(1) Code in Vote-Counting computers allows Rigging (variable weighting) (2) Votes are being counted as Fractions instead of as Whole Numbers (3) How U.S. elections are hacked (4) Vote fraud expert Bev Harris exposes electronic voting machines (5) Wikileaks reveals Google "Strategic Plan" to help Hillary win, and track Voters (6) Could neither Hillary nor Trump win? Could House of Reps appoint Mormon candidate? (7) Dollar slumps against euro, jumps against peso on potential Trump win (8) Sheldon Adelson donates big to Trump, but only at the last minute (9) Trump is to blame for ‘Unprecedented’ Train Wreck of an Election - Jewish Forward (10) In wake of Trump ascendancy, The (Rothschild) Economist switches allegiance to Canada (1) Code in Vote-Counting computers allows Rigging (variable weighting) http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/2179920-program-to-alter-elections-found-in-system-that-counts-us-votes-video/ Program to Alter Elections Found in System That Counts US Votes (Video) By Joshua Philipp, Epoch Times | November 1, 2016 AT 1:53 PM Last Updated: November 1, 2016 5:46 pm The electoral system in the United States is based on the standard of "one person, one vote," yet a nonpartisan organization investigating the elections has found code in vote-counting machines that allows them to alter how each vote is weighed. Black Box Voting released a video on Oct. 31 that exposes the code found in the GEMS machines, which count votes in elections for a quarter of the United States. Investigators showed video evidence of tabulation computers being tampered with in U.S. elections. The investigators also found functions on the vote-counting systems that hide alterations and code that divides whole votes into fractions. "In short, it’s like having the ability to say a vote is not a whole," said Bennie Smith, a Tennessee programmer in the investigative video, who analyzed the GEMS system. ES&S, the company that runs the GEMS system, did not respond to questions sent through its media request form asking why the GEMS system contains code to alter how votes are weighed. Black Box Voting published a report showing the code it discovered in the GEMS system. James Scott, co-founder and senior fellow of the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, a cybersecurity think tank, reviewed the code and said it functions as "alter" commands. "An adversary could not write malware more damaging, better hidden, or more capable of altering election results than the fractionalization feature already included in GEMS," Scott said. "This is deeply disturbing." Scott said the code also raises the risk of an outside hacker using the built-in system to alter votes. "If this is already built into the GEMS software, then they’ve made it easy," he said. "All a hacker needs to do is compromise credentials of someone that already has access to this software and you can use your imagination after that." (2) Votes are being counted as Fractions instead of as Whole Numbers http://blackboxvoting.org/fraction-magic-3/ Fraction Magic – Part 3: Proof of code By Bev Harris May 12, 2016 3 – Programming to treat votes as decimals – The term "DOUBLE" means to store and process numbers with "double precision floating points" – in other words, to enable large numbers of decimal values. In contrast, the term "INT" instructs the program to treat numbers as whole integers. Source Code: Below are clips from GEMS source code showing that it converts votes from whole numbers (previous version, GEMS 1.17) to store and process them as decimal values by setting them to "double" in GEMS version 1.18: "ALTER TABLE SumCandidateCounter" "ALTER COLUMN TotalVotes DOUBLE" "ALTER TABLE SumRaceCounter" "ALTER COLUMN NumberOfUnderVotes DOUBLE" *** "CREATE TABLE SumCandidateCounter ( ReportunitId INT, VCenterId INT, CounterGroupId INT, CandVGroupId INT, TotalVotes DOUBLE )" *** "CREATE TABLE SumRaceCounter ( ReportunitId INT, VCenterId INT, CounterGroupId INT, RaceId INT, TimesCounted INT, TimesBlankVoted INT, TimesOverVoted INT, NumberOfUnderVotes DOUBLE ) " *** "ALTER TABLE CandidateCounter " "ALTER COLUMN TotalVotes DOUBLE " "ALTER TABLE RaceCounter " "ALTER COLUMN NumberOfUnderVotes DOUBLE" *** # Contains the candidate counts for the race "CREATE TABLE CandidateCounter (           CounterBatchId INT, ReportunitId INT,           CounterGroupId INT,           CandVGroupId INT,           TotalVotes DOUBLE # Number of votes ) " *** "CREATE TABLE SumCandidateCounter (           ReportunitId INT,     VCenterId INT,           CounterGroupId INT, CandVGroupId INT,           TotalVotes DOUBLE ) " *** Non-programmers may not have seen the term "double" used to describe processing numbers with decimals. Here is an SQL tutorial -- there are many -- showing that "Double" means to process numbers as decimal values: The above source code instructions create and define data structures in Microsoft Access tables, used by GEMS to create results reports. By opening the GEMS tables using MS Access, and right-clicking "design