We'll leave it the Big Apple justice system to prove whether or not the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Dominique Strauss-Kahn, is guilty or not of the sexual assault charges levied against him.

But the real issue is not the wayward leader of the IMF, but the organization itself. 

Founded by the world's most powerful financial interests at a conference in New Hampshire's famous Bretton Woods resort after WWII -- most of whom envisioned a one-world style of government in lieu of national self determination -- the IMF has since morphed into a literal piggy bank for the globe's financial elitists. 

That summit, conceived to reconfigure the global financial system for the demands of the post-War framework, positioned the United States as a global hegemonic authority.

Like the Federal Reserve System on the domestic level, the IMF and its companion, the World Bank, are the ruling class's legally sanctioned currency printing mechanisms.

Tin-horn totalitarian governments led by despot dictators the world over have used the Bretton Woods institutions as their personal ATM's to line the pockets of elites and lay the groundwork for their version of Fascist style state capitalism. In return, all the American imperialists and their collaborators in Europe have asked for in return is a bit of prime real estate on which to locate their military compounds. 

The Third World's isolated elites have happily and predictably obliged them. The standard apologetics for the specious, corporate variant of "free trade" argue that the professed goals of the IMF -- something like aiding the development of global markets--are not in themselves the problem.

These arguments suggest that the developing world's governments just need a more central role in decision-making, and that Western multinational corporations are too dominant in the process through which IMF and World Bank funds are dispersed.

What these well-meaning critics fail to comprehend, however, is that the relationship between corporate and state power is not inverse, but symbiotic -- they grow in tandem.

Vehicles of perverse corporate welfare such as the IMF and the World Bank are hallmarks of statist-led domination of the world's economy. Their conceptions of "development" give little heed to the living conditions of people in those "developing" countries.

The corrupt governments of the weak countries are no different from those of the Western powers, caring little for ideas of national self-direction as long as they're living cozily in the lap of luxury.

Genuine free markets -- real free trade between individual producers -- function opposite the state capitalist system represented by the Bretton Woods system and its corporate "welfarism" realities.  

Like Ayn Rand so aptly depicted in her novel "Atlas Shrugged," bonafide deregulation and freedom empowers those in the economy who actually carry the weight. For these people, bank credit and favors are not so easy to come by. The real economic producers get the short of the elitists' cash stick. 

When you consider Strauss-Kahn's flashy, sleazy lifestyle -- staying in $3,000 per night luxury hotel suites and being whisked around the globe via $5,000 a pop first class airline tickets -- consider also the unsavory policies of these hallowed institutions that have become symbols of global faux "free enterprise."

Truth be told: they don't represent free markets, but instead a corrupt game of upward income redistribution.

Perhaps the fall of their ignominious leader will give pause to those who barely notice when the IMF takes their hard earned currency and bails out depraved governments with no accountability.