Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and across the Med in Tunisia and Egypt this post-liberal recovery is emerging, sometimes quite fast. The restored state, the government, national institutions and national identity all have a post-global economy importance which of course is played down by average government friendly media in presently unaffected countries. This is a dangerous trend for fuddle-along debt financing and austerity miracles, which only fatten the regular gang of charlatans, who in any case will quickly lose their ill-gotten gains on the gaming tables of the global financial casino.

The process is also post-ideology in a major way. Carefully unexplained by dominant media and their business editors, the failed dictators of the Arab world, currently including ben Ali of Tunisia, Mubarak of Egypt, Gaddafi of Libya and al Assad of Syria all played squeaky clean copybook export platform economics, yipped on by IMF-friendly economists and commentators. Inside their countries the story was a lot different. Street resistance was not driven by ideology or by demonstrators waving pictures of Che Guevara – but by citizens sick of not being able to afford to eat and the victims of permanent mass unemployment, casually described by well paid IMF experts as “an adjustment phenomenon”.

Forcing the economy to ground zero, which again is official IMF medicine, drives society to a rapid search-and-select of what counts and what does not. The flimsy global economy and its tinsel promises weigh little, and outright resistance to austerity measures and cures will rise.

The fear of anarchy and revolution in the post-liberal world – and a total loss for global finance players – is now moving up the teleprompter, prompting European, US, Japanese and other remaining defenders of Orthodox ‘no alternative’ economics to throw money at emerging national governments in a string of countries. Played right, Greece might also benefit from this.  

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MARKET FLASH: GOLD PARABOLIC COMING THIS SUMMER

FLASH ANALYSIS
By Andrew McKillop
21st Century Wire
May 24, 2011

Question: Why could gold go parabolic?

Prices for the Yellow Metal have recently suffered, along with silver, from sudden investor retreat using rationales like ‘inflation is beaten’, the global economy is recovering and the US dollar is getting stronger. Against the overvalued euro, maybe, but against gold the US dollar, euro, yen and almost all other paper moneys only have one way to go:  down.

Gold is a very special market and gold plays a key arbiter role in the unending attempt by the IMF and central banks to bolster and defend the value of “fiat moneys”. Their strategy is simple: push down the price of gold, anyway they can.

With the sudden and spectacular fall of the IMF’s Strauss-Kahn, 18 May, a large number of gold shuffling and swap operations between the IMF, central banks, the ultra-secret BIS and the world’s highly restricted number of authorized bullion banks could have been frozen in mid-air. When the balls hit the ground the collateral monetary damage could be a lot more interesting and much more powerful than what Strauss-Kahn did with his personal playthings in a Manhattan hotel room.

Strauss-Kahn’s sudden ouster comes at a key moment for its biggest debt bailout operations in favour of governments like that of Greece or Portugal, Ireland or Spain, the Baltic states, Iceland and others – who have to run a constant financing operation to save their national private banks, insurance companies and mortgage lenders. IMF austerity cures and forced firesale of government assets, under Strauss-Kahn or any body else, only makes the debt-load financing problem worse. To be sure, the IMF line is things have to get worse before they get better

Other so-called rich countries with similar crisis-level debt loads start with the USA, but at such fantastic rates of new financing need that, since late 2008, the USA is in permanent crisis territory.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

The near-term gold price target is US$ 2000 per troy ounce, and how this open-crisis price level for the Yellow Metal is reached will itself have powerful impacts on what happens next. Options will include the rushed introduction of an entirely new global reserve currency, itself driving gold prices ever higher, perhaps in a highly compressed time frame, measured in months.

Other options include a crash into recession far steeper than the 2008 crash.

Gold traders and holders including the big ETF’s led by SPIDR can themselves heavily influence the parabolic curve for gold prices through this summer. But central banks, due to the sudden disappearance of Strauss-Kahn and a likely gaping hole in the IMF’s own and real marketable gold reserves may be forced to enter the market and buy-buy-buy. Under this scenario, daily gold price hikes could become glaring signals of what is happening: $25-per-day and per ounce would be a giveaway signal.

To be sure, government leaders worldwide will try to talk down and thwart this gold panic – at the same time as their central banks drive the process.

