So is Dominique Strauss-Kahn a violent rapist or just a sleazy French socialist? Either way, events that occurred at the Sofitel in Times Square last May ought to leave his political career sunk. As columnist Michael Powell wrote in the New York Times at the weekend: ‘When the debate is between those who accuse you of rape and those who defend you as a mere disgusting cad, your image problems have not emerged from critical care.’
Well, not in America at any rate. But in France it seems DSK’s fellow socialists can’t see that he has an image problem at all. Some of them even reckon he should be back in the race to be the socialist candidate in next year’s presidential election. They imagine that his being released without bail is proof that there is no case against him, that he is merely a victim of what they see as America’s obsession with prying into people’s sex lives. The French intellectuals despise ‘Anglo-Saxon morals.’
Note to the French: at this writing, not one of the serious sexual charges against Mr Strauss-Kahn has been dropped.
All that’s happened is that the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr, appears to be losing his nerve over the case. Why? Well, maybe it is because Mr Vance is less than two years in the job and is not a very good prosecutor, but it is more likely that he is gun-shy after losing two other high-profile prosecutions recently, one of them involving charges of rape against two policemen.
More on Mr Vance in a moment. Back to the French left-wing and their attitudes towards this case: the only outrage they have expressed from the start is not that they must now accept the truth about the man who was considered by many to be the next president of France. The truth is that he travels the world looking for sex with the hired help.
For of course the DSK defence team is not denying sexual activity between Mr Strauss-Kahn and the maid, it is just claiming whatever happened was consensual. They decline to say whether any money was paid. They claim the chambermaid is in fact a hooker who was placed in the posh hotel by her union so that she could make more money turning tricks for rich guests. (Do I have to tell you how quickly the hotel workers’ union denied that one?)
No, the only outrage among the French left-wing is that the former head of the IMF has been treated exactly the same as any other man against whom a credible allegation of rape might be made. The Canadian writer Mark Steyn reported this comment by Jean Daniel, editor of Le Nouvel Observateur: ‘We and the Americans do not belong to the same civilisation,’ insisting that the police should have known that Mr Strauss-Khan ‘was not like other men.’ Mr Daniel wondered why ‘this chambermaid was regarded as worthy.’
What outraged Parisian left-bank, left-wing philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, was that an American judge ‘pretended to take [Strauss-Kahn] for a subject of justice like any other.’ Yes, treating Mr Strauss-Kahn like ‘a subject of justice like any other,’ which is to say, as equal before the law, that’s what really outrages French left-wing intellectuals.
Mr Levy – or BHL, as he is called in France, a kind of bookend to his ‘friend for 20 years’ DSK – was, like Mr Daniel, also scandalised that a mere chambermaid could get a ‘great’ man such as Mr Strauss-Kahn in trouble with the law by credibly accusing him of sexual assault.
I stand with American writer Jonah Goldberg on this one: ‘I am proud to live in a country where a housekeeper can get a world leader pulled off a plane bound for Paris. I something like that couldn’t happen in France, then shame on France and shame on Levy for thinking otherwise.’
What we have here is a happy American Independence Day, the Fourth of July, where indeed all men are created equal, even men who lead the IMF.
That equality is of course why Mr Strauss-Kahn had to leave his first court appearance in handcuffs. Here is the thing about the perp walk: all accused persons are taken out of a New York criminal court that way. All of them. If the courts started to pick and choose which individuals to put in handcuffs and which to have the dignity of just strolling out of the court to a waiting car, maybe arm in arm with their wives and friends, it would make those who are denied that privilege look somehow more certainly guilty. But since handcuffs go on everyone, everyone looks the same, so the fact of handcuffs has no more meaning for one accused person than for any other.
Yet Bernard-Henri Levy called putting DSK through the normal form of arrest ‘pornographic.’ Wrong. What would have been pornographic is if Mr Strauss-Kahn’s position as a member of the elite had given him the special privilege of no handcuffs.
Remember that DSK was arrested on charges of a violent crime. Kenneth Thompson, the alleged victim’s lawyer, gave a description last week of hospital photographs showing injuries she suffered in the hotel room. I’m not going to give details of all of the injuries because some were intimate (or in BHL’s word, ‘pornographic’). But the apparent injuries are evidence of some kind of violent encounter. New York cops want prisoners in handcuffs because too often prisoners turn violent after arrest. Loose hands can break police noses and grab police guns. Or, let’s face it, punch journalists.
Now we are being told that the case against DSK is looking shaky. The fact is that if DSK did rape this woman, he picked exactly the right woman: she apparently lied on her application for asylum (hey, who’d have ever thought an asylum seeker might be bogus?). She is a woman who has at least one boyfriend who is dealing marijuana, and who may, or may not, be a hooker.
