• by Ignacio Ramonet
• Monday, June 13, 2011
• Inter Press Service

One of the most powerful men in the world, director of the largest financial institution of the planet, sexually assaults one of the world's most vulnerable people, a humble African immigrant. In its raw concision, this image sums up with the expressive force of an editorial cartoon one of the central characteristics of our age: the violence of inequality, writes Ignacio Ramonet, editor of "Le Monde diplomatique en espanol".

Ramonet writes in this article that what makes the case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn more pathetic is that, if the charges against him prove true, his downfall will also be a metaphor for the current moral unravelling of social democracy. With the aggravating factor that it also reveals, in France, the dangers of complicit media. Why did the media keep the electorate in the dark and present the IMF chief as "the great hope of the left" when it was clear that his Achilles' heel could short circuit his ascension at any moment?

The massive conversion to free market economics and neoliberal globalisation, the renunciation of any defence of the welfare state and the public sector, the new alliance with financial capital and banking have all stripped social democracy of the primary features of its identity. Perhaps it was a brilliant move by the financial bosses of the world to place a "socialist" at the head of the IMF to impose draconian neoliberal structural adjustment programmes on his "socialist" friends in Greece, Portugal, and Spain [vi].

Thus the explosion of popular disgust and outrage, the rejection of the false choice between the two main platforms, the awakening of society, and the end of inaction and indifference. The people want an end to the system.

// NOT FOR PUBLICATION IN CANADA, CZECH REPUBLIC, IRELAND, POLAND, AND THE UNITED STATES //

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

Where next?

Advertisement