#but he's an Australian citizen so technically he's on both teams

[fazcinatingblog]

My first thought was that Annabel was dating Corey Rocchiccioli but sadly I don't think that's right

[archdioceseofsuva-blog]

The Archbishop versus the WB on Fiji poverty (FT 23 Feb. 2019)

Last week (Fiji Times 17 Feb. 2019), Catholic Archbishop Peter Loy Chong mounted an astonishing broad-ranging critique of the powerful international organizations, World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), alleging that their policy advice to the Bainimarama Government (and developing countries) was “anti-poor”.

Apparently, the Ministry of Education (PS Burchell) had used WB advice as part of their justification for using the Open Merit Recruiting Selection (OMRS) to appoint principals of privately owned schools.

Archbishop Chong, however, not only criticized the Bainimarama Government’s plans to privatize schools and hospitals, but with the sermons of the Catholic Pope John Paul II to guide him, saw these WB and IMF strategies to push globalization and privatization on the Third World, as being primarily in the interests of the developed corporate West, while harming the poor in developing countries.

Just as surprising, despite the serious criticisms made by this reputable and responsible Head of the Catholic Church in Fiji, there has been no public response from the Ministry of Education and the Bainimarama Government, nor from the academics of the three universities in Fiji, and none from the WB either, not surprising given their total lack of accountability to the public whose welfare they “advise” on.

Nevertheless, I would suggest that readers and in particular economics students should carefully and critically read the arguments made by Archbishop Chong, simply because the WB and IMF have such great influence over economic and social policies of Third World countries like Fiji, profoundly affecting the lives of our poor. Are Chong’s arguments all correct or should some be qualified (as I suggest below)?

Archbishop Chong’s criticisms are even more pertinent in the light of the most recent IMF Article 4 recommendations to the Bainimarama Government (Fiji Times, 20 February 2019) but that deserves a separate article.

To help students see more clearly, I summarize Archbishop Chong’s arguments into four sets of inter-related important development topics:

(a) the WB/IMF and their Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs)

(b) the impact of globalization on the world’s poor

© the impact of the Bainimarama Government’ privatization program on Fiji’s poor, and

(d) whether WB, IMF and the Bainimarama Government are following the principles of genuine democracy in their decision-making.

I add any disagreements I may have or qualifications in italics.

The WB, IMF and the SAP

Archbishop Chong asserted that when Third World Countries cannot repay their loans from WB and IMF (and I suggest sometimes even when the capacity to repay debts is not an issue) these institutions instruct our countries to carry out Structural Adjustment Programs which include reduced government spending on essential services (like health, education, welfare), reduce taxes of high income earners, implement other market oriented policies such as privatization and globalization, and the ORMS (I doubt if this was important to the WB or IMF), all making the rich richer, and the poor poorer (I argue below, not always), thereby widening the gap between the rich and the poor (not always, I suggest).

In the process, the poor are rendered powerless, worsened by the lack of effective protection by workers’ associations.

Archbishop Chong argues that the central objective of the WB and IMF is not to alleviate poverty in the developing countries, but to advance the agenda and economic interests of the West. (I suggest below that the “west” is not an accurate category any more, given all the new Super Powers that benefit from globalization, like Japan, China and India. I also elaborate below on the “unaccountable” nature of WB and IMF).

Globalization and the poor

Archbishop Chong argues that while globalization promises that development will trickle down to the poor, that trickle down has not happened historically (I suggest below that Chong is not completely accurate); the rich have become richer and the poor have become poorer, with the gap between the rich and poor widening. Globalization is like a ship with no map headed for shipwreck (it is also not clear that this is so.)

[In some countries, the poor have become much better off even if the rich have become richer. For instance, development economists have still not caught with up the most incredible economic miracle over the last two hundred years of China using globalization and increased access to global markets to lift more than 400 million people out of poverty. Sure, the rich have got richer (there are more Chinese and Indian millionaires in the world than that from most developed countries), but their poor have also become much better off. This is so not just in China but also in places like Korea, Brazil, Malaysia and now slowly even in India, still massively plagued by abject poverty.

Of course, the gap between the rich and the poor might have increased, but it is not correct to generalize that globalization has universally “made the poor poorer” just because the gap has grown wider or the rich have got richer.

Ask the poor “would you rather stay poor while the rich remain the same” or “would you prefer to become richer, even if the rich become richer still”? Or ask poorly paid garment workers in Fiji “Would you like a poorly paid job, or no job at all”?

Whatever leftist (usually well-off) activists might recommend, we know what the poor themselves would answer to both questions.

Bainimarama Government’s Privatization Plans and the poor

Archbishop Chong argues that the Bainimarama Government’s plans to privatize the Lautoka and Ba hospitals and schools will hand over these essential services to the private sector who will put profit before service and worsen service to the poor. He correctly sees that it would be totally unfair given that taxpayers are already paying taxes precisely for these essential services for which they will pay again from private providers, without their taxes being correspondingly reduced. Chong argues that this implies that that the Bainimarama Government and politicians would be serving the WB and IMF, not the Fiji people (not necessarily so).

[It has been my experience that over the decades since Independence, succeeding Fiji governments (including the Bainimarama Government) have referred to the WB and IMF only when it has suited the government. There has been much WB/IMF advice which has been simply ignored by Fiji governments.]

Catholic teaching on genuine democracy

Chong notes that Catholic social teaching emphasizes that the human person ought to be the center of all policies not the World Bank or IMF policies.

The people must participate in the decision making, knowing full well what the decisions mean for their own welfare and to themselves as people.

All citizens must practice genuine equal relationships and genuine (not just token) solidarity with the community, for the good of the community and the planet (environment). Policies, like the ORMS, must not be imposed on the community by any government or outside agencies like the World Bank and IMF.

These arguments by Archbishop Chong go to the heart of the invidious role played by World Bank and IMF staff in developing countries like Fiji.

In the sections below, I elaborate but also qualify and disagree with some of the ideas presented by Archbishop Chong.

The Unaccountable World Bank (and IMF) Staff

Do Fiji people ever wonder where WB and IMF Teams come from, who they serve and who they are accountable to, for the advice that they give, often with grave consequences for the poor among us?

Of course, these WB and IMF persons, based in Washington or wherever are extremely intelligent and qualified professionals in their own fields. They are drawn mostly from the developed countries but increasingly from the large developing countries like India and Bangladesh. They are paid phenomenally high tax-free salaries which are many times that of the Prime Ministers or Permanent Secretaries in the countries they advise.

Most importantly, these anonymous god-like “advisers” are not accountable to the developing country people but only to their superiors in Washington, whose ideas and priorities they must propagate, if they are to look after their careers. The local people’s interests and views are not their priority.

They work on priority areas, workplans, and projects decided by their superiors in HQ, and at the times decided by their superiors. One of the tragedies for us is that these work plan priorities change over time without any correspondence to the needs of the countries to whom they deliver their “advice”.

My personal experience of WB

In the nineteen nineties I myself worked for eighteen months, as USP’s contribution to a two person team (with Australian consultant and later WB staff member Ian P. Morris), on a six Pacific country World Bank project in the field of secondary and post-secondary education, whose massive reports are in the USP Library. Morris and I had to work hard to change the WB pre-conceived idea, based on narrow rate of return analysis, that the focus of government should be on lower level basic education and not tertiary. Morris and I had argued that the Pacific countries needed graduates at all levels, and especially at the tertiary levels given the huge backlogs in training during the colonial era. Thankfully, they had agreed. At that time, the WB was far more concerned about wider development issues than the IMF.

But then the WB priorities changed and they disappeared from the education scene, I suspect leaving it in some uncoordinated fashion to ADB and Forum Secretariat for both whom I also personally did some consultancy work on basic education and technical training in the Pacific (those reports are also in the USP Library)).

Then, some five years ago, WB staff (different lot of course) reappeared in Fiji working on Fiji Bureau of Statistics household survey data, producing a technical report on poverty in Fiji. They essentially replicated the work I had been doing (with some additional “small area” estimates based on census data), but at probably fifty times the cost of my services to the FBS. Their results were pretty much the same as mine, except they were grossly wrong on the lack of changes in poverty in rural areas (I suspect because of errors in their methodology). These WB advisers never explained the discrepancies with our results and disappeared without creating any capacity in the FBS to continue the work they had been doing. The WB have never cared much about developing local capacity and sustainability of research capacity at the local universities. Why should they? There would be no need for their services if they did!