How is the district attorney supposed to get a conviction if he puts a woman like that on the stand to testify? Apparently Mr Vance is beginning to fear that the defence lawyers could destroy her in court. Or more to the point for Mr Vance, destroy what remains of his political future (Manhattan district attorney is an elected office).
Which is what I suspect was behind that performance of one of the prosecuting lawyers in court last week, when a list of all these doubts was read out. Mr Vance may be losing his nerve and trying to find a way to get out of proceeding to trial. The usual thing to do in such a case in the American system is to plea-bargain – to offer Mr Strauss-Kahn a chance to plead guilty to a lesser charge, and in return escape a prison term.
This kind of practice is why more than 90 percent of felony charges are not tested before a jury: that’s right, the evidence in 90 percent of US felony convictions is never tested before a jury.
Which is a continuing scandal in America. If cops and prosecutors imagine there is little chance a jury will ever evaluate the evidence they gather, then they can get sloppy about the evidence.
Did Mr Vance and his team get sloppy in the way they gathered evidence against DSK – or in fact did they get sloppy in the way they gathered evidence to undermine the credibility of the alleged victim? The only way we will ever know is if this case is taken to court and the evidence is finally tested.
If we are lucky, Mr Strauss-Kahn’s arrogance will prevent him agreeing to plea bargain. Excellent: justice demands we hear testimony on what happened in that hotel room. Then the jury can give a verdict of guilty or not guilty: guilty, and DSK is a violent rapist. Not guilty, he is merely a sleazy French socialist.
In France, just one of those possible outcomes is a bar to his becoming president. Too right, as Monsieur Daniel says, the French and the Americans do not belong to the same civilisation.
It is entirely to the credit of Americans that they do not.
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20 June 2011 7:27 PM
Greece out of the euro: good for everyone, especially the Greeks and the Germans
This just in, from Charles Dumas of Lombard Street Research, one of my favourite experts on eurozone economics.
I will remind you that in 2006 Dumas said the eurozone would begin to unzip in five years, starting with Greece. He's so smart it's spooky.
Today he asks, who would lose if Greece should default, leave EMU [that's economic and monetary union, in other words the euro] and call in the IMF?
Now, I know that Boris Johnson wrote today that Greece should be allowed to default
on its debts and leave the euro, and that Greece would be no more worse off with its own currency again -- see the news pages for the details -- and he is quite right (though what took him so long to see it?).
But listening to economics from Boris is like listening to economics from Tigger. I'd rather listen to Dumas cover the same ground. It's like listening to economics from Beethoven.
So, according to Dumas, the answer to 'who would lose if Greece should default, leave EMU and call in the IMF?' is: 'Nobody need lose -- it is not a zero-sum game.'
And his reasoning is worth listening too, since the British government has repeatedly been sucked into the multi-billion bail-out schemes that are supposed to 'save the euro.' Which means, keep all the member states of the euro in the damned currency, no matter what it costs.
But as Dumas says, if Greece gets out, nobody need lose: 'The answer is utilitarian, of course, It assumes the purpose of economic policy is to achieve the maximum economic/welfare benefit to the population. In reality, the losers would be the bulk of the continental European elite, which has hitched its wagon to a "falling star" -- a "black hole" would express it better -- since the early 1990s. This elite would be shown up for the arrogant blunderers they have always looked like, and have proved to be. Pride, guilt and fear are some of the most powerful motivations on earth -- hence the resistance to shrinking or dissolving EMU.'
'In welfare terms, the current Greek government policy makes no sense at all, for Greece. It is hammering its economy with domestic deflation that is now cratering tax revenue, ensuring that reduction of the deficit is slowing to a crawl while the denominator of the relevant ratios, GDP, is sliding way, increasing the task of debt stabilisation.'
'Default will not be avoided...By staying in the euro, Greece ensures it has no chance of generating external growth, to offset domestic deflation. Yet everybody knows that only with growth can excessive debts be repaid -- or, more realistically in the Greek case, be defaulted on by fewer cents in the euro.'
Equally Germany would also grow better if Greece were out of the euro: 'Over the nine years since the last recession (2001), German GDP is only up 10%, well behind Britain and France, for example, let alone the US, despite its greater cost competitiveness, and contrived undervaluation through linkage to its more inflationary "partners" in Euroland. And the suppression of wages that has achieved this...results in real consumer spending only up 3% over the same nine years...'