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SEE ALSO:

The Strauss-Kahn Affair: It’s Now Make or Break Time for the IMF

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The Strauss-Kahn Affair: It’s Now Make or Break Time for the IMF

By Andrew McKillop
21st Century Wire
May 20, 2011

In the wake of the Strauss-Kahn affair, real economic events are fast conspiring to reshape the global financial playing field. What the big player governments on the IMF Executive Board want- and want fast, is action to stave off international financial meltdown. They also need continuing multi-billion dollar action to prevent a return to near-bankruptcy for their big name high-street banks.

Following pre-trial hearings, Dominique Strauss-Kahn was bundled out of the IMF and into a heavily guarded residence surveyed by cameras in every room. For plot theory lovers, these cameras can be contrasted with the alleged claimed cameras in the corridor of the Manhattan Sofitel hotel, able to capture and record images of the panicked and distressed 32-year-old Guniean hotel room cleaner fleeing from the room where Strauss-Kahn had sexually assaulted her, before himself fleeing under the same cameras.

TIME TO FACE THE MUSIC: In the wake of the DSK Affair, the IMF are facing some big strategic decisions.

By 19 May, these hotel cameras simply did not exist, and in the corridor of the room in question had never existed. But never mind! Plenty of other evidence was under preparation or already in the possession of prosecutors and their investigators. Much more serious and real charges had existed against Strauss-Kahn, whose $75,000-a-year entertainment and personal expenses allowance at the IMF rather comfortably covers any paid sex he might have wanted.

Strauss-Kahn’s nice talk for pseudo-socialists about greater accountability and more controls on the global finance industry most surely sounded a little too much like Elliot Spitzer talking, circa 2007, about how he was going to clean up Wall Street. By early 2008 Spitzer fell in a sex scandal where the bit players were staffed from the same high price prostitution rackets Spitzer had been investigating as New York Attorney General. More important, Strauss-Kahn was likely failing in the real key mission of the IMF, but his sudden disappearance creates huge risks of the game plan becoming known.

SUPPRESS GOLD AND SAVE THE SYSTEM 

The IMF and its close-related international financial partner institution, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) operate with the sort of ironclad secrecy only dreamed of by the bankrupted, downsized and repackaged (that is restructured) Wall Street financial players which Spitzer brushed too hard against.

IMF financial support and bailout operations in 2010 reached about $ 91 billion, compared with about $ 1 billion in 2006. Proposals agreed by the G20 and by the IMF Executive Board since April 2009 target an increase of its total resources by as much as $ 750 billion within one or two years.

  No DSK = no EURO? Speculation persists in the wake of DSK’s resignation.

Doing this is the key challenge for the IMF and whatever director it has. Vastly increasing the IMF’s firefighting role in bailing out governments unable to borrow on global capital markets, like Greece at present, and re-financing weakened private banks by financing national governments which in turn bail out banks in their national territories, is however and in no way sure and certain. The Strauss-Kahn crisis can or might be the opening salvo in an IMF crisis for reasons which are not so complex.

The processes or mechanisms the IMF can draw on to vastly expand its bailouts and financing are few and easy to define. They all feature SDRs on one hand, and gold sales and swaps, on the other. Both are full of risks for the global financial system and economy at this highly weakened moment.

The IMF can encourage national central banks to sell their gold nearly always in secret, or the IMF can print and swap SDRs against gold from the central bank of a country needing emergency help and then secretly sell this gold, often through the BIS. Other financial magic operated by the IMF, with or without the BIS extends into realms as surprising, to some, as real estate and international trade financing on a strictly-for-profit basis. Even less publicized, and just as profitably it likely operates in tandem with the ultra-secret BIS- for recycling hot capital from low income countries and tax haven island states, in a constant IMF self-financing process.

Despite all this, the bottom line since the global financial crisis went critical in December 2008 is these activities are vastly smaller than the size of the problem: national debt financing and saving bankrupt private banks.