The WB never organized any national workshops of the kind that I assisted the Fiji Bureau of Statistics to conduct (with the great support of the Government Statistician then (the late) Timoci Bainimarama) or later (Epeli Waqavonovono) not just in Suva but also Labasa and Nadi, with Fiji Government departments and NGOs. They were facilitated by USP (Dean of FBE Professor Biman Prasad) and Fiji National University (Dean Dr. Mahendra Reddy and VC Dr. Ganesh Chand). These workshops truly democratized knowledge among the local communities- never a concern of WB or IMF. Sadly, such workshops are no longer conducted by the FBS.

But essentially, WB “advisers” come and go from countries like Fiji, depending on WB priorities, not ours. What is horrifying is that after giving their advice (good or bad), they never return to be accountable to the local people as are local professors of economics, or the Catholic Archbishop of Fiji, or the Bainimarama Government currently (we leave out their totally unaccountable period from the 2006 coup to the 2014 elections), or Opposition Members of Parliament.

Neither is there any genuine collective democratic participation of the local community in the decision making as Archbishop Chong called for in his Fiji Times article. Simply holding elections is not “democracy”.

WB Not Serving the “West” anymore.

In the early decades after WWII, those controlling the WB and IMF were indeed the Super Powers from the “West” as Archbishop Chong alleges, but they also included Japan from the East.

In recent decades, however, China and India have become far more important in world trade and globalization. Indeed, any economic forecasts for the economies of developed countries nowadays begin with economic projections for China and India, just as they used to thirty years ago begin with forecasts of US, Europe and Japan. So the benefits of globalization are not any more just the monopoly of developed countries of the “West” as used to be the rhetoric twenty years ago, but must also now include new countries in Asia (China, India, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia) and South America (Brazil).

Unfortunately, not discussed much at all in our media (which is sadly mired in moronic discussions about rugby sevens), is that new Super Powers like China, India and Brazil, are facing an uphill battle behind the scenes to try and gain their proper voting rights on the bodies that control World Bank, IMF and World Trade Organization (WTO) which is an even more influential international body for globalization.

It will be interesting to see whether these organizations change in any way when China and WB do obtain greater say on their boards. I suspect that as Trump has done with UN organizations, they will simply withdraw their contributions and apply pressure elsewhere.

Who needs the Structural Adjustment Programs?

Note also that while most Western countries have long protected their domestic goods and services from the cheaper goods and services being produced by the newly emerging countries, the pressures from globalization as implemented by WTO, mean that many non-competitive domestic industries in the developed countries are collapsing, giving rise to the Trump and Brexit phenomena. Even in Australia, after decades of sucking up billions of dollars of taxpayers’ subsidies, the essentially uncompetitive car manufacturing industries have closed down, causing great angst amongst the redundant workers, unions, and political parties.

It is not hard to understand that high wage industries in Australia and US (like car or shoe manufacturing), cannot compete with the same products produced by the same companies, using the same technologies, in developing countries like Brazil or China or India, where the wages are one fifth of that in the developed countries, where workers work much harder, for longer hours, and without all the expensive health and safety regulations and environment protections, and often without the unions that prevail in the developed countries.

All these developed countries and their governments (as here in Australia) face the conundrum of stagnant real wages in industries which are subject to the harsh discipline of free markets and globalization.

These Western countries (including US, Japan and Australia) need Structural Adjustment Programs and lower wages or restrained wage growth, but the WB and IMF are rarely to be seen or heard giving stern advice and SAPs to their governments in the same way they do to weak Third World countries like Fiji. In any case, the developed countries could not care less about WB or IMF, unless they are totally mired in debt and need loans to bail them out, as do bankrupt countries like Greece. Fiji is not there, yet.

The Fiji Government and the Fiji public need to heed the advice of responsible and reputable clerics like Archbishop Chong (with their vows of personal poverty), who have no political agenda or vested material interest to gain in giving that advice. Unlike the grossly over-paid WB and IMF Teams, Archbishop Chong is not going anywhere soon and can be held to account by Fiji people.

[wavemaker9]

I had a stray thought of the two Kyles swapping instead, mainly just so Angel!Doug can show up while human kyle is there and Kyle has a little panic moment about it because the vessel being used looks just like the Doug he knew in his world & he was /not/ expecting that. Mainly I just like confronting my boy with the fact that he’s the reason his childhood friend is dead. That’s a bad reason, but it’s the reason.

(also i typed ‘the vessel being used looks just like the Doug he knew in his world’ and it really sunk in. this fucking angel with frosted tips. Jfc. i’m so. Fuck. ALSO i’m getting off topic but i remembered justin saying in the wrestling monster factory where they made him how he had frosted tips at some point and then had another good laugh about law abiding citizen and how the demon persona there is named doug. If i didn’t already have the vaguest idea of how i picture doug, I’d just make human him suspiciously similar to justin mcelroy at this point. Justin’s evil twin)

Another great option! Ivan being the one to swap! One team that’s all humans and one team that’s all monsters. Human gil is happiest. Kyle here’s your boyfriend but less likely to get any of us killed or sacrifice your humanity, are you sure you don’t want this one instead? Are you /really/ sure? We can pick up some halloween vamp teeth for him if you’re really nostalgic but I think it’ll be fine. Djinn Gil is happy too but like. None of us are human now, why are we still hunting things. Let’s cut our ‘losses’ and carry on with our lives (Vetala Kyle having to remind Gil they also do this to help monsters too, it’s not just for human benefit, cmon gil, i know you’re happy as a part of this hunting team and i don’t even have to search your desires to guess that, stop being like that). Both kyles mainly just want their friend/boyfriend back, this one is nice too, but it’s not the same (both also tell gil they’re gonna tell their ivan once he’s back how eager gil was to swap them out and ivan’s gonna fuck with gil in retaliation for like a month at least and it’s gonna be really funny just fyi). Both Ludwigs are, again, semi-rethinking their being a part of the team. It’s good and they do good things and sometimes it’s fun and they do like the team more or less (some german ones more than other australian ones), but. They go through the weirdest shit, dude. What the fuck.

Also back to angel doug but him never really full out betraying the boys. Hides a lot of shit and asks them to do missions that turn out very dangerous and disregards their lives a touch and is just. Awful in general, but never full on betrays them like demon!doug does. Basically puts his priorities above theirs but things never work out so that he full on contradicts theirs in quite so terrible a fashion. I considered something like that for him too, kinda like the metatron thing, not that exactly but that was hte first ‘betraying angel’ example i thought of, but I think I like it more if he remains a terrible but consistent ally to them. Definitely not in the ‘he’s an angel so he should be better’ way, but more so, like, Gil and ivan /wish/ he’d betray them because at least they would have a reason to stop fucking. Humoring him as best as they can tolerate. But no such luck, he’s still a friend of kyle’s and they still technically owe him and they’re gonna have to deal with this walking fashion disaster asshole with a pair of wings, sorry boys.

Fuck I should design demon and angel dougs, fuck. ANGEL DOUG AT LEAST SOMETIMES WITH THAT DOUCHEBAG STYLE TRENCH COAT THOUGH. LIKE CAS BUT THE BLACK ONE YOU SEE THOSE GUYS WHO HAVE 20 SWORDS AND TALK ALL THE TIME ABOUT HOW GREAT MOUNTAIN DEW AND ATHEISM IS. OH OH LIKE. THE WORLD’S END. THE ONE GARY WEARS. GARY MIGHT HONESTLY NOW THAT I THINK ABOUT IT BE THE CLOSEST EXAMPLE OF WHAT I TEND TO PICTURE FOR DOUG’S FASHION SENSE. NOT IT EXACTLY BUT V. CLOSE. IT’S IMPORTANT TO ME THAT DOUG BE AS DOUCHEY LOOKING AS POSSIBLE IN LITERALLY EVERY AU SO THE OUTSIDE MATCHES THE INSIDE. I’D GIVE HIM A FEDORA BUT IT’D COVER UP THE FROSTED TIPS, YKNOW?

