In mid-May, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn was accused and subsequently presumed guilty of sexually assaulting a maid at the hotel where he had been staying.

In fact, what was playing out was not an incident of rape, but much more likely a drama that has profound implications for Americans, one which involves our economic future as financial industry oligarchs fight it out for control of managing the world economy. Getting DSK, as Strauss-Kahn has become known, out of the way was just a step that needed to be taken in order to perpetuate the Ponzi scheme that international finance has become.

Don’t get me wrong, DSK is no angel. But neither are his successor at the IMF, Christine LaGarde, nor those involved in what increasingly appears to be an engineered fall from grace.

A number of things argue that DSK was set up: The fact that he had, for decades, pursued a French-sanctioned life of hedonistic pursuit without a second thought and by doing so had made himself a sitting duck for his enemies; and the fact of the timeline in his trumped-up tabloid prosecution, one which spanned some six weeks and in which authorities knew but kept secret important facts of the case long before they revealed them.

In fact, it wasn’t until it was too late for DSK to redeem himself and resume his chairmanship of the International Monetary Fund that authorities in New York released the information that sank the case against Strauss-Kahn. It’s been credibly argued that the reason for the delay was that politically and financially influential people wanted to see Christine LaGarde take over the position of IMF Managing Director.

It was important, according to several sources, that DSK not stay on as head of the IMF but that he be replaced by someone who was more sympathetic to and supportive of that institution’s ultimately changing its direction, that it not remain a European old-guard institution but rather become once more an important player in the new global governance/financial conglomerate that is emerging in the wake of the current financial turmoil.

In other words, DSK’s ouster may well be nothing less than a step toward the ongoing attempt to establish what amounts to a global political/financial oligarchy. That’s another term for “global governance” by the “international community” to which Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton are so fond of referring.

First, there were the circumstances of DSK’s arrest. The police didn’t bother to ask Strauss-Kahn for his version of the events of May 15 until hours after he’d been in custody. According to one account, Strauss-Kahn ”sat there and nobody had the guts to go up to him and ask if he had committed these acts.”

Even granting that failing, one has to ask why he was even arrested in the first place. A New York Times piece on the matter asks why the IMF Managing Director wasn’t released on bail, which would have given investigators “weeks to investigate the complaint and secure an indictment.”

A quick look at the timeline of the case reveals this: DSK was taken into custody on May 15, and it is clear that both the District Attorney, Cyrus Vance, Jr., and the NYPD were having ”severe doubts” about the credibility of the witness and the viability of the case as early as May 25. Nonetheless, it wasn’t until the end of June, after Timothy Geithner had announced that he might resign and after Christine LaGarde had been approved as the new Managing Director of the IMF, that the news of the case’s imminent collapse was made public and Strauss-Kahn released.

Why the delay? Indeed, why frame DSK at all?

Did it have anything to do with the fact that Strauss-Kahn was, essentially, an enemy of Tim Geithner, where LaGarde is a friend, a even stronger supporter of increasing Euro debt than DSK, and, by extension, validating raising the U.S. debt limit?

Put another way: Was Geithner’s reason for announcing his pending resignation really a ploy to speed up LaGarde’s appointment in order to shore up the Ponzi scheme Geithner himself has been running with the U.S. debt limit through giving it validity by approving another stage of the Greek bailout?

And is the whole affair simply one more step in the move to establish a global oligarchy?

It’s no secret that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was not comfortable with Dominique Strauss-Kahn, an old guard socialist, running the IMF. Geithner torpedoed a payment to Ireland that had been favored by DSK, and he (Geithner) was a Christine LaGarde backer. In addition, French president Nikolas Sarkozy saw in DSK a socialist political opponent who would likely have secured his party’s nomination and run against Sarkozy in the next French presidential election. LaGarde, on the other hand, is a Sarkozy supporter who is committed to keeping the EU together and artificially solvent by whatever means necessary.

Of course, that’s precisely what Geithner is trying to do here in the U.S., and he and his international financial cohorts are desperately trying to raise debt ceilings and put together any type of program they can in order to put the burden on taxpayers for pulling the world out of the bottomless pit that the burgeoning economic disaster represents.

In fact, in countries where the financial conditions have become the most dire, the very assets that make countries viable are about to be put up for sale.

The IMF is one of three financial institutions, including a group of European Union governments and the European Central Bank, that are attempting to head off a monumental collapse of the European Union itself through continuing to bail out failing EU economies, including those of Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and Spain. These countries are essentially ceding “sovereignty over their own economies” to this group of financiers.

One of the means by which the loss of sovereignty will be accomplished will be the privatization (that is, the outright sale to private entities) of these countries’ state-owned assets in order to raise money for debt service. The sale will be overseen by an agency that includes representatives of the IMF and a European Commission. The countries involved will have no voice in what happens to the assets. In Greece’s case, the assets include Greek islands and other publicly held properties and institutions which can be sold to raise an anticipated 300 billion Euros.

As financial analyst Max Keiser explains, the product that the IMF sells is debt, and the more debt it can peddle, the better its own position. The only thing the IMF wants to see is countries like the United States and the troubled EU countries increase their debt ceiling. That way the IMF is assured of having a raison d’etre. Debt is the lifeblood of the IMF. Functioning capitalist economies which are growing and reducing their debt are the enemy of the IMF.

Perversely, then, the IMF is an ally of Barack Obama (and by extension the United States, though not the majority of U.S. citizens), Ben Bernanke (although one wonders if the self-described “clueless” Bernanke understands anything at all about the way economies work), and Tim Geithner, not to mention Hank Paulson, the guy who arguably pushed the whole debt issue over the top. These four especially have been instrumental in promoting economic policies -- from Quantitative Easing to massive budget deficits to uncontrolled spending and raising the debt ceiling -- that weaken us economically and cede power to elements, such as the IMF, of the emerging international financial oligarchy. They’re not unhappy that DSK is out of the picture.