A Campaign That Backfired

While many people are amazed at how low Dominique Strauss-Kahn has fallen, it is equally fitting for us to wonder how he had risen so high. Was he so different from any other banker or economist or Socialist mayor? Did he alone hold the key to solving the world's economic crisis? In America, Donald Trump had enough sense to withdraw as a presidential candidate, even though he may have had some justification for aspiring to the post. DSK, as far as we can see, had no such humility. It took an unexpected calamity to force him off the list of potential candidates. Nonetheless, he may have had a premonition that he would be undone, as this article by Andrea Massari from Polémia explains. And we learn also why and by what hidden processes he was elevated to the heights of power and influence:

In an interview with Libération, at the end of April, DSK admitted he had three possible weak points: "Money, women, and my Jewishness."

In truth, the man who had declared "I get up each morning wondering what I can do for Israel" was apt to have some trouble mobilizing the votes of the Arab-Muslim ghettos who had voted massively for Ségolène Royal in 2007.

But even before the election, he would have had to win the Socialist primary!

How could a man who was the incarnation of world finance win the votes of Socialist Party members, many of whom are still government employees? How could a man who had imposed on Greece a rigorous plan and who had praised the Tunisian example of Ben Ali gather enough votes from the party members?

Note: The Socialist primary will be held on October 9 and 16, 2011.

Likewise, it is surprising that the Socialist Party, a feminine and feminist party, could envisage giving itself to a man impelled to harass women, in a manner closer to that of a predator than a seducer.

In such conditions, how on earth could DSK appear to be presidential?

DSK took the lead in the polls thanks to his image as the economic savior of the planet.

Here we have to distinguish reality from the image conveyed by the media.

In reality, the IMF and its leader functioned as a sort of permanent secretariat of the G20. But other than tedious communiqués, the G20, G8 or G5 made very few concrete decisions; and above all, in no way did they correct the dubious practices of world finance. Quite the contrary, they catered to the interests of big banking did nothing against systemic fraud.

Only the magic of communication made DSK the deus ex machina of a hypothetical rescue from the economic crisis. And it was only the French who believed it. In New York, as we saw, DSK does not have the celebrity status the French imputed to him…

The communications agency Euro-RSCG (part of the Bolloré Group) was maneuvering behind the scenes. This agency had acquired from the IMF the communication rights for Europe and Africa. In practice it helped to impose the image of a "super DSK"on the French. Stéphane Fouks, the head of Euro-RSCG, had, as early as 1990, the reputation for being "a businessman capable of selling a color television to a blind man." And Euro-RSCG is a powerful agency. It assures the communications of 14 companies of the CAC-40. Not to mention the Lazard Bank, Orange and MacDonald's France.

Euro-RSCG's job is to pass on to the bosses of the press and the media the political "messages" of the biggest advertisers. Many of them deemed the head of the IMF to be the best candidate for the French presidential elections from the point of view of finance and multinational corporations. Here we find ourselves in the midst of an incongruous mixture of press, advertising, business and politics.

Besides Stéphane Fouks, the head of Euro-RSCG, three people seem to have been working almost full time (and at very big salaries and "false fees") for DSK: Ramzi Khiroun (the man with the Panamera Porsche), Gilles Finchestein (one of DSK's ghost writers) and Anne Hommel (a press attaché). They are the ones who are suspected today of having spread the theory of a "plot", in order to try to protect DSK.

Note: Ramzi Kiroun, a Tunisian born in Sarcelles where DSK had been mayor, and personal adviser to him, was the owner of the Porsche that created such a stir in the press when Strauss-Kahn was seen riding in it. French readers may be interested in this article from Le Parisien that discusses the care with which Kiroun watched over every detail of DSK's campaign.

The morality, if not the legality, of all these practices is more than dubious.

In France, the rules of political finance exclude the financing of a political campaign by private enterprises as well as by foreign States and international organizations.

Likewise an enterprise does not have the right to serve for no reason the ambitions of a man through abuse of social goods (note: what we call "corruption"). Did the national promotion of DSK enter into the international deals between the IMF and Euro-RSCG? If so, what were the conditions?

In the end, who will pay the primary campaign bills of DSK? The IMF, the Socialist Party or Anne Sinclair?

Whatever the case may be, we see here the perfidy of French-style "spin doctors": the manipulators of opinion, the little communications geniuses, who were trying to impose first on the Left, then on the French people, a man manifestly not qualified for the high function to which the world superclass aspired for him!

Note: This article is based on the assumption that DSK is not really a Socialist at all, but a financial mogul on a global scale who the Left was fooled into thinking was one of them. The article does not take into the consideration his early ties to the Communists, his long term as a Socialist politician in Sarcelles, as a Socialist deputy in the National Assembly during the presidency of François Mitterrand, and as minister of finance in the government of Lionel Jospin. The article does not go into the nebulous merger that we have seen in recent years of the Left with big business, and with multinational companies and philanthropic organizations.

Nor does the article question the validity of the IMF itself. In a recent communiqué, Marine Le Pen declared that the IMF has become useless and should be abolished.

I don't doubt the truth of the article (at least I have no reason to now), but I do question the implication that the Left did not "know". Certainly the people may not have known they were being sold a bill of goods, but the politicians of the Left knew, not only of his dangerous life-style, but of his great wealth. They were, after all, going to benefit from the Euro-RSCG publicity effort with a triumphant return to Elysée.

A discussion of the connections between big money, globalism, and the Socialists of the world is too complex to go into here. However, the flood of articles about him goes on unabated, just when I was hoping for a respite.

One final note: the letters RSCG stand for the first initial of the last names of the four founders of the agency: Roux, Séguéla, Cayzac nd Goudard.

The images are from Novopress.