Also Doug at least once or twice appearing into the room with “hey look, it’s everyone’s favorite angel; listen up, I need you to [....]”. There are at least a couple other times where he appears behind one of the non-kyle three and mimics their actions in over the top ways or just does assholish gestures behind them where kyle can see and kyle of course laughs every time. The person shoots kyle a look before turning around to see what kyle’s staring at and doug’s suddenly standing on their other side via jumpcut, rolling his eyes exaggeratedly at the person and shaking his head like they’re so dumb for missing him. One time Ivan caught on and just swung his fist back into doug’s stomach. it didn’t particularly hurt doug but he was still pretty proud of that one. However the next time he tried doug had made sure to catch him while he was standing by a wall so when he swung his hand back, he hit that instead. Suddenly standing across the room by kyle (who is simultaneously trying not to laugh and choking on laughter at this point), leaning against the wall with his arms crossed like ‘you’re gonna wanna be more careful, clumsy. You humans need your hands to do a lot of things and I ain’t gonna heal you if you hurt them running around punching random shit. Besides, I got better things you idiots can be doing’. One time he tried to appear behind kyle to make fun of him but nobody besides kyle finds doug even remotely amusing so it was lame and he didn’t try it again.

[khdailyhealth]

News: Raynel Mederos, Jade Bornea, Jesse White, More

Last Friday freshly signed Dragon Fire Boxing prospect, King Raynel Mederos enhanced his professional record to 3-0 with a damaging body shot. The Cuban amateur boxing standout Mederos dismantled Bolivian Carlos Ever Rocha HURTADO 4-4 inside 50 seconds in the opening stanza. One of the featured headline battles at the Club Mexico Stadium in Santiago Chile. The occasion was the initial of the freshly introduced Dragon Fire Latino advertising company by Chiles Nico "Maverick" Martinez. Martinez opened up regarding Dragon Fire Boxing Latino, "This will be a busy year for Dragon Fire Boxing Latino and Chilean boxing. Firstly its an honor to companion with Australias Tony Tolj. We are established to provide our boxers the best possibilities in Chile and construct the future generation of boxers, our marquee stars are WBA Fedebol Champ Andres Campos, Ramon Mascareñan as well as Raynel Mederos are fighters that will certainly be the future as well as its an honor to see these Super human warriors most likely to the following degree" Mederos opened up concerning his battle, "To start with I intend to say thanks to God, my supervisor The Large Bossman Tony Tolj, My marketer "The Maverick" Nico Martinez. I put in the operate in the gym and the outcomes came, I have an impressive team around me as well as I recognize thats what it takes to go to the following degree. I'm looking forward to having a substantial year. Unbeaten Jesse "The Great" White obstacles for Fano Kori for the Western Australian Super Welterweight title on March 6 in City City, Perth Hugely preferred Jesse White 6-0 takes a step up in his seventh specialist contest as he clashes with the tried and examined Fano Kori for the Western Australian Super Welterweight title on the latest version of Dragon Fire Boxing's Thunderdome series. The clash that will certainly take place in City City, Perth, features on a show that will showcase several of Australia's most prominent ability done in title activity. White, a citizen of Melbourne, opened concerning his initial title opportunity in the pro rankings. He said, "To start with thanks to my manager the very best in business Tony Tolj for obtaining me this opportunity on what is appearing like possibly the best Thunderdome program of all time. I am so grateful to be getting an opportunity at a title at this stage of my job as well as I am completely convinced I will arise victoriously on battle evening. " Kori is a hard fighter, I fully appreciate him. I have actually been working hard with my team for this fight and also I am enhancing all of the time thanks to them. I am thrilled for the fight and I truly believe people will see the very best Jesse White they have actually seen so far in the pro ranks. " I just had 11 amateur fights so I am learning at work, but I recognize that I am learning on duty the right way which will certainly reveal on March 6." White looks to take a step on a ladder that lots of fantastic Australian champions have actually taken before him. With several winning State after that full Australian titles, White outlined what he wants his path to be in the pro ranks. " Danny Eco-friendly obtained me into boxing, he was my hero so obviously I want to adhere to a course like his, nevertheless, I am honestly just focused on this battle coming up then coming to be Australian Champion. That is the objective for me right now as well as I believe I can make that take place. " I have a top-class team around me in the health club and also on the monitoring side so allow's see just how far this can go. I'm going to keep functioning as hard as I can as well as that understands, however I am concentrated right now in attaining my occupation objective which is to be Australian Champ and that path begins on March 6 in Metro City." Unbeaten Filipino incredibly flyweight possibility Jade Bornea (now W15 KO10 L0 D0) ran away with a split decision win over previously unbeaten Mexican Ernesto Delgadillo (now W11 KO2 L1 D2) thus taking home the NABF Super Flyweight Title. Both courts scored it 96-93 for the Filipino while one had it 93-96 for the Mexican. The fight headlined the UFC Fight Pass occasion on January 30 in Legends Gambling Enterprise and Resort in Toppenish, Washington. The event was promoted by previous pound for extra pound king Roy Jones, Jr. In association with Sanman Promotions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cV6PUEH2-Q Bornea's manager Jim Claude Manangquil was thrilled with his ward's performance. " The battle was an affordable fight in between two young undefeated competitors yet Bornea was the far better warrior technically and in being aggressive. It should not have actually been a split choice but we constantly respect the courts. Jade was prepared and also he provided," the Sanman Boxing Chief Executive Officer mentioned. For Bornea, it was a great efficiency however he understood he can do much better. " I need to boost my video game. It was a good win yet there is still a great deal of room to be better. I will keep striving in the fitness center as well as be much more ready in my following battle. I enjoy to take home the belt. I am hoping for larger battles next time," Bornea claimed Read the full article

[shirlleycoyle]

Experts Find Serious Problems With Switzerland’s Online Voting System Before Public Penetration Test Even Begins

Switzerland made headlines this month for the transparency of its internet voting system when it launched a public penetration test and bug bounty program to test the resiliency of the system to attack.

But after source code for the software and technical documentation describing its architecture were leaked online last week, critics are already expressing concern about the system’s design and about the transparency around the public test.

Cryptography experts who spent just a few hours examining the leaked code say the system is a poorly constructed and convoluted maze that makes it difficult to follow what’s going on and effectively evaluate whether the cryptography and other security measures deployed in the system are done properly.

“It is simply not the standard we would expect.”

“Most of the system is split across hundreds of different files, each configured at various levels,” Sarah Jamie Lewis, a former security engineer for Amazon as well as a former computer scientist for England’s GCHQ intelligence agency, told Motherboard. “I’m used to dealing with Java code that runs across different packages and different teams, and this code somewhat defeats even my understanding.”

She said the system uses cryptographic solutions that are fairly new to the field and that have to be implemented in very specific ways to make the system auditable, but the design the programmers chose thwarts this.

“It is simply not the standard we would expect,” she told Motherboard.

Even if the system is designed securely in principle, for it to operate securely in practice, each of its many parts has to be configured correctly or risk creating vulnerabilities that would let an attacker subvert the system and alter votes.

“Someone could wire the thing in the wrong place and suddenly the system is compromised,” said Lewis, who is currently executive director of the Open Privacy Research Society, a Canadian nonprofit that develops secure and privacy-enhancing software for marginalized communities. “And when you’re talking about code that is supposed to be protecting a national election, that is not a statement someone should be able to make.”

It isn’t just outside attackers that are a concern; the system raises the possibility for an insider to intentionally misconfigure the system to make it easier to manipulate, while maintaining plausible deniability that the misconfiguration was unintentional.

“Nobody has ever deployed a voting system with this level of complexity.”

“You expect secure code to be defensively written that would prevent the implementers of the code from wiring it up incorrectly,” Lewis told Motherboard. But instead of building a system that doesn’t allow for this, the programmers simply added a comment to their source code telling anyone who compiles and implements it to take care to configure it properly, she said.