SDRs are the special trump card of the IMF because this institution with a highly special and only partly defined role relative to both governments and the global financial system has one rare privilege it shares with governments: printing money, that is SDRs. Inside its 24-member Executive Board the trading of these SDRs is permanent – and usually secret. The plan to establish these “special drawing rights”, the SDRs, was devised on September 29, 1967 by the Governors of the IMF, only a few weeks before the collapse of the London gold pool. At the time it was clear to many observers the intention was to put SDR’s into play in time to overlap the pool’s closure, for the constant key mission of the IMF: protect the value of world currencies, starting with the dollar by preventing gold prices growing further, if they are rising, and pushing them further down, if they are falling.

PREVENTING MELTDOWN

This dawn of SDRs may be little known to most, but for bullion traders and central bankers is a key period and a sombre flashback – in miniature – to the gold and money crises of today. By 1965 the London gold pool was consistently supplying more gold to cap prices than it was able to buy back. The end for the pool started with the devaluation of the UK pound sterling in November 1967, yet again spurring gold purchases. By early December, the gold pool was selling around 20 times its usual amount of gold, and with its Zurich partners was forced to cease forward sales of gold, further intensifying gold demand. Over a few weeks, the pool had laid out more than 1000 tons, and the newly invented SDRs had done little or nothing to stem the panic.

This 1000-ton figure, we can note is close to 40 percent of world total gold mine output in 2010.

In those days, 1000 tons of gold was worth around $1 billion. Today it would fetch about $ 50 billion underlining the general failure of the IMF’s key mission to “protect currencies”, of course spurring ever more desperate attempts to finally succeed. Since the action engaged by the IMF to raise its financing capabilities and maintain confidence in world moneys is always secret the stage of negotiations reached by Strauss-Kahn before his rapid fall is hard to know. To be sure, the subject attracts almost as much comment as what happened at the Manhattan Sofitel hotel, last weekend, but global markets do not have the time to dwell too long on juicy sex scandals.

In recent weeks, heroic behind-the-scenes action has been poured into talking down gold, oil and other commodity prices, and talking up the failing dollar. The blatantly overvalued euro continues to be defended by the European members of the IMF Executive Board, showing rare and total solidarity in their quest to ensure a European takes over from Strauss-Kahn. This could or might however be a lost cause for the de facto US-European bloc, still holding a massive majority of votes inside the IMF, and the power to decide how many SDRs are printed and what central bank gold reserves will be sold or swapped – but kept on the books as still belonging to national central banks.

Current events could now radically speed decisions.

The BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) group, showing a lack of solidarity in jostling to get leadership of the IMF as open as Europe’s solidarity and American neutrality playacting, have very different agenda items in this global quest to prevent an epic financial meltdown. Running trade surpluses, they can finance their national budget deficits and borrow to save their fragile banking systems, as overstretched as those of the USA, Europe and Japan.

The bottom line is that the IMF, as a gold laundering entity using central bank gold may be close to its first double-or-quits crisis point in its 67 year history, and its 44 years of SDR printing.

THE SCENARIOS

It is possible Strauss-Kahn was close to some major breakthrough in recycling government gold, printing SDRs and protecting the paper moneys printed by governments, but whatever his heroic quest, and why he fell, the numbers are stacked against this quest. Taking the approximate current market value of all the gold that has ever been produced, few estimates place this at above $ 5000 billion. US Federal debt growth from December 2008 to April 2011 was about $ 3600 billion. Global “hot capital” flows, grotesquely underestimated by the IMF in its publication, are likely running at no more than $ 250 billion-a-year.

The only solution for Strauss-Kahn, and whoever succeeds him is to invent a new global money. This was the real mission of “DSK” and will be the real mission of whoever steps into his shoes, and does not stay in Sofitel mid-range hotels with low level security on room intruders. The action to produce a new global money – called a reserve currency – will also have to be very fast, due to the debt clock, or time bomb ruthlessly ticking forward.

For a short while the gold bullion market will stay quiet, but daily change of the gold price will increase, and then rise further. Few rational analyses of the right price for gold place it under $ 2000 per troy ounce, and plenty of experts will say this is only the starting gate for a hyper inflation spiral in which national currencies are ground to dust like a black hole swallows and smashes stars. All and any real asset, that is food, energy and minerals can only spiral in price for as long as the global economy struggles forward. After that, the recession implosion will operate, restoring the value of money in a vastly downsized global economy morphing into semi-autonomous national or regional economies.

