The Austerity Sociopaths

Oh, hell yeah, we do.

Today we hear of a truly horrific story.  The head of the International Monetary Fund has been arrested and charged with raping a hotel maid in New York.

This is honestly a Hollywood movie plot.  You have the head of an elite organization whose primary purpose is to make sure huge banks don't get hit by the default problems of developing world countries.  The IMF usually works like this: a country screws up its economy, usually because of the behavior of its financial and political elites.  The IMF comes in and bails out that country and in return screws over the populace by gutting social services, destroying pensions and forcing austerity on the people who had nothing to do with causing the problem in the first place.

Does any of this sound familiar?

As we watch austerity fail in Ireland and Britain - and the rest of the PIIGS, too - we wonder why a country would do this?  Why, for instance, should we cut teacher's salaries in Wisconsin, because Wall Street Smart Guys tanked the economy?  Hell if I know, but that's the IMF game plan.  It's served the "global North" well enough until it got turned on some of them.

And now we have the perfect metaphor.  The head of the IMF forces a hotel maid - a minimum wage position, often filled with immigrants - on to his bed and sodomizes her.  And then he scoots off to JFK to catch his First Class flight back to Paris.  Luckily, he was arrested before he got out of the country.

I have always assumed that critics of the Wall Street Gang were engaged in metaphorical hyperbole when they said that finance guys are all a bunch of sociopaths, but it might actually be clinically accurate in a lot of cases.

If he wasn't French, I would expect someone in the GOP Congressional ranks - or maybe Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly - to defend him.  Maybe Rand Paul will.

This just disgusts me.