We were all stunned by the lead story in today’s New York Times about the drama that unfolded at Attorney General John Ashcroft’s bedside in March 2004 over the NSA’s wiretapping program. Greta said it read like a West Wing episode that Larry O’Donnell would have rejected for being too unbelievable. We talked some about how to cover this story tomorrow and if so in what larger context – the NSA, the Justice Department, a White House in contempt of the law?
Glenn Greenwald writing in Salon today says yesterday’s hearing reminds us how little we know about the NSA eavesdropping program and how unresolved the whole issue is. Katherine has calls out to bloggers Marty Lederman and Josh Marshall among others. Chris has a call out to Harvard Law prof. Larry Tribe who said on Open Source that the NSA Wiretapping story was a slow motion coup against the US Constitution.
ROS community member and fan Garrett “nother” Zevgetis is playing utility infielder on our team this week. He’s helping to produce a show he pitched on the Latinization of American baseball. How’s that for an open source approach?
Wolfits may be out soon but should we actually be talking about getting rid of the World Bank and IMF or at least reforming then so they do cause countries to become basket cases? Take a look at http://www.lifeanddebt.org/about.html. This provides a case study of industries in Jamaica such as bananas, dairy and chicken which appear to have been hurt very seriously by the policies of these international banking organizations.
Considering that Jamaica now owes 4.5 billion to the IMF a key question is Jamaica better off having accepted IMF funds and if the IMF helps countries why are countries like Jamaica saddled with such great debts?
The film also highlights that textile jobs which came to Jamaica are also getting taken away because there are cheaper places to operate. Of course many of the
same jobs were first lost from the US.
Several Latin American countries appear ready to get rid of the World Bank. See blog http://lanr.blogspot.com/2007/05/whats-behind-withdrawals-from-world.html.
You can find 10 pages of hits on google by searching on International Monetary Fund.