by PEPE ESCOBAR
So Osama bin Laden won’t be the main character in the trial of the century after all; by a simple twist of fate, that role will be played by Dominique Strauss-Khan (DSK), the all-powerful head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), now languishing at “Alcatraz” Rikers Island in New York.
The fact that this acronym soup has just been auditioning, despite himself, to the world-famous New York Police Department, complete with the last-minute snatch in the first class cabin of a trans-Atlantic flight, police line up and perp walk, makes it the ultimate sociopolitical global scandal.
On a nastier, New York tabloid level, it was hard to escape the scintillating metaphor of the IMF – with its reputation for screwing the world’s poor – literally applying a structural adjustment in a Manhattan hotel suite to a discreet African Muslim immigrant widow who lives in the Bronx with her teenage daughter. The merciless media execution had to be as massive as the event itself.
Arguably, DSK is luckier than Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, because he’ll be facing a New York jury and not the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. Unlike Gaddafi, DSK – at least in theory – is innocent until proven guilty, although he has already been convicted by the gutter press.
Less visible on both sides of the Atlantic have been sane intellects pointing out that Wall Street crooks swindling average people out of trillions of dollars; BP executives destroying the Gulf of Mexico; and as a matter of fact the George W Bush administration bankrupting the US by launching a war that killed over 1 million Iraqi civilians – none of them were slapped with a perp walk.
That much is established; as far as “American justice” is concerned, the chances of seeing Bush administration or Goldman Sachs perpetrators in handcuffs are zero.
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