The IMF Clusterfuck And The African Queen

“Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”                                                                                               Hepburn to Bogart – The African Queen

Question: Did you ever get to wonderin’ why those Somali pirates appeared suddenly off the coast of Africa two years ago?  Well it all began two decades earlier as young Somali fishermen woke up to the fact that their safe and plentiful coastal waters were disappearing; their livelihood and their villages’ food supplies hijacked. How, you might ask?

It certainly is true that a principal culprit was the illegal and often clandestine encroachment by fishing fleets from developed (read ‘civilized’) nations like South Korea, Japan and Spain, among others. The pillaging of the Somali coastline began shortly after the dismantling of Somalia’s government roughly twenty years ago.

Moreover, from the 1970s until its civil war in the early 90s, the Somali government was bent over backwards getting fucked by the IMF and its partners at the Paris Club and the World Bank. “Like most countries devastated by debt in the late 1970s, Somalia could rely only on the nostrums of the IMF and its program of Structural Adjustment (SAP).”  This program typically required that “underdeveloped” countries lay down, open their economic kimonos, and spread their legs wide – allowing foreign corporations and multinationals to enter and do what they will; that is, of course, if the governments of those countries wanted to get their hands on IMF money.  It was a nice quid pro quo if you will.  All part of the package for economic globalization!!

More often then not, where SAP is implemented, agribusiness or other multinationals move in and, without any real oversight or regulation (an SAP signature move), eviscerate local economies, close down smaller indigenous operations, set up sweat-shops, and displace villagers, confiscating natural wealth, planting miles of exportable crops, or building “cities of pigs that stretch around the world.”  [Incidentally, this is the reason for swine flu epidemics. They are a direct result of large-scale live stocking and agribusiness farming which create large colonies or “pig cities” of tens of thousands of pigs, with a commensurate increase in the potential for squalor, waste and disease.]

These are some of the reasons there are still pirates off the coast of Somalia even today.  No doubt, they are looking to get even with all those who fucked them. But the IMF continues to extract its pound of flesh, not only from the poorer countries of Africa and elsewhere around the globe, but now from its EU brethren in Greece, Portugal and Ireland. But what does this all have to do with a poor immigrant maid from West African Guinea, or does it?

OK. Granted Dominique Strauss-Kahn had been head of the IMF only since 2007; but perhaps he wasn’t satisfied just fucking the poorer countries of the world. So, allegedly, he decided to pick on one lonely black woman from the poorest of the underdeveloped countries in Africa. Quite possibly, one would think, he could get away with a little action on the side.  After all, no one seemed to mind how his organization had been fucking the rest of the African continent for years now.

And yet still we sit enthralled, dazed at the images on our screens, exactly as we did while our very own St. Bill was getting his proof of membership re-nude and shined by Monica in the Oral Orifice.  But, why are we so fascinated by the sordid details about whether or not the head of the IMF got “head,” how, and from whom?  Does it irritate or surprise us?  Perhaps it fascinates our civilized (read ‘repressed’) sensibilities that he allegedly had the nerve to take what he apparently felt, in typically colonialist fashion, was his for the taking?  After all, his IMF did this regularly to debtor nations.

On the other hand, perhaps this poor immigrant woman is just trying to get even for her sufferings and those of her fellow Africans at the hands of the IMF. Her attorney keeps reassuring us that she knew nothing about this man or who he was; but, hey, that’s just good legal representation (i.e., marketing). One might even sympathize with such a conspiracy were it found to be true.  After all, she is the ideal ‘poster-child’ for all those persons displaced by the IMF’s machinations and suspect policies. Who would blame her for taking revenge on the emperor running the institution that had already fucked her and her ‘countrymen’ for two decades now?

These assault allegations, moreover, come at a time when the IMF continues to impose its imperious will on various African governments, forcing countries to devalue local currencies and slash services for the poor through more Structural Adjustment Programs. As Online Nigeria reports:

[Today’s headline] ironically underscores years of failed economic policies championed by the IMF on the African continent, the very reason that increasing numbers of Africans have become vulnerable second class citizens in Western capitals, often exploited as sex slaves, maids and nannies by powerful capitalist oligarchs.

So where is the real rape taking place?  I believe it is the IMF’s relentless fucking of poor nations for their land, raw materials, and the slave labor that supports our rapacious Western lifestyle.  Hopefully, that is what this story will shed light on, so that those of us here in the ‘first world’ can see things more clearly.  After all, the bill for one night stay in the luxury suite of his Manhattan hotel was enough to provide a daily wage for several thousand African workers in Guinea today.  But, our media will not report on that rape, now will they?

By the way, did you know that African Guinea hosts an abundant cache of natural resources, including gold, diamonds and rare metals, as well as a significant portion of the world’s known bauxite reserves? No wonder the IMF wants to impose an SAP on the region… all the easier for us first-worlders legally to take whatever we want whenever we feel the urge.  The Western rape of this country and the African continent continues, unabated.  After all, the white power brokers see it as their god-given right; just like taking an African woman whenever they happen to feel the urge.

I guess what I am saying folks is that life imitates life.  The allegations against the head of the IMF with this African woman is itself a metaphor for what the IMF has been doing to the nations of Africa for decades.  Isn’t it great that sixty years after The African Queen we are still trying to help those poor underdeveloped people rise above nature.