James Grimmelmann posted an extremely lengthy but interesting piece on LawMeme about the Laurie Garrett e-mail brouhaha. It’s about a Pulitzer-winning science journalist who attended the WEF, and then sent some of her friends an e-mail describing it. She became outraged when one of those friends forwarded it, then their friends forwarded it, and so on, and so on, and it wound up all over the Net.

One line in the LawMeme article struck me: “Every email comes with an implicit ‘Bcc:everyone’ header set”. Essentially, if you write it, it might be forwarded to the rest of the world. It turns out that that isn’t what the article is really about, and he doesn’t get around to making his real point until the end, but that’s another story.

I ran across the subject of Laurie’s e-mail (and the LawMeme piece) again while I was looking for something completely unrelated. Coincidence? Perhaps. But it made me realize that I had never gotten around to reading her letter because the “cc: all” idea was more interesting to me. Whoops.

I was not really familiar with the World Economic Forum (and confused it with the WTO as being something that gets protested), but it is attended by heads of state and the economy from all over the world; among many other from the U.S., Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Powell and Ashcroft were there. This is a major event, so reading about it in something that hasn’t been cleaned up or edited for PC-ness is really interesting.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Here are a couple of things that she noted at the convention:

The global economy is in very very very very bad shape. Last year when WEF met here in New York all I heard was, “Yeah, it’s bad, but recovery is right around the corner”. This year “recovery” was a word never uttered. Fear was palpable — fear of enormous fiscal hysteria. The watchwords were “deflation”, “long term stagnation” and “collapse of the dollar”. All of this is without war.

If the U.S. unilaterally goes to war, and it is anything short of a quick surgical strike (lasting less than 30 days), the economists were all predicting extreme economic gloom … Very few economists or ministers of finance predicted the world getting out of that economic funk for minimally five-10 years, once the downward spiral ensues.

For a minority of the participants there was another layer of AntiAmericanism that focused on moralisms and religion. I often heard delegates complain that the US “opposes the rights of children”, because we block all treaties and UN efforts that would support sex education and condom access for children and teens.

I attended a small lunch with Ashcroft, and observed Ralph Reed and other prominent Christian fundamentalists working the room and bowing their heads before eating. The rest of the world’s elite finds this American Christian behavior at least as uncomfortable as it does Moslem or Hindu fundamentalist behavior. They find it awkward every time a US representative refers to “faith-based” programs. It’s different from how it makes non-Christian Americans feel — these folks experience it as downright embarrassing.

It’s not my normal political focus, but it is good reading. And scary.