view" for the tables related to vote-counting, you see that the instruction to treat vote counts as "double" is implemented. The vote format in each is set to "double," counting votes as decimals. Overvotes are counted as whole numbers but undervotes are counted as decimals: Because the "double" configuration for votes is built into the source code, the most important requirement for sophisticated, configurable election tampering exists wherever the program is used. [...] * * * * * Bev Harris is a writer and founder of Black Box Voting. She has researched and written about election transparency and computerized voting systems since 2002. Harris was featured in the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary Hacking Democracy, and is the author of Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century, a book purchased by the White House Library and also reportedly found on Osama bin Laden’s bookshelf. Harris’s research has been covered in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Time Magazine, CNN and several international publications, including the Philippine Daily Inquirer and Agence France Presse. Contact by text or phone 206-335-7747 for media inquiries. Bennie Smith is a Memphis-based application developer for an electrical manufacturing company. He is also a political strategist who has developed a micro-targeting application that predicts voter turnout. In August 2014 he was approached by a number of candidates who insisted that their elections had been stolen. He disagreed with the group and offered to look into how the system works. After discovering a number of irregularities, Smith began to research how votes that originate from the same source can change once they get into the GEMS vote tabulation program. Smith’s attention to these anomalies uncovered an extraordinarily high-risk tampering mechanism and ultimately provided a new infrastructure for analyzing questionable election results. (3) How U.S. elections are hacked http://www.wnd.com/2016/10/how-u-s-elections-are-hacked-missing-link-found/ How U.S. elections are hacked, missing link found Vote-fraud expert exposes electronic voting machines Published: 1 day ago (INFOWARS) — Black Box Voting, founded in 2003, performs nonpartisan investigative reporting on elections in an attempt to stop vote rigging. You may be wondering what the term "black box" means. A "black box" system is non-transparent; its functions are hidden from the public. Elections, of course, should not be black box systems. Author Bev Harris became known for groundbreaking work on electronic voting machines, which can remove transparency of the vote count. With voting machines, all political power can be converted to the hands of a few anonymous subcontractors: (4) Vote fraud expert Bev Harris exposes electronic voting machines http://www.infowars.com/how-americas-elections-are-hacked/ Infowars.com - October 31, 2016 Black Box Voting, founded in 2003, performs nonpartisan investigative reporting on elections in an attempt to stop vote rigging. You may be wondering what the term "black box" means. A "black box" system is non-transparent; its functions are hidden from the public. Elections, of course, should not be black box systems. Author Bev Harris became known for groundbreaking work on electronic voting machines, which can remove transparency of the vote count. With voting machines, all political power can be converted to the hands of a few anonymous subcontractors: Extensive analysis on the topic by Alex Jones can be viewed below: Watch the full interview with Bev Harris from the Alex Jones Show: (5) Wikileaks reveals Google "Strategic Plan" to help Hillary win, and track Voters http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-01/wikileaks-reveals-googles-strategic-plan-help-democrats-win-election Wikileaks Reveals Google's "Strategic Plan" To Help Democrats Win The Election, Track Voters by Tyler Durden Nov 1, 2016 3:09 PM Among the latest set of Podesta releases, was the following email sent on April 15, 2014 by Google's Eric Schmidt titled "Notes for a 2016 Democratic Campaign" in which the Google/Alphabet Chairman tells Cheryl Mills that "I have put together my thoughts on the campaign ideas and I have scheduled some meetings in the next few weeks for veterans of the campaign to tell me how to make these ideas better. This is simply a draft but do let me know if this is a helpful process for you all." Google head Eric Schmidt's secret strategic plan for the US election #PodestaEmails https://t.co/LskJODXyXn More: https://t.co/ZUfh7WDAT5 pic.twitter.com/llq5G9kp5V — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 31, 2016 While there are numerous curious nuances in the plan, presented below in its entirety, the one section that caught our - and Wikileaks' attention - is the following which implicitly suggests Google planned the creation of a voter tracking database, using smart phones: Key is the development of a single record for a voter that aggregates all that is known about them. In 2016 