How can I tell a story we already know too well? Her name
was Africa. His was France. He colonized her, exploited her, silenced her and
even decades after it was supposed to have ended, still acted with a high hand
in resolving her affairs in places like Côte d’Ivoire, a name she had been
given because of her export products, not her own identity.

Her name was Asia. His was Europe. Her name was silence. His
was power. Her name was poverty. His was wealth. Her name was Her, but what was
hers? His name was His, and he presumed everything was his, including her, and
he thought he could take her without asking and without consequences. It was a
very old story, though its outcome had been changing a little in recent
decades. And this time around the consequences are shaking a lot of
foundations, all of which clearly needed shaking.

Who would ever write a fable as obvious, as heavy-handed as
the story we’ve just been given? The extraordinarily powerful head of the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), a global organization that has created mass
poverty and economic injustice, allegedly assaulted a hotel maid, an immigrant
from Africa, in a hotel’s luxury suite in New York City.

Worlds have collided. In an earlier era, her word would have
been worthless against his and she might not have filed charges, or the police
might not have followed through and yanked Dominique Strauss-Kahn off the plane
to Paris at the last moment. But she did, and they did, and now he’s in
custody, and the economy of Europe has been dealt a blow, and French politics
have been upended, and that nation is reeling and soul-searching.

What were they thinking, these men who decided to give him
this singular position of power, despite all the stories and evidence of such
viciousness? What was he thinking when he decided he could get away with it?
Did he think he was in France, where apparently he did get away with it? Only
now is the young woman there, who says he assaulted her in 2002, making her
allegations public — her own politician mother talked her out of it, and she
worried about the impact it could have on her journalistic career.

And the Guardian reports that these stories “have added
weight to claims by Piroska Nagy, a Hungarian-born economist, that the fund’s
director engaged in sustained harassment when she was working at the IMF that
left her feeling she had little choice but to agree to sleep with him at the
World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2008. She alleged he persistently
called and e-mailed on the pretext of asking questions about [her expertise,]
Ghana’s economy, but then used sexual language and asked her out.”

In some accounts, the woman Strauss-Kahn is charged with
assaulting in New York is from Ghana, in others a Muslim from nearby Guinea.
“Ghana — Prisoner of the IMF,” ran a headline in 2001 by the usually
mild-mannered BBC. Its report documented the way the IMF’s policies had
destroyed that rice-growing nation’s food security, opening it up to cheap
imported U.S. rice, and plunging the country’s majority into dire poverty.

Pimping for the Global North

There’s an axiom evolutionary biologists used to like:
“Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” or the development of the
embryonic individual repeats that of its species’ evolution. Does the ontogeny
of this alleged assault echo the phylogeny of the International Monetary Fund?
After all, the organization was founded late in World War II as part of the
notorious Bretton Woods conference that would impose American economic visions
on the rest of the world.

The IMF was meant to be a lending institution to help
countries develop, but by the 1980s it had become an organization with an
ideology — free trade and free-market fundamentalism. It used its loans to gain
enormous power over the economies and policies of nations throughout the global
South.

However, if the IMF gained power throughout the 1990s, it
began losing that power in the 21st century, thanks to powerful popular
resistance to the economic policies it embodied and the economic collapse such
policies produced. Strauss-Kahn was brought in to salvage the wreckage of an
organization that, in 2008, had to sell off its gold reserves and reinvent its
mission.

Her name was Africa. His name was IMF. He set her up to be
pillaged, to go without health care, to starve. He laid waste to her to enrich
his friends. Her name was Global South. His name was Washington Consensus. But
his winning streak was running out and her star was rising.

It was the IMF that created the economic conditions that
destroyed the Argentinian economy by 2001, and it was the revolt against the
IMF (among other so-called neoliberal forces) that prompted Latin America’s
rebirth over the past decade. Whatever you think of Hugo Chavez, it was loans
from oil-rich Venezuela that allowed Argentina to pay off its IMF loans early
so that it could set its own saner economic policies.

The IMF was a predatory force, opening developing countries
up to economic assaults from the wealthy North and powerful transnational
corporations. It was a pimp. Maybe it still is. But since the Seattle
anti-corporate demonstrations of 1999 set a global movement alight, there has
been a revolt against it, and those forces have won in Latin America, changing
the framework of all economic debates to come and enriching our imaginations
when it comes to economies and possibilities.

Strangers on a train

The New York Times reported it this way: “As the impact
of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s predicament hit home, others, including some in the news
media, began to reveal accounts, long suppressed or anonymous, of what they
called Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s previously predatory behavior toward women and his
aggressive sexual pursuit of them, from students and journalists to
subordinates.”