'Shedding Greece from the euro might be far from a sufficient cure for the gross distortions of EMU, but it would be a step in the right direction, and all the more important in signalling that maximising the present value of potential Greek (and other) debt repayments is now the chief goal -- rather than punishing Club Med "bad boys" [Greece, Portugal, etc] for past sins, or driving Europa through intense economic pain to some presumed nirvana -- actually, chimera -- of a European super-state where everybody behaves like "good boys."'
Dumas is so right, so often, about so many things --and never more than today when he writes about the European elite 'being shown up for the arrogant blunderers they have always looked like.'
Exactly. I have always known the euro-elite were devious and dishonest, but I'd always given them credit for a kind of Jesuitical intellectual skill. But since the first fumbled, panicked Greek bailout a year ago, the euro elite have shown themselves to be the gang that can't shoot straight.
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19 June 2011 9:55 AM
Euro-inspired Human Rights Act: British dogs deserve better than that at Westminster
Tory MP Matthew Offord is defying the Westminster bureaucrats who say he can't go on taking his dog Max to his Commons office. You can see the full story in today's Mail on Sunday.
I can only say to Offord: Bravo -- but why have you spoiled an otherwise honourable position by whining that you will invoke that euro-curse, the Human Rights Act, if you don't get your way?
Offord should have invoked instead the weight of the history and tradition of the English-speaking world.
Look across the Atlantic, where the Mother of Parliament's greatest child, the United States Congress, is happy to let its Senators and Representatives take their dogs to Capitol Hill.
These days the dogs stay in the offices, but certainly, in the golden age of the Senate before 1861, dogs even went into the chamber. That is because during the golden age America was still a great country, and most of the Senators were gentlemen -- and a gentleman always kept his gun dogs close.
A gentleman also kept his pistols close, as this account by the late Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia illustrates.
In 1998 Byrd addressed a ceremonial gathering of Senators in the Old Senate Chamber, in which their predecessors met from 1819-1859. The room has quite a history:
'Here, in this room, Daniel Webster orated, Henry Clay forged compromises, and John C. Calhoun stood on principle. Here, Henry Foot of Mississippi pulled a pistol on Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. Senator Benton ripped open his coat and said, "Let the assassin fire!" And, "Stand out of the way."
'Here the eccentric [I would dispute that, but will let Byrd have it] Viginian Senator John Randolph brought his hunting dogs into the Chamber, and the dashing Texas Senator, Sam Houston, sat over here to my right; he sat at his desk whittling wooden hearts for ladies in the gallery.'
'Seated at his desk in the back row, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner was beaten violently over the head with a cane wielded by Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, who objected to Sumner's strongly abolitionist speeches and the vituperation that Sumner had heaped upon Brooks' uncle, Senator Butler of South Carolina.'
Where's the fun in the Senate chamber now? Gone, along with all the great men, and their pistols, and their gun dogs.
Just like at Westminster.
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04 June 2011 10:09 AM
Elite European Schools: how the eurocrats' kids get the gravy and you pay for it
Thanks to ‘JDF’ for taking the time to post a comment – and for asking about the elite European Schools for the sons and daughters of eurocrats, which I mentioned in the previous post about the luxurious lives of the European Commission staff. This will fill you in a bit:
The schools are located in the most fashionable neighbourhoods of Brussels, Frankfurt, Luxembourg and other cities across the Continent where there are significant numbers of eurocrats, and at Culham in Oxfordshire (which is being wound-down as a European School and turned into an academy).
The schools offer an aggressively ‘European’ education from nursery level through secondary level, meant to produce children who are – and this is their founding mission statement -- ‘in mind Europeans, schooled and ready to complete and consolidate the work of their fathers before them, to bring into being a united and thriving Europe.’
In fact, these superior multi-lingual international schools are producing a caste of taxpayer-funded euro-elite who will grow up with connections and networking skills denied to other children. The picture above, from the schools' website, is of the European School in the fashionable Brussels suburb of Uccle. Draw your own conclusions.
One ‘old boys’ organisation for the European Schools actually has bragged that its objectives are to ‘create contacts’ and ‘expand a worldwide network’ across Europe and around the world, based on ‘a past history in the European School.’ And, No, your kids can’t join the network – even though your taxes pay for the schools.
The 14 ‘European Schools’ run on a £237m annual budget. These elite multilingual academies were founded in 1953 to give guaranteed free places worth up to £13,000 a year to the sons and daughters of already highly-privileged, low-taxed EU officials.
You will not be surprised to hear that British taxpayers are being forced to spend more than £25m a year in subsidies for these exclusive free schools for the children of the European Union elite.