smart phones will be used to identify, meet, and update profiles on the voter. A dynamic volunteer can easily speak with a voter and, with their email or other digital handle, get the voter videos and other answers to areas they care about ("the benefits of ACA to you" etc.) As a reminder, two days ago it was revealed that just days prior to the April 15, 2014 email, Schmidt had sent another email in which he expressed his eagerness to "fund" the campaign efforts and wants to be a "head outside advisor." In the email from John Podesta to Robby Mook we learned that: I met with Eric Schmidt tonight. As David reported, he's ready to fund, advise recruit talent, etc. He was more deferential on structure than I expected. Wasn't pushing to run through one of his existing firms. Clearly wants to be head outside advisor, but didn't seem like he wanted to push others out. Clearly wants to get going. He's still in DC tomorrow and would like to meet with you if you are in DC in the afternoon. I think it's worth doing. You around? If you are, and want to meet with him, maybe the four of us can get on t Another email from February 2015 suggested that the Google Chairman remained active in its collaboration with the Clinton campaign: John Podesta wrote that Eric Schmidt met with HR "about the business he proposes to do with the campaign. He says he's met with HRC" and adds that "FYI. They are donating the Google plane for the Africa trip" The remainder of Schmidt's proposed plan, presented in its entirety below, is just as troubling. Notes for a 2016 Democratic Campaign Eric Schmidt April 2014 DRAFT DRAFT DRAFT DRAFT Here are some comments and observations based on what we saw in the 2012 campaign. If we get started soon, we will be in a very strong position to execute well for 2016. 1. Size, Structure and Timing Lets assume a total budget of about $1.5Billion, with more than 5000 paid employees and million(s) of volunteers. The entire startup ceases operation four days after November 8, 2016. The structure includes a Chairman or Chairwoman who is the external face of the campaign and a President who is the executive in charge of objectives, measurements, systems and building and managing the organization. Every day matters as our end date does not change. An official campaign right after midterm elections and a preparatory team assembled now is best. 2. Location The campaign headquarters will have about a thousand people, mostly young and hardworking and enthusiastic. Its important to have a very large hiring pool (such as Chicago or NYC) from which to choose enthusiastic, smart and low paid permanent employees. DC is a poor choice as its full of distractions and interruptions. Moving the location from DC elsewhere guarantees visitors have taken the time to travel and to help. The key is a large population of talented people who are dying to work for you. Any outer borough of NYC, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Boston are all good examples of a large, blue state city to base in. Employees will relocate to participate in the campaign, and will find low cost temporary housing or live with campaign supporters on a donated basis. This worked well in Chicago and can work elsewhere. The computers will be in the cloud and most likely on Amazon Web services (AWS). All the campaign needs are portable computers, tablets and smart phones along with credit card readers. 3. The pieces of a Campaign a) The Field Its important to have strong field leadership, with autonomy and empowerment. Operations talent needs to build the offices, set up the systems, hire the people, and administer what is about 5000 people. Initial modeling will show heavy hiring in the key battleground states. There is plenty of time to set these functions up and build the human systems. The field is about organizing people, voter contact, and get out the vote programs. For organizing tools, build a simple way to link people and activities as a workflow and let the field manage the system, all cloud based. Build a simple organizing tool with a functioning back-end. Avoid deep integration as the benefits are not worth it. Build on the cloud. Organizing is really about sharing and linking people, and this tool would measure and track all of it. There are many other crucial early investments needed in the field: determining the precise list of battleground states, doing early polling to confirm initial biases, and maintaining and extending voter protection programs at the state level. b) The Voter Key is the development of a single record for a voter that aggregates all that is known about them. In 2016 smart phones will be used to identify, meet, and update profiles on the voter. A dynamic volunteer can easily speak with a voter and, with their email or other digital handle, get the voter videos and other answers to areas they care about ("the benefits of ACA to you" etc.) The scenario includes a volunteer on a walk list, encountering a potential voter, updating the records real time and deepening contact