Preventive action by the world’s few capital surplus countries could start in the very near-term future. The BRIC group could break away from the IMF system by inventing its own BRIC reserve money backed by key commodities, gold, and manufacturing power, but this would need a vast increase of their current low-level coordination of financial and monetary policies.

Not impossibly, the USA facing hyper debt could take its own unilateral action, with well-described and possibly planned actions to erect tariff barriers and heavily limit overseas holdings and use of the US dollar – that is siege economy action in a new era of isolationism marked in the geopolitical domain by abandoning the Afghan war, total disengagement from Iraq and leaving Israel to solve its long and festering problems with the Palestinians all on its own.

In the same way, Europe’s neo-colonial turf war with China and India for control over Africa’s natural resources and growing consumer markets could morph into a war for saving European moneys.

Under any scenario the Strauss-Kahn affair comes at a key moment. Attempts at saving the global economy and world moneys, since the end of 2008, have all failed, raising the stakes and risk each time. What we may now witness is historic change as the IMF’s real situation seeps and leaks out, under the tinsel wraps of just another sex scandal.

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The Strauss Kahn Frame-Up: The Amerikan Police State Strides Forward

Paul Craig Roberts
Infowars.com
May 18, 2011

The International Monetary Fund’s director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was arrested last Sunday in New York City on the allegation of an immigrant hotel maid that he attempted to rape her in his hotel room. A New York judge has denied Strauss-Kahn bail on the grounds that he might flee to France.

President Bill Clinton survived his sexual escapades, because he was a servant to the system, not a threat. But Strauss-Kahn, like former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, was a threat to the system, and, like Eliot Spitzer, Strass-Kahn has been deleted from the power ranks.

Strauss-Kahn was the first IMF director in my lifetime, if memory serves, who disavowed the traditional IMF policy of imposing on the poor and ordinary people the cost of bailing out Wall Street and the Western banks. Strauss-Kahn said that regulation had to be reimposed on the greed-driven, fraud-prone financial sector, which, unregulated, destroyed the lives of ordinary people. Strauss-Kahn listened to Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz, one of a handful of economists who has a social conscience.

NO MORE HOBNOBBING: Strauss-Kahn has been deleted from elite circles.

Perhaps the most dangerous black mark in Strauss-Kahn’s book is that he was far ahead of America’s French puppet, President Sarkozy, in the upcoming French elections. Strauss-Kahn simply had to be eliminated.

It is possible that Strauss-Kahn eliminated himself and saved Washington the trouble. However, as a well-travelled person who has often stayed in New York hotels and in hotels in cities around the world, I have never experienced a maid entering unannounced into my room, much less when I was in the shower.

In the spun story, Strauss-Kahn is portrayed as so deprived of sex that he attempted to rape a hotel maid. Anyone who ever served on the staff of a powerful public figure knows that this is unlikely. On a senator’s staff on which I served, there were two aides whose job was to make certain that no woman, with the exception of his wife, was ever alone with the senator. This was done to protect the senator both from female power groupies, who lust after celebrities and powerful men, and from women sent by a rival on missions to compromise an opponent. A powerful man such as Strauss-Kahn would not have been starved for women, and as a multi-millionaire he could certainly afford to make his own discreet arrangements.

As Henry Kissinger said, “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” In politics, sex is handed out as favors and payoffs, and it is used as a honey trap. Some Americans will remember that Senator Packwood’s long career (1969-1995) was destroyed by a female lobbyist, suspected, according to rumors, of sexual conquests of Senators, who charged that Packwood propositioned her in his office. Perhaps what inspired the charge was that Packwood was in the way of her employer’s legislative agenda.

Even those who exercise care can be framed by allegations of an event to which there are no witnesses. On May 16 the British Daily Mail reported that prior to Strauss-Kahn’s fateful departure for New York, the French newspaper, Liberation, published comments he made while discussing his plans to challenge Sarkozy for the presidency of France. Strauss-Kahn said that as he was the clear favorite to beat Sarkozy, he would be subjected to a smear campaign by Sarkozy and his interior minister, Glaude Gueant. Strauss-Kahn predicted that a woman would be offered between 500,000 and 1,000,000 euros (more than $1,000,000) to make up a story that he raped her. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1387625/IMF-chief-Dominique-Strauss-Kahn-feared-political-enemy-pay-woman-allege-rape.html