Selection of the nearly 22,780 pupils is based entirely on their parents’ connections in the EU. Children hoping to go to one of the schools are divided into divisions based on family status.
The most privileged class is called Category I. A child is Category I if one of his parents is on the staff of an EU institution or is a national expert seconded by an EU institution or is an official attached to one of the Permanent Representations to the EU. (These are the national embassies which negotiate in Brussels at European Council level.)
Because all Category I children are guaranteed a place, the four schools in Brussels are already at full capacity and a fifth taxpayer-funded school is being planned to meet the demand. Well over 90 percent of the children at the Brussels European Schools are the Category I sons and daughters of top eurocrats. For local Belgians, entrance to the school is a privilege which their children can never enjoy. Yet the European Commission insists the schools are ‘public’ – in the American sense -- like any other state school in any EU member state, and not private.
Category II children have parents who work for one of the international organisations such as Nato which pay fees to the European Schools. Category III children have parents who have no connection with the EU but are willing to pay up to £13,000 a year to secure a place. Category III children have no hope of admission until demand by higher-category children has been met.
Britain pays a disproportionately high amount of the cost of these exclusive schools, because of the insistence by the schools that only native English-speaking teachers be used to instruct the European children in English language classes. The UK Government must meet the cost of paying 247 British teachers and management staff who have been seconded from British schools, even though they are working abroad and teaching foreign children.
When I talked to Stephen Booth of Open Europe about this some months ago, he said: ‘It is completely unreasonable to expect British taxpayers to foot the bill to educate privately EU officials’ children. Why should the sons and daughters of well-paid EU bureaucrats be granted privileges that the majority of UK taxpayers cannot afford for their own children?’
Nigel Farage, MEP and leader of UKIP said: ‘The schools of highly paid Eurocrats have the very best facilities while the average child in Britain has to do with much less. Our money should not be wasted on the free education and salubrious facilities of well-paid untaxed bureaucrats. The EU is a racket run for the benefit of the pencil-pushers.’
And for the benefit of their sons and daughters -- not your sons and daughters.
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02 June 2011 8:20 AM
Commission spending: EU elite lead lives of Renaissance Princes of the Church
The last time a pan-European power lived like this was when the Renaissance
popes controlled the Continent. Yet now it is all happening again, at a time of what is supposed to be democracy: the unelected elite of the European Union are using your tax money to live in the gilded style of 16th century Cardinal-Archbishops.
According to a new report by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism -- see the news pages today for details -- there have been cocktail-fuelled international soirées at £66,000 a time. Guests of the eurocrats have been tucking tax-payer funded solid silver trinkets and elegant fountain pens from Tiffany into their pockets on the way home. And sometimes it has been a long way home: this new investigation has turned up the shocking fact of a European Commission five-star junket for officials and their families to Papua New Guinea.
Yes, and their families. The eurocrats took their families along: you paid for them and their wives and children to have a holiday on beaches lapped by the Coral Sea. Even the families of the Medici popes never had such luxury. (By the way, some of those children would have been on break from one of the exclusive European Schools, where their tuition of up to £13,000 a year is paid by – yes, by you, the taxpayer.)
But is any of this shocking anymore? Not to those of us who have been up close and watching the Brussels gravy train for years. It is what we have come to expect from the unelected, unaccountable euro-elite. These people do not consider themselves to be public servants. They consider themselves to be an anointed priesthood of the Church of the European Project. By their thinking, anything that furthers the power or the prestige of this new Church must be a good thing.
This leads to the relentless examples of arrogance, led from the top by José Manuel Barroso, the president of the commission. This arrogant Portuguese former Maoist politician and eight of his assistants ran up a bill of £24,600 at the Peninsula Hotel in New York in the space of just four nights. And you can bet they didn’t get there from Brussels flying tourist class.
Consider this. Right now the EU and their partners in the IMF are screwing the eurozone periphery countries down into penury with their demands for austerity -- all to save the eurocrats' sacred currency, the euro.
Yet meanwhile the European Commissioners alone have run up over £6.6m on private jet travel in the last four years. And now these same eurocrats are demanding that the commission’s budget be increased by almost five percent next year, despite governments across the Continent cutting back spending.
You can understand why the eurocrats want the extra money: those five-star hotels in the South Pacific aren’t getting any cheaper.
The only question that remains is this. How much longer are we and the other taxpayers of the EU member states going to let this extravagance go on?
Of course, complain about it and you will be smeared as ‘anti-European,’ rather in the way the reformers who complained about the extravagance of the Renaissance Papacy were condemned as heretics.
Fine, call me a heretic. I still say, ‘Roll on Reformation.’ If not revolution.
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