The United States has not been short on sex scandals of
late. They reek of the same arrogance, but they were at least consensual (as
far as we know). The head of the IMF is charged with sexual assault. If that
term confuses you take out the word “sexual” and just focus on
“assault,” on violence, on the refusal to treat someone as a human
being, on the denial of the most basic of human rights, the right to bodily
integrity and corporeal safety.

“The rights of man” was one of the great phrases
of the French Revolution, but it’s always been questionable whether it included
the rights of women.

The United States has 100 million flaws, but I am proud that
the police believed this woman and that she will have her day in court. I am
gratified this time not to be in a country that has decided the career of a
powerful man or the fate of an international institution matters more than this
woman and her rights and wellbeing.

This is what we mean by democracy: that everyone has a
voice, that no one gets away with things just because of their wealth, power,
race or gender.

The poor starve, while the rich eat their words

What makes the sex scandal that broke open last week so
resonant is the way the alleged assailant and victim model larger relationships
around the world, starting with the IMF’s assault on the poor. That assault is
part of the great class war of our era, in which the rich and their proxies in
government have endeavored to aggrandize their holdings at the expense of the
rest of us.

Poor countries in the developing world paid first, but the
rest of us are paying now, as those policies and the suffering they impose come
home to roost via right-wing economics that savage unions, education systems,
the environment and programs for the poor, disabled and elders in the name of
privatization, free markets and tax cuts.

In one of the more remarkable apologies of our era, Bill
Clinton — who had his own sex scandal once upon a time — told the United
Nations on World Food Day in October 2008, as the global economy was melting
down: “We need the World Bank, the IMF, all the big foundations and all
the governments to admit that, for 30 years, we all blew it, including me when
I was president. We were wrong to believe that food was like some other product
in international trade, and we all have to go back to a more responsible and
sustainable form of agriculture.”

He said it even more bluntly last year: “Since 1981,
the United States has followed a policy, until the last year or so when we
started rethinking it, that we rich countries that produce a lot of food should
sell it to poor countries and relieve them of the burden of producing their own
food, so, thank goodness, they can leap directly into the industrial era. It
has not worked.

“It may have been good for some of my farmers in
Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake. It was a mistake that I was
a party to. I am not pointing the finger at anybody. I did that. I have to live
every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in
Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did.”

Clinton’s admissions were on a level with former Federal
Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s 2008 admission that the premise of his
economic politics was wrong. The former policies and those of the IMF, World
Bank, and free-trade fundamentalists had created poverty, suffering, hunger and
death.

A remarkable thing happened after the devastating Haitian
earthquake last year: The IMF, under Strauss-Kahn, planned to use the
vulnerability of that country to force new loans on it with the usual terms.

Activists reacted to a plan guaranteed to increase the
indebtedness of a nation already crippled by the kind of neoliberal policies
for which Clinton belatedly apologized. The IMF blinked, stepped back and
agreed to cancel Haiti’s existing debt to the organization. It was a remarkable
victory for informed activism.

Powers of the powerless

It looks as though a hotel maid may end the career of one of
the most powerful men in the world, or rather that he will have ended it
himself by discounting the rights and humanity of that worker.

Pretty much the same thing happened to Meg Whitman, the
former E-Bay billionaire, who ran for governor of California last year. She
leapt on the conservative bandwagon by attacking undocumented immigrants —
until it turned out that she had herself long employed one, Nicky Diaz, as a
housekeeper.

When, after nine years, it had become politically
inconvenient to keep Diaz around, she fired the woman abruptly, claimed she’d
never known her employee was undocumented, and refused to pay her final wages.
In other words, Whitman was willing to spend $140 million on her campaign, but
may have brought herself down thanks, in part, to $6,210 in unpaid wages. Diaz
said, “I felt like she was throwing me away like a piece of garbage.”

The garbage had a voice, the California Nurses Union
amplified it, and California was spared domination by a billionaire whose
policies would have further brutalized the poor and impoverished the middle
class.

The struggles for justice of an undocumented housekeeper and
an immigrant hotel maid are microcosms of the great world war of our time. If
Nickie Diaz and the battle over last year’s IMF loans to Haiti demonstrate
anything, it’s that the outcome is uncertain. Sometimes we win the skirmishes,
but the war continues.

So much remains to be known about what happened in that
expensive hotel suite in Manhattan last week, but what we do know is this: A
genuine class war is being fought openly in our time, and last week, a
so-called socialist put himself on the wrong side of it.

His name was privilege, but hers was possibility. His was
the same old story, but hers was a new one about the possibility of changing a
story that remains unfinished, that includes all of us, that matters so much,
that we will watch, but also make and tell in the weeks, months, years, decades
to come.

Rebecca Solnit is the
author of 13 books, including “A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary
Communities That Arise in Disasters” and “Infinite City: A San
Francisco Atlas.” A longer version of this piece ran in Tomdispatch.com