Matthew Green, a noted cryptographer who teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, agreed with Lewis and told Motherboard the system is “enormously complex.”

“To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever deployed a voting system with this level of complexity,” he told Motherboard. “At this point I think the only appropriate way to evaluate it is through a professional evaluation by someone trained in this sort of advanced cryptography. And even then I’d be concerned, given the stakes.”

The system was developed by Swiss Post, the country’s national postal service, and the Barcelona-based company Scytl, which was formed by a group of academics who spun it off of their research work at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona (Autonomous University of Barcelona) in 2001. Local cantons, or states, in Switzerland are the ones who administer elections and would be responsible for the configuration.

Scytl claims the system uses end-to-end encryption that only the Swiss Electoral Board would be able to decrypt. But there are reasons to be concerned about such claims.

In 2015, a different Scytl system used in elections in New South Wales, Australia, was found to have vulnerabilities that researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Melbourne could use to bypass the end-to-end encryption in order to see and alter votes. Another group of researchers examined the Australian system again in 2017 and found different vulnerabilities that would still allow an attacker to see and alter votes. The Australian and Swiss systems use a lot of the same underlying cryptographic libraries, but “the Australian system doesn’t have the security the Swiss system purports to have,” according to Vanessa Teague, who teaches cryptography at the University of Melbourne and was part of both studies. This, on its face, suggests it’s more secure, but Teague agreed with Lewis that the convoluted design raises red flags that require the system to be scrutinized more carefully.

Nathalie Dérobert, a spokeswoman for Swiss Post, said the public intrusion test is not meant to be an audit of the code “or to prove the security of the Swiss Post online voting system.” Instead, it’s meant to help inform the developers about improvements they need to make.

“Security is a process and even if the source code passed numerous previous security audits, we expected criticism and even outright negative comments,” Dérobert wrote in an email to Motherboard. “After all, that is the whole point of publishing the source code: we want a frank response and an honest discussion about the merits and shortcomings of our work… [W]e are determined to take up the negative comments, discuss them with our developing partner Scytl and to get in touch with the people where we see a benefit.”

But Lewis says such discussion is a little late.

“If you’ve already built your million-dollar house on sand, no amount of honest discussion is going to turn the foundations into stone,” she told Motherboard.

Although Swiss Post claims the system has undergone three audits by auditing giant KPMG— among them an audit of the end-to-end encryption—it has never made the auditing reports public or indicated if anything significant got changed as a result of the audits.

“I think they don’t get the concept of free and open code.”

Lewis said she’s not sure how someone could effectively audit the complicated code and certify it.

“Even if you sat down and read every line and determined everything was good, the code still wouldn’t pass the bar for being good code,” Lewis said.

Internet voting isn’t new to Switzerland. It’s been used a couple hundred times in various cantons on a trial basis since 2004. But Switzerland wants to make it available as an option nationwide, with plans to offer it in three-fourths of the country’s cantons before October.

The program has faced a lot of detractors in the computer security community. Last November, members of the Swiss branch of the Chaos Computer Club found that basic security hadn’t been implemented on the web site, which would allow someone to perform a DNS cache poisoning attack and divert voters to rogue servers instead of the legitimate ones. Last month, critics of the system launched a public initiative to halt the internet voting program until Swiss authorities can demonstrate that it’s secure.

Although the issues around the code might be specific to Switzerland, they raise questions about other Scytl systems in use in elections. Scytl isn’t a small player in the elections industry. It has taken the lead in developing various internet and other voting solutions for national or regional elections in 42 countries, including at least 1,400 counties in the US. In the US, however, the Scytl system doesn’t collect votes over the internet as the Swiss system does; it just delivers ballots via the internet to U.S. military and other citizens overseas, who print them out and return them via fax or offline mail.

The way the Swiss system works is that voters authenticate themselves to the voting web site using their birthdate and an initialization code they receive from Swiss Post in the mail. When they make their selections on screen, the votes are encrypted before going to the Swiss Post servers, where they are processed through a so-called “mix network” that cryptographically shuffles the votes to separate them from anything that would match them to the voter. Once the votes are shuffled, they’re counted then decrypted.

So far more than 2,000 people have registered to participate in the public hacking test of the Swiss system, which runs from February 25 to March 24. The bug bounty program will pay 20,000 Swiss francs to anyone who can manipulate votes in the mock election or 30,000 to 50,000 francs if they manage to manipulate votes without being detected. As part of the test, the Swiss Post is making the source code for the software available to participants. But the code wasn’t supposed to be open to just anyone to examine.

Instead, to obtain access to it, participants have to agree to terms that were published with the announcement of the bug bounty program.

“[Y]ou need to agree to these strange rules they have. So in the concept of free and open source code, it’s not really accessible,” said Hernani Marques, board member and spokesperson of the Chaos Computer Club of Switzerland. “I think they don’t get the concept of free and open code.”

The terms allow participants to publish information about vulnerabilities they find in the code or system, but requires them to report them first to the organizers through a specified channel, as all bug bounty programs do. Participants can go public after the organizers acknowledge receipt of their report but have to wait 45 days after that acknowledgement or after the last communication the organizers send them about the vulnerability. This gives the appearance that participants are free to publish anything after this time period. But in three technical documents from Scytl that are provided with the source code and outline the architecture and protocols used in the system there is a notice indicating that none of the information in the documents can be communicated to the public or otherwise distributed.

This presents a significant barrier to publicly disclosing vulnerabilities found in the system because a system’s architecture and protocols provide context for explaining the nature of a vulnerability and can even contain vulnerabilities themselves.

“[Y]ou can’t publish … if you can’t describe the architecture,” said a participant who was given access to the code and asked not to be identified. “Doesn’t matter if you can quote the code, you’ll need to be able to show why the bit of code is relevant, by showing the architecture.”

Someone else who objected to the terms posted the source code and the three documents detailing the architecture and protocols online, where anyone can now examine the code for vulnerabilities without registering for the public pentest and also anonymously post information about vulnerabilities without being subject to Scytl’s confidentiality terms.

Swiss Post responded to the publication of the code, saying the source code was not leaked since it was already available to anyone who wanted to see it—as long as they registered with Swiss Post. Swiss Post also wrote that there is no NDA or confidentiality agreement around publishing information about the source code or citing parts of the code, but the statement did not say anything about the Scytl technical documents themselves and the architecture and protocol information that is contained in them.

Motherboard reached out to Scytl to ask about the confidentiality clause, but a spokeswoman’s response was unclear, saying only that “researchers are allowed to publish their findings on their own after the official publication” by the organizers of the bounty program. She referred any additional questions about disclosure to Swiss Post, which referred Motherboard to the Swiss federal government. That entity did not respond.

Katie Moussouris, CEO of Luta Security, which works with companies and governments to develop bug bounty programs, agreed that there’s a conflict between the conditions for the bug bounty and the boilerplate confidentiality language in the Scytl documents. Generally, to prevent participants from disclosing information in such documents the company would need to have participants sign an NDA, so it’s not clear if this language was left in as an oversight or if Scytl would enforce it. She noted that because the disclosure terms for the bug bounty program require participants to coordinate with the organizers before publishing anything, this raises the possibility that restrictions could arise there.

“It’s there where they might possibly ask for redactions, or not,” she told Motherboard.

Experts Find Serious Problems With Switzerland’s Online Voting System Before Public Penetration Test Even Begins syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[thetrumpdebacle]

I recently heard on cable news that special counsel Robert Mueller wanted to interview some “Russian oligarchs” about their supposed influence on the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Liberal talking heads at such organizations as MSNBC and CNN keep warning that nothing has been done yet to protect the integrity of our voting process against “Russian interference” as the 2018 midterm elections loom ever closer on the nation’s horizon.

What about the American oligarchs, I wondered, people like businessman Richard Uihlein, who regularly distort U.S. elections at every level—local, state and federal? Who will protect our “democracy” from the plutocratic “wealth primary” power of the American oligarchy?

If you are like most U.S citizens, you’ve never heard of Richard Uihlein. An heir to the Milwaukee-based Schlitz beer fortune, Uihlein is the billionaire CEO of Uline Inc., a private, family-owned Wisconsin company that sells shipping and packaging materials to the tune of $2 billion in annual revenue. He lives in a mansion in Lake Forest, a hyperopulent preserve north of Chicago.