The Daily Mail reports that Strauss-Kahn’s suspicions are supported by the fact that the first person to break the news of Strauss-Kahn’s arrest was an activist in Mr Sarkozy’s UMP party – who apparently knew about the scandal before it happened. Jonathan Pinet, a politics student, tweeted the news just before the New York Police Department made it public, although he said that he simply had a ‘friend’ working at the Sofitel where the attack was said to have happened. The first person to re-tweet Mr Pinet was Arnaud Dassier, a spin doctor who had previously publicised details of multi-millionaire Strauss-Kahn’s luxurious lifestyle in a bid to dent his left wing credentials.

Strauss-Kahn could just as easily been set up by rivals inside the IMF, as well as by rivals within the French political establishment.

Michelle Sabban, a senior councillor for the greater Paris region and a Strauss-Kahn loyalist said: ‘I am convinced it is an international conspiracy.’

She added: ‘It’s the IMF they wanted to decapitate, not so much the Socialist primary candidate.

‘It’s not like him. Everyone knows that his weakness is seduction, women. That’s how they got him.’

Even some of Strauss-Kahn’s rivals said they could not believe the news. ‘It is totally hallucinatory,’ said centrist Dominique Paille.

‘If it is true, this would be a historic moment, but in the negative sense, for French political life. I hope that everyone respects the presumption of innocence. I cannot manage to believe this affair.’

And Henri de Raincourt, minister for overseas co-operation in President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government, added: ‘We cannot rule out the thought of a trap.’

Michelle Sabban is on to something when she says the IMF was the target. Strauss-Kahn is the first IMF director who is not lined up on the side of the rich against the poor. Strauss-Kahn’s suspicions were of Sarkozy, but Wall Street and the US government also had strong reasons to eliminate him. Wall Street is terrified by the prospect of regulation, and Washington was embarrassed by the recent IMF report that China’s economy would surpass the US economy within five years. An international conspiracy is not out of the question.

Indeed, the plot is unfolding as a conspiracy. Authorities have produced a French woman who claims she was a near rape victim of Strauss-Kahn a decade ago. It would be interesting to know whether this allegation is the result of a threat or a bribe. As in the case of Julian Assange, there are now two women to accuse Strauss-Kahn. Once the prosecutors get the odds of two females against one male, they win in the media.

It has not been revealed how the authorities knew Strauss-Kahn was on a flight to France. However, by arresting him aboard his scheduled flight just as it was to depart, the authorities created the image of a man fleeing from a crime.

The way Amerikan justice (sic) works is that prosecutors in about 96 percent of the cases get a plea bargain. US prosecutors are permitted by judges and the public to pay for testimony against the defendant and to put sufficient pressure on innocent defendants to coerce them into making a guilty plea in exchange for lesser charges and a lighter sentence. Unless the hotel maid has a spell of bad conscience and admits she was paid to lie, or gets cold feet about perjuring herself, Strauss-Kahn is likely to find that Amerikan criminal justice (sic) is organized to produce conviction regardless of innocence or guilt.

On May 16, the day following Strauss-Kahn’s arrest, the US Supreme Court threw its weight behind the Amerikan police state by destroying the remains of the Fourth Amendment with an 8-1 ruling that, the U.S. Constitution notwithstanding, Amerika’s police do not need warrants to invade homes and search persons.

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This ruling is more evidence that every American is regarded as a potential enemy of the state, not only by Airport Security but also by the high muckety-mucks in Washington. The conservatives’ “war on crime” has created a police state, and conservatives, who originally stood for limited government and civil liberty, are euphoric over the expanded and unaccountable powers that a conservative Supreme Court has handed to the police.

On the same day the federal government reached the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling, which forced the Treasury to “borrow” money from federal employee pensions in order to continue funding Amerika’s illegal wars and crimes against humanity. The breached debt ceiling serves as an appropriate marker for a country that has squandered its constitutional heritage and has arrived at moral as well as fiscal bankruptcy.

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is the former head of policy at the Department of Treasury. He is a columnist and was previously an editor for the Wall Street Journal. His latest book, “How the Economy Was Lost: The War of the Worlds,” details why America is disintegrating.