with the voter and the information we have to offer. c) Digital A large group of campaign employees will use digital marketing methods to connect to voters, to offer information, to use social networks to spread good news, and to raise money. Partners like Blue State Digital will do much of the fund raising. A key point is to convert BSD and other partners to pure cloud service offerings to handle the expected crush and load. d) Media (paid), (earned) and (social), and polling New tools should be developed to measure reach and impact of paid, earned and social media. The impact of press coverage should be measurable in reach and impact, and TV effectiveness measured by attention and other surveys. Build tools that measure the rate and spread of stories and rumors, and model how it works and who has the biggest impact. Tools can tell us about the origin of stories and the impact of any venue, person or theme. Connect polling into this in some way. Find a way to do polling online and not on phones. e) Analytics and data science and modeling, polling and resource optimization tools For each voter, a score is computed ranking probability of the right vote. Analytics can model demographics, social factors and many other attributes of the needed voters. Modeling will tell us what who we need to turn out and why, and studies of effectiveness will let us know what approaches work well. Machine intelligence across the data should identify the most important factors for turnout, and preference. It should be possible to link the voter records in Van with upcoming databases from companies like Comcast and others for media measurement purposes. The analytics tools can be built in house or partnered with a set of vendors. f) Core engineering, voter database and contact with voters online The database of voters (NGP Van) is a fine starting point for voter records and is maintained by the vendor (and needs to be converted to the cloud). The code developed for 2012 (Narwahl etc.) is unlikely to be used, and replaced by a model where the vendor data is kept in the Van database and intermediate databases are arranged with additional information for a voter. Quite a bit of software is to be developed to match digital identities with the actual voter file with high confidence. The key unit of the campaign is a "voter", and each and every record is viewable and updatable by volunteers in search of more accurate information. In the case where we can’t identify the specific human, we can still have a partial digital voter id, for a person or "probable-person" with attributes that we can identify and use to target. As they respond we can eventually match to a registered voter in the main file. This digital key is eventually matched to a real person. The Rules Its important that all the player in the campaign work at cost and there be no special interests in the financing structure. This means that all vendors work at cost and there is a separate auditing function to ensure no one is profiting unfairly from the campaign. All investments and conflicts of interest would have to be publicly disclosed. The rules of the audit should include caps on individual salaries and no investor profits from the campaign function. (For example, this rule would apply to me.) The KEY things a) early build of an integrated development team and recognition that this is an entire system that has to be managed as such b) decisions to exclusively use cloud solutions for scalability, and choice of vendors and any software from 2012 that will be reused. c) the role of the smart phone in the hands of a volunteer. The smart phone manages the process, updates the database, informs the citizen, and allows fundraising and recruitment of volunteers (on android and iphone). d) early and continued focus of qualifying fundraising dollars to build the field, and build all the tools. Outside money will be plentiful and perfect for TV use. A smart media mix tool tells all we need to know about media placement, TV versus other media and digital media. (6) Could neither Hillary nor Trump win? Could House of Reps appoint Mormon candidate? http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-02/us-election:-could-both-clinton-and-trump-lose/7988484 US Election: Could neither Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump end up president? The World Today By Eleanor Hall There is a possibility that neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump could win the US presidential election, says Bill Whalen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution While the latest national polling is showing Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump neck-and-neck, Mr Whalen, who also worked on several past Republican campaigns, said the unpopularity of both candidates could lead to some interesting results. Mr Whalen said there was a chance a third party candidate could pick up enough votes in the state of Utah and "start a process that could lead to genuine chaos". He said as well as the usual suspects of key