He’s also way into right-wing politics. As one can learn from a quick trip to the Center for Responsive Politics’ (CRP) website, Uhlein invested $24 million—that’s right, $24 million—in the 2016 elections. His political contributions went to Republican candidates and Republican-affiliated and “conservative” (that is, radically regressive and reactionary groups such as the Club for Growth. A longtime supporter of right-wing Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Uilhein is a major sponsor of hard-right Republican candidates—at both the state and federal levels—and organizations across the nation.

So far, Uihlein is the top political contributor in the 2018 federal U.S. election cycle, at $21 million. In 2016, however, he was just the nation’s ninth biggest investor. Above him on the plutocratic “wealth primary” scale stood the San Francisco hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer ($91 million, all to Democratic candidates and Democratic Party-affiliated “liberal outside groups”); Las Vegas billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson ($83 million to Republicans and the right); Florida billionaire financier Donald Sussman ($42 million to Democrats and “liberal” groups); Chicago multimillionaire media mogul Fred Eychaner ($38 million to Democrats and “liberal” groups); Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook and the “world’s youngest self-made billionaire” ($27 million to Democrats and “liberal” groups); billionaire mathematician and hedge fund manager James Simons ($27 million to Democrats and “liberal” groups); billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer ($26 million to Republicans and right-wing groups); and billionaire right-wing hedge fund manager Robert Mercer ($26 billion to Republicans and right-wing groups). Michael Bloomberg rounded out the top 10 list at a cool $23,786,083.

These megadonors are the superrich cream atop a deep plutocratic pitcher. The CRP’s list of the top 100 individual contributors to federal candidates during the 2016 election cycle ends with Karen Wright, CEO of a leading gas-compressor manufacturer. She gave a whopping $2.2 million to Republicans and the right.

How are such ridiculously astronomical political investments—far beyond the capacity of all but a superopulent minority of U.S. citizens—possible under U.S. law? Aren’t there limits on how much rich people can spend on U.S. elections?

Not really. Not for rich people whose agents know how get past the nation’s porous regulations. Federal law sets a $2,500 per-person, per-election limit on how much a donor can give to a federal candidate, a $30,800 per-person, per-year limit on donations to national party committees, and a $10,000 total limit on per-person contributions to state, district or local party committees.

But the rules change when it comes to technically “independent” nonparty and “outside” groups called political action committees, known as PACs. A person can give as much as $5,000 to a PAC that contributes directly to candidates. And there are no limits whatsoever on how much a person can give to a PAC that declares it will spend its money totally independently from a candidate’s campaign. These “independent expenditure” groups, which can receive unlimited contributions from individuals, corporations or unions, are commonly called super PACs.

Some nonprofit groups, called “social welfare” organizations or “501(c)(4) groups,” can also accept unlimited contributions. The primary purpose of these groups cannot technically be political, but they can spend substantial amounts on political activities, such as TV commercials.

Adding to the plutocratic muddle, the Supreme Court’s infamous 2010 Citizens United decision overthrew a federal ban on corporations and unions making independent expenditures and financing electioneering communications. It gave corporations and unions the green light to spend unlimited sums on ads and other political tools calling for the election or defeat of individual candidates.

This has opened the door to astonishing levels of private spending in the nation’s public elections. “During the 2016 election cycle,” CRP staffer Bob Biersack notes, “the top 20 individual donors (whose contributions were disclosed) gave more than $500 million combined to political organizations. The 20 largest organizational donors also gave a total of more than $500 million, and more than $1 billion came from the top 40 donors. … At a time when Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were confirming that large numbers of people donating small amounts could fund successful campaigns, the extraordinary role being played by the very few donors who give the most may be the most important element in this new era.”

Thanks to the problem of “dark money,” moreover, we don’t have a complete record of which rich people give how much to which candidates. While super PACS must disclose their donors, 501(c)(4)s are not required to do so. These nondisclosing organizations engage in numerous political activities: buying ads that advocate for or against a candidate, running phone banks, making contributions to super PACs (!) and more.

It’s reached the point where, as a former Republican chairman of the Federal Election Commission told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer last year, “a single billionaire can write an eight-figure check and put not just their thumb but their whole hand on the scale—and we often have no idea who they are. … [A] random billionaire can change politics and public policy—to sweep everything else off the table—even if they don’t speak publicly, and even if there’s almost no public awareness of his or her views.”

Their right to not disclose means that the campaign finance data listed above significantly underestimates total political investments made by the nation’s leading election donors. (And that was just federal data. It does not include campaign finance at the state level, where the right-wing billionaire Koch brothers focus a lot of their legendary election funding and policymaking power. The Kochs and their allies understand that, in the words of historian Nancy MacLean, “corporate and conservative interests can make their will felt most easily in state governments—and are more likely to be challenged successfully by the citizenry at the federal and local levels—partly because state affairs are less well monitored by the people the press”).

According to the CRP, outside spending by nondisclosing 501(c)(4) groups—so-called dark money—exceeded $160 million in 2016. “A [U.S. campaign finance] system founded on the principle of individuals giving limited, disclosed contributions directly to candidates, parties and PACs has morphed into a system that allows individuals and organizations to give hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars, to groups to spend in elections, some of whom are closely aligned with candidates and parties, without disclosure. …”

Under the high court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, the federal government can set no legal limits on a candidate’s total campaign expenditure except in cases in which public campaign funding is made available to candidates. The sky’s the limit.

All of this and more makes the United States’ ever more expensive electoral politics a wild West-like money chase in which candidates who want to be viable must endlessly court big-dollar, business-class donors who do not generally invest without profit-serving policy returns in mind.

No other “democracy” in the developed world comes close to the United States when it comes to giving big-money donors unregulated power in their national electoral processes. Along with other and related characteristics of its election and party system—winner-take all contests with no proportional representation, rampant partisan gerrymandering of election districts, voter registration problems, corporate media bias and the “federalist” decentralization and partisan control of U.S. election process—this plutocratic campaign finance free-for-all is why the Electoral Integrity Project (a research undertaking funded by the Australian Research Council with a team of researchers based at the University of Sydney and Harvard University) ranks the democratic election integrity of U.S. elections below that of all 19 North and Western European democracies and also below that of 10 other nations in the Americas (Costa Rica, Uruguay, Canada, Chile, Brazil, Jamaica, Grenada, Argentina, Barbados and Peru), 10 nations in Central and Eastern Europe, nine Asian-Pacific countries, two countries in the Middle East (Israel and Tunisia) and six African nations. The U.S. ranks dead last among “Western democracies.”

What does American campaign finance have to do with the 2016 election, whose outcome so much of the Democratic Party establishment and its many friends in the nation’s corporate media oligopoly blame on “Russian interference” and “Russian oligarchs”? A lot more than one might think from the media’s focus on “Russiagate” or from Biersack’s reflection on how “Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders [supposedly] confirm[ed] that large numbers of people donating small amounts could fund successful campaigns.”

An essential source here is the distinguished political scientist and money-politics analyst Thomas Ferguson’s recent study, co-authored with political scientist Paul Jorgensen and statistician Jie Chen, titled, “Industrial Structure and Party Competition in an Age of Hunger Games: Donald Trump and the 2016 Presidential Election.” Ferguson, Jorgensen and Chen mined the nation’s complex finance data to paint an extraordinary portrait of how the American oligarchy’s campaign funding put Trump in the Oval Office.

Perhaps their most remarkable finding is that the left-leaning “populist” Sanders came tantalizingly close to winning the Democratic presidential nomination with no support from Big Business. The small-donor Sanders’ campaign was “without precedent in American politics not just since the New Deal, but across virtually the whole of American history … a major presidential candidate waging a strong, highly competitive campaign whose support from big business is essentially zero.” In the end, though, Sanders was foiled by the big-money candidate Hillary Clinton’s advance control of the Democratic National Committee and convention delegates. He dutifully complied with her corrupt victory and campaigned on her behalf, as promised from the start. The Wall Street establishment kept its command over the not-so leftmost side of the American two-party system. Sanders failed.

