The D.C. offices of the International Monetary Fund are “an
international island in the midst of the American capital,”
furnishing “a climate in which romances often flourish — and
lines are sometimes crossed,”
Binyamin Applebaum and Sheryl Gay Stolberg report in the New
York Times.
The IMF’s “female employees [are] vulnerable to harassment,”
they report, citing numerous examples. “The laws of the United
States do not apply inside its walls, and until earlier this month
the I.M.F.’s own rules contained an unusual provision that some
experts and former officials say has encouraged managers to pursue
the women who work for them: ‘Intimate personal relationships
between supervisors and subordinates do not, in themselves,
constitute harassment.’”
How long have we Americans been lectured about how backward
the United States is, and how much more sophisticated our
European superiors are? Yet if recent news accounts are to be
believed, IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn had been
boorishly
imposing himself on women for years — and was never called to
account until he made the mistake of attempting to rape a hotel
maid in Manhattan.
Our old-fashioned belief in the Rule of Law is one of those
allegedly “backward” traditions that Ruling Class elitist are
forever trying to cure us of. Perhaps now we understand why.