Things were different on the Republican side. The right-leaning “populist” challenger—Trump—ran strangely outside the longstanding neoliberal Washington consensus, as an economic nationalist and isolationist. His raucous rallies were laced with dripping denunciations of Wall Street, Goldman Sachs and globalization; mockery of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq; rejection of the New Cold War with Russia; and pledges of allegiance to the “forgotten” American working class. “In striking contrast to every other Republican presidential nominee since 1936,” Ferguson, Jorgensen and Chen note, Trump “attacked globalization, free trade, international financiers, Wall Street, and even Goldman Sachs. … In a frontal assault on the American establishment,” Trump “proclaimed ‘America First.’ Mocking the Bush administration’s appeal to ‘weapons of mass destruction’ as a pretext for invading Iraq, he broke dramatically with two generations of GOP orthodoxy and spoke out in favor of more cooperation with Russia. He even criticized the ‘carried interest’ tax break beloved by high finance.”

This cost Trump much of the corporate and Wall Street financial support that Republican presidential candidates usually get. But however disingenuous and laced with racism and nativism it may have been, much of Trump’s rhetoric was popular with a considerable portion of the electorate, thanks to the widespread economic insecurity that had spread among the populace during the transparently bipartisan New Gilded Age and with special low-wage poignancy in the wake of the Great Recession. He would become the first Republican presidential nominee in memory to out-perform his Democratic opponent with small (middle-class and working-class) donors.

It’s a mistake, however, to see Trump as a sign of small-donor potency in the American system. The billionaire Trump’s personal fortune permitted him to tap popular anger while leaping insultingly over the heads of his less wealthy, albeit corporate and Wall Street-backed competitors (“low energy” Jeb Bush and “little Marco” Rubio most notably) in the crowded Republican primary race. A Republican candidate dependent on the usual elite bankrollers would never have been able to get away with Trump’s crowd-pleasing—and CNN and Fox News rating-boosting—antics.

Things were different after Trump won the Republican nomination, however. He could no longer go it alone after the primaries. During the Republican National Convention and “then again in the late summer of 2016,” Ferguson, Jorgensen and Chen show, Trump’s “solo campaign had to be rescued by major industries plainly hoping for tariff relief, waves of other billionaires from the far, far right of the already far right Republican Party, and the most disruption-exalting corners of Wall Street.” By the authors’ carefully researched account, the Trump general election campaign relied for its success on “a giant wave of dark money—one that towered over anything in 2016 or even Mitt Romney’s munificently financed 2012 effort—to say nothing of any Russian Facebook experiments.” Along with giant contributions from the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife ($11 million), Sands Casino employees ($20 million) and Silicon Valley executives, Trump garnered a giant wave of money that “turned into a torrent” from big hedge funds and “large private equity firms, the part of Wall Street which had long championed hostile takeovers. …”

The critical late wave of big right-wing money came after Trump moved to rescue his flagging campaign by handing its direction from the Russia-tainted Paul Manafort to the white-nationalist and American-as-Apple-Pie Breitbart executive Steve Bannon, who advocated what proved to be a winning, Koch brothers-approved strategy: appeal to economically and culturally frustrated working- and middle-class whites in key battleground states, where the bloodless neoliberal and professional class centrism and snooty metropolitan multiculturalism of the Barack Obama presidency and Clinton campaign was certain to depress the Democratic “base” vote.

Along with the racist voter suppression carried out by Koch-backed Republican state governments (Ferguson, Jorgensen and Chen rightly chide Russia-obsessed political reporters and commentators for absurdly ignoring this important factor) and (the authors intriguingly suggest) major anti-union offensives conducted by employers in some battleground states, this major late-season influx of big right-wing political money helped tilt the election Trump’s way.

The Clinton campaign might still have prevailed if it hadn’t made egregiously stupid mistakes. It failed to set foot in Wisconsin after the Democratic convention or to purchase campaign ads in Michigan. Clinton got caught telling wealthy New York City donors that half of Trump’s supporters were “a basket of [racist, white, working-class] deplorables”—a hideous mistake hauntingly akin to Mitt Romney’s gaffe in 2012, when he was videotaped telling elite donors that 47 percent of the population were a bunch of lazy welfare dependents. Above all, the Clinton team decided not to talk about policy. In an epic miscalculation, her team decided not to advance anything close to a standard, progressive-sounding, Democratic Party policy agenda. Clinton ran almost completely on the issue of candidate character and quality. This was a blunder of historic proportions, given Clinton’s own highly problematic character brand. Any campaign needs a reasonably strong policy platform to stand on in case of candidate difficulties.

What was her deafening policy silence about? Money—big American oligarchs’ money. Clinton’s campaign funding success went beyond her party’s usual corporate and financial backers to include normally Republican-affiliated capitalist sectors less disposed than their more liberal counterparts to abide the standard, progressive-sounding policy rhetoric of Democratic Party candidates. This was a curse. For “one fateful consequence of trying to appeal to so many conservative business interests,” Ferguson, Jorengensen and Chen note, “was strategic silence about most important matters of public policy. … Misgivings of major contributors who worried that the Clinton campaign message lacked real attractions for ordinary Americans were rebuffed. The campaign sought to capitalize on the angst within business by vigorously courting the doubtful and undecideds there, not in the electorate.”

As the authors show, there is little empirical evidence to support the Clinton and corporate Democrats’ self-interested and diversionary efforts to explain her epic fail and Trump’s jaw-dropping upset victory as the result of (1) Russian interference, (2) then-FBI Director James Comey’s October Surprise revelation that his agency was not done investigating Clinton’s emails, and/or (3) some imagined big wave of white, working-class racism, nativism and sexism brought to the surface by Trump. The impacts of both items 1 and 2 were infinitesimal in comparison with the role that big campaign money played both in silencing Clinton and funding Trump. The blame-the-deplorable-racist-white-working-class narrative is belied by basic underlying continuities in white, working-class voting patterns. As Ferguson, Jorgensen and Chen note, “Neither turnout nor the partisan division of the vote at any level looks all that different from other recent elections. … 2016’s alterations in voting behavior are so minute that the pattern is only barely differentiated from 2012.” It was about the money—the big establishment money that the Clinton campaign took (as the authors plausibly argue) to recommend policy silence and the different, right-wing big money that approved Trump’s comparative right-populist policy boisterousness.

Imagine if Sanders had snuck past Clinton in the primary race. Could he have defeated the billionaire and right-wing billionaire-backed Trump in the general election? Perhaps. Sanders consistently out-performed Clinton in one-on-one match-up polls vis-à-vis Trump during the primary season, but much of the big money (and corporate media) that backed Clinton would likely have gone over to Trump had the supposedly “radical” Sanders been the Democratic nominee.

Even if Sanders has been elected president, moreover, Noam Chomsky is certainly correct in his recent judgment that a President Sanders “couldn’t have done a thing” because he would have had “nobody [on his side] in Congress, no governors, no legislatures, none of the big economic powers, which have an enormous effect on policy.” A Sanders presidency would certainly have been undermined—if it had tried to do anything seriously progressive—by several factors, including a significant downturn in capitalist investment (with an attendant rise in joblessness) and the relentless hostility of the corporate media oligopoly. Right-wing media, including Fox News, talk radio and Breitbart News (which has received at least $10 million in backing from the arch-reactionary U.S. plutocrat Robert Mercer) would have gone ballistic, driving its followers to scary new levels of deadly disruption.

As Chomsky might have added, Sanders’ oligarchy-imposed “failures” would have been great fodder for the disparagement and smearing of progressive, left-leaning and majority-backed policy change. “See,” the reigning plutocratic media and politics culture would have said, “We tried all that and it was a disaster!”

That and more are reminders of something I made a special point of highlighting (with no special claim to originality) in my 2014 book, They Rule: The 1% vs. Democracy: Campaign finance is just the tip of the iceberg in how the American capitalist ruling class owns and runs the political and policy systems the United States. It’s got nothing to do with Russia.

Meanwhile, though, political money matters a great deal as we race into the 2018 midterm contests and the 2020 elections with U.S. “election integrity” still unprotected from the special plutocratic power of America’s wealthy masters. Nobody in Congress is talking seriously about passing bills to remove private cash from the public elections—or even to mandate reasonable “dark money” disclosure. Fuming about Moscow’s allegedly powerful conspiracy against our supposedly democratic elections looks more than a little ridiculous when considered alongside the deafening official silence on America’s own oligarchic electoral system.

via The Trump Debacle

[goldeagleprice]

COTY award goes to Germany

By Donald Scarinci

Individual category winners and the top Coin of the Year Award for coins dated 2016 were announced Feb. 3 at a ceremony held in conjunction with the World Money Fair in Berlin, Germany.

The German Federal Ministry of Finance’s 2016-dated “Planet Earth” copper-nickel 5-euro coin with a blue polymer ring has been named the Coin of the Year. It also won the Most Innovative Coin category.

It was a win for the home team, as Germany came away with highest honors: the 2018 Krause Coin of the Year Award. The winner was the 5 euro copper-nickel “Planet Earth” coin with the new polymer ring technology. The coin was designed by Stefan Klein.

An easy win in the Most Innovative category, the polymer ring was developed by the German Mint as an anti-counterfeiting device. The coin was minted in proof and in circulation strike by each of Germany’s five mints. The polymer ring is a slightly different shade of blue for each mint that is easily spotted when the coins are placed on a light board or when they are held up to the light.

Germany accepts the Coin of the Year trophy: (from left) Thomas Michael, senior editor, Standard Catalog of World Coins; Günther Waadt, mint director, Bavarian State Mint; Dr. Peter Huber, mint director, Baden-Württemberg State Mint; Dr. Thomas Dress, coinage official, German Federal Ministry of Finance; Alina Hoyer, designer of eagle on the winning coin; and Albert Beck, founder, World Money Fair.

It might be technically accurate to consider the coins of all five mints as winners of the 2016-dated Krause Coin of the Year because of the different shade of blue used in the polymer ring, but the judges did not choose to do so. The last time the Krause judges awarded the Coin of the Year to an entire set of coins was in 2008 for Canada’s 2006-dated proof set of four $50 palladium coins depicting Ursa Major and Ursa Minor through the seasons.

While no country dominated the awards this year, Austria won two. The “Red Fox” 100 euro gold from the “Wildlife in Our Sights” series won Best Gold. The fourth coin in this popular series was designed by Thomas Pesendorfer and Herbert Wahner. The obverse depicts the European red fox sitting in grass and gazing to the right. The reverse depicts a family of foxes.

Austria also won the Best Bi-Metallic Coin category with its 25 euro niobium silver depiction of “Time.” That coin is part of the niobium series of silver coins and depicts a clock face on one side and, on the reverse, the inner workings of a clock incorporating symbolic depictions of time.

Coins from both popular series of Austrian coins – wildlife and niobium – have won category awards in previous years.

France also won two category awards. The Most Historically Significant Coin dated 2016 went to the 200 euro gold “Joan of Arc” coin, part of the Women of France series. This popular series of coins pays tribute to three important women of France each year. The series honored women from medieval France in 2016: Queen Clotilde, Queen Mathilde and Joan of Arc. These coins are available as a 10 euro silver coin, a 50 euro gold coin and the 200 euro coin, which is the one the Krause judges selected.

The Paris Mint also won the Best Crown category with a 50-euro, five-ounce silver coin honoring Van Cleef and Arpels which, oddly, does not fit any definition of a “crown” and violates Krause’s own rules. A scalloped version of this coin bearing a 10-euro denomination is also available, but it too does not meet the definition of a “crown.”

Switzerland won the Best Contemporary Event Coin with the 20 francs “Gottardo Tunnel” commemorating the opening of the new Gotthard base tunnel. Available in proof and uncirculated, the popular Swiss coin designed by Fredy Trumpi sold out relatively quickly in 2016.

Australia won the Best Silver Coin for the $5 silver “Northern Sky Cassiopeia” dome-shaped coin. This is the first of a three-coin series from the Australian Mint designed by B. King that features the Northern Sky constellations. It was the Royal Australian Mint’s previously issued Southern Sky series of coins that influenced the United States Congress to mandate a concave coin for the 2014 Baseball Commemorative $1 and 50 cent coins, which won Krause Coin of the Year awards in 2016.

China won the important Best Circulating Coin category with the 10-yuan bi-metallic “Year of the Monkey” coin that included important security features. Three artists, one from the Shenyang Mint, one from the Shanghai Mint and one from the Nanjing Mint, joined together in a group effort to design this important first coin that makes use of the new security feature.

The Most Artistic Coin went to Latvia for the 5-euro silver “National Entrepreneur,” multi-faceted coin with a QR code. This coin recognizes the importance of entrepreneurs on the obverse and celebrates the 25th anniversary of the restoration of Latvian independence from the former Soviet Union on the reverse. There are 25 raised facets that represent the past quarter-century. This wonderful design by Paulis Liepa is a great example of the marriage of the art of the coin with the art of the technology of making coins.

Canada won the Most Inspirational Coin category with the $20 silver coin depicting the earth in a 3-D water droplet. In perhaps the most subjective of the Krause award categories, artist Alexandra Lefort (reverse design) honored the Royal Canadian Mint by creating the first Canadian domed coin. Once again, the art of coin design married the art of coin production technology to create a moving, hand-held work of art.

Donald Scarinci is author of Coin of the Year: Celebrating Three Decades of the Best in Coin Design and Craftmanship. He also serves on the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee, whose responsibility is to advise the Secretary of the Treasury on themes and designs pertaining to U.S. coinage.

Coin of the Year is presented by Krause Publications’ World Coin News. It is sponsored by the World Money Fair and The Journal of East Asian Numismatics.

  This article was originally printed in World Coin News. >> Subscribe today.

  More Collecting Resources

• The Standard Catalog of World Coins, 1901-2000 is your guide to images, prices and information on coinage of the 1900s.

• Any coin collector can tell you that a close look is necessary for accurate grading. Check out this USB microscope today!

The post COTY award goes to Germany appeared first on Numismatic News.

[jmtapio]

Since the EU referendum got under way in the UK, it has become almost an everyday occurence to turn on the TV and hear some politician explaining "I don't mean to sound racist, but..." (example)

Of course, if you didn't mean to sound racist, you wouldn't sound racist in the first place, now would you?

The reality is, whether you like politics or not, political leaders have a significant impact on society and the massive rise in UK hate crimes, including deaths of Polish workers, is a direct reflection of the leadership (or profound lack of it) coming down from Westminster. Maybe you don't mean to sound racist, but if this is the impact your words are having, maybe it's time to shut up?

Choosing your referendum

Why choose to have a referendum on immigration issues and not on any number of other significant topics? Why not have a referendum on nuking Mr Putin to punish him for what looks like an act of terrorism against the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17? Why not have a referendum on cutting taxes or raising speed limits, turning British motorways into freeways or an autobahn? Why choose to keep those issues in the hands of the Government, but invite the man-in-a-white-van from middle England to regurgitate Nigel Farage's fears and anxieties about migrants onto a ballot paper?

Even if David Cameron sincerely hoped and believed that the referendum would turn out otherwise, surely he must have contemplated that he was playing Russian Roulette with the future of millions of innocent people?

Let's start at the top

For those who are fortunate enough to live in parts of the world where the press provides little exposure to the antics of British royalty, an interesting fact you may have missed is that the Queen's husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh is actually a foreigner. He was born in Greece and has Danish and German ancestry. Migration (in both directions) is right at the heart of the UK's identity.

Home office minister Amber Rudd recently suggested British firms should publish details about how many foreign people they employ and in which positions. She argued this is necessary to help boost funding for training local people.

If that is such a brilliant idea, why hasn't it worked for the Premier League? It is a matter of public knowledge how many foreigners play football in England's most prestigious division, so why hasn't this caused local clubs to boost training budgets for local recruits? After all, when you consider that England hasn't won a World Cup since 1966, what have they got to lose?

All this racism, it's just not cricket. Or is it? One of the most remarkable cricketers to play for England in recent times, Kevin Pietersen, dubbed "the most complete batsman in cricket" by The Times and "England's greatest modern batsman" by the Guardian, was born in South Africa. In the five years he was contracted to the Hampshire county team, he only played one match, because he was too busy representing England abroad. His highest position was nothing less than becoming England's team captain.

Are the British superior to every other European citizen?

One of the implications of the rhetoric coming out of London these days is that the British are superior to their neighbours, entitled to have their cake and eat it too, making foreigners queue up at Paris' Gare du Nord to board the Eurostar while British travelers should be able to walk or drive into European countries unchallenged.

This superiority complex is not uniquely British, you can observe similar delusions are rampant in many of the places where I've lived, including Australia, Switzerland and France. America's Donald Trump has taken this style of politics to a new level.

Look in the mirror Theresa May: after British 10-year old schoolboys Robert Thompson and Jon Venables abducted, tortured, murdered and mutilated 2 year old James Bulger in 1993, why not have all British schoolchildren fingerprinted and added to the police DNA database? Why should "security" only apply based on the country where people are born, their religion or skin colour?

In fact, after Brexit, people like Venables and Thompson will remain in Britain while a Dutch woman, educated at Cambridge and with two British children will not. If that isn't racism, what is?

Running foreigner's off the roads

Theresa May has only been Prime Minister for less than a year but she has a history of bullying and abusing foreigners in her previous role in the Home Office. One example of this was a policy of removing driving licenses from foreigners, which has caused administrative chaos and even taken away the licenses of many people who technically should not have been subject to these regulations anyway.

Shouldn't the DVLA (Britain's office for driving licenses) simply focus on the competence of somebody to drive a vehicle? Bringing all these other factors into licensing creates a hostile environment full of mistakes and inconvenience at best and opportunities for low-level officials to engage in arbitrary acts of racism and discrimination.

Of course, when you are taking your country on the road to nowhere, who needs a driving license anyway?

What does "maximum control" over other human beings mean to you?

The new British PM has said she wants "maximum control" over immigrants. What exactly does "maximum control" mean? Donald Trump appears to be promising "maximum control" over Muslims, Hitler sought "maximum control" over the Jews, hasn't the whole point of the EU been to avoid similar situations from ever arising again?

This talk of "maximum control" in British politics has grown like a weed out of the UKIP. One of their senior figures has been linked to kidnappings and extortion, which reveals a lot about the character of the people who want to devise and administer these policies. Similar people in Australia aspire to jobs in the immigration department where they can extort money out of people for getting them pushed up the queue. It is no surprise that the first member of Australia's parliament ever sent to jail was put there for obtaining bribes and sexual favours from immigrants. When Nigel Farage talks about copying the Australian immigration system, he is talking about creating jobs like these for his mates.

Even if "maximum control" is important, who really believes that a bunch of bullies in Westminster should have the power to exercise that control? Is May saying that British bosses are no longer competent to make their own decisions about who to employ or that British citizens are not reliable enough to make their own decisions about who they marry and they need a helping hand from paper-pushers in the immigration department?

Echoes of the Third Reich

Most people associate acts of mass murder with the Germans who lived in the time of Adolf Hitler. These are the stories told over and and over again in movies, books and the press.

Look more closely, however, and it appears that the vast majority of Germans were not in immediate contact with the gas chambers. Even Gobels' secretary writes that she was completely oblivious to it all. Many people were simply small cogs in a big bad machine. The clues were there, but many of them couldn't see the big picture. Even if they did get a whiff of it, many chose not to ask questions, to carry on with their comfortable lives.

Today, with mass media and the Internet, it is a lot easier for people to discover the truth if they look, but many are still reluctant to do so.

Consider, for example, the fingerprint scanners installed in British post offices and police stations to fingerprint foreigners and criminals (as if they have something in common). If all the post office staff refused to engage in racist conduct the fingerprint scanners would be put out of service. Nonetheless, these people carry on, just doing their job, just following orders. It was through many small abuses like this, rather than mass murder on every street corner, that Hitler motivated an entire nation to serve his evil purposes.

Technology like this is introduced in small steps: first it was used for serious criminals, then anybody accused of a crime, then people from Africa and next it appears they will try and apply it to all EU citizens remaining in the UK.

How will a British man married to a French woman explain to their children that mummy has to be fingerprinted by the border guard each time they return from vacation?

The Nazis pioneered biometric technology with the tracking numbers branded onto Jews. While today's technology is electronic and digital, isn't it performing the same function?

There is no middle ground between "soft" and "hard" brexit

An important point for British citizens and foreigners in the UK to consider today is that there is no compromise between a "soft" Brexit and a "hard" Brexit. It is one or the other. Anything less (for example, a deal that is "better" for British companies and worse for EU citizens) would imply that the British are a superior species and it is impossible to imagine the EU putting their stamp on such a deal. Anybody from the EU who is trying to make a life in the UK now is playing a game of Russian Roulette - sure, everything might be fine if it morphs into "soft" Brexit, but if Theresa May has her way, at some point in your life, maybe 20 years down the track, you could be rounded up by the gestapo and thrown behind bars for a parking violation. There has already been a five-fold increase in the detention of EU citizens in British concentration camps and they are using grandmothers from Asian countries to refine their tactics for the efficient removal of EU citizens. One can only wonder what type of monsters Theresa May has been employing to run such inhumane operations.

This is not politics

Edmund Burke's quote "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" comes to mind on a day like today. Too many people think it is just politics and they can go on with their lives and ignore it. Barely half the British population voted in the referendum. This is about human beings treating each other with dignity and respect. Anything less is abhorrent and may well come back to bite.

via Planet Debian

[educ7545-melanie-blog]

Portfolio: Engaging - Public Media - Design and Technologies

This article read more like a tragic novel. The death of Design and Technology; a world which I would not have otherwise considered. However, it plays with society’s assumption that Design and Technology, and The Arts and Technologies in general, is not an important learning area. As the title suggests, the article describes a three part scene set in the UK where a school headmaster and assistant principal have come to discuss whether Design and Technologies should continue as a subject in said school. 

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The headmaster and assistant principal are concerned that the numbers on enrolments in Design and Technologies are declining. And yet, it is still costing the school far too much. What is the point in the subject if the concepts can be taught in other subjects such as Art? The school has recently purchased coffee machines and a swimming pool. So, there isn’t much left to use in sprucing up the subject anyhow. Both gentlemen realise that the old Design and Technologies classrooms would make the perfect office area for all the new assistant principals. They settle on removing the subject from the school and advise the head of Design and Technologies the following day.

The assistant principal advises the head of Design and Technologies that the school will be stopping the teaching of the subject by the end of summer. He thanks her and the department for all they have done. Although the head of Design and Technologies attempts everything she can to persuade him otherwise, she is left speechless as the assistant principal grabs his briefcase and leaves the room.

The following day, the Design and Technologies team have a meeting and find they are no longer needed in the school. Any teacher who can take another subject may be able to transfer departments. Their meeting discusses the lack of STEM without this subject. However, with S and M being covered, school administration are happy to remove T and E. Instead, these ‘arty and technical stuff’ can be offered through other subjects and extra-curricular activities. Other countries will need to support the UK with the workforce needed in Creative, Design and Engineering industries.

One day, grammar schools will exist for bright students and schools such as these will teach students with lower abilities. These students will be taught subjects such as Art and Design ...oh wait. At this point in the article, the head of Design and Technologies is left speechless yet again. This time because of how ridiculous the whole ‘debacle’ has been.

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The Australian Curriculum: Design and Technologies argues that “In an increasingly technological and complex world, it is important to develop knowledge and confidence to critically analyse and creatively respond to design challenges. Knowledge, understanding and skills involved in the design, development and use of technologies are influenced by and can play a role in enriching and transforming societies and our natural, managed and constructed environments”. In Year 5 - 6 students learn to “Examine how people in design and technologies occupations address competing considerations, including sustainability in the design of products, services, and environments for current and future use (ACTDEK019). Not only does this support the individual, an understanding of Design and Technologies supports the trajectory of the greater community. In turn, Design and Technologies education creates active and informed citizens of the future.