states to keep an eye on during election day — Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida — the Republican candidate, Mr Trump, would also have to hold onto every state carried by Mitt Romney in 2012. "Where that would be troubling him would be Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Utah," he said. "But in terms of getting to 270, besides holding on to the 206 he needs to pick up the following, if he wins Florida and Ohio he is now up to 253 — he is only 17 electoral votes away. "If he won the state of Pennsylvania, which has 20 electoral votes, that would do the trick right there, but he's struggling in Pennsylvania so now he's looking at Michigan, he's looking at Wisconsin and other states. "A very curious state would be the state of Utah, which almost always go Republican — I think it last voted for a Democrat in 1964. "You can almost always put six electoral votes in the Republican side." Mr Whalen said right now the Mormon independent candidate, Evan McMullin, could instead pick up those six electoral votes in Utah. "And start a process could lead to genuine chaos in terms of another candidate getting to the requisite 270 electoral votes they need to win the presidency." Mr Whalen said in the case of Mr McMullin winning the Utah votes, then the matter would have to be decided by the House of Representatives. "What the McMullin campaign would hope is this, that once he got into that vote, because the constitution of the United States dictates that the top three earners of electoral votes are considered by the house, and McMullin would be part of this calculation," he said. "What his campaign would hope would be that they would get to the House and suddenly people would be thinking well, we don't like Donald Trump, we don't think he's suitably presidential. "Hillary Clinton is under federal investigation right now, if she's elected to office there could be a constitutional crisis — let's start voting for McMullin." This, he said, could all result in an election season where neither Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton end up in the White House. [...] (7) Dollar slumps against euro, jumps against peso on potential Trump win http://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-forex-idUSKBN12X022 Wed Nov 2, 2016 | 11:08am EDT By Sam Forgione | NEW YORK The U.S. dollar hit its lowest level in more than three weeks against the euro, yen, Swiss franc and sterling on Wednesday on continued nervousness about a potential victory for U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump next week. Investors are rethinking long-held bets on a Nov. 8 victory for Democrat Hillary Clinton. Clinton held a 5 percentage point lead over Trump, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Monday, but some other polls showed her Republican rival ahead by 1-2 percentage points. The dollar index .DXY, which measures the greenback against a basket of six major rivals, fell about 0.4 percent to 97.26, its lowest since Oct. 11. The Mexican peso tumbled to a more than one-month low against the greenback of 19.4295 pesos MXN= per dollar on fears of a Trump victory. Markets' assumption in the past month has been that the dollar would fall if Trump won. Clinton is viewed as the candidate of the status quo, while there is greater uncertainty over what a Trump victory might mean for U.S. foreign policy, international trade and the domestic economy. "There is a huge amount of unknown unknowns around Trump," said Richard Franulovich, a senior currency strategist at Westpac Banking Corp in New York. "That uncertainty is obviously anathema to markets." The euro EUR= rose about 0.6 percent against the dollar to $1.1115, its highest since Oct. 11. The dollar sank 1 percent against the yen JPY= to 103.10 yen, its lowest since Oct. 10. The dollar plunged about 0.6 percent against the Swiss franc CHF= to 0.9695 franc, its lowest in roughly a month. The Mexican peso suffered MXN= a more than 1-percent drop against the dollar for a second straight day. A possible Trump victory has been viewed as a key risk for the Mexican currency given the candidate's promises to clamp down on immigration and rethink trade relations. "People are pricing in higher odds" of a Trump victory, said Win Thin, global head of emerging market currency strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman in New York. The Fed ends a two-day meeting on Wednesday and is due to issue a statement at 2 p.m. ET (1800 GMT) that is widely expected to open the door, on economic grounds, to a hike in interest rates next month. A number of analysts said, however, that might prove irrelevant in the context of the election. (Reporting by Sam Forgione; Additional reporting by Patrick Graham in London; Editing by Nick Zieminski) (8) Sheldon Adelson donates big to Trump, but only at the last minute http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/10/31/adelson-pours-25-million-into-white-house-race-more-may-be-coming.html Adelson pours $25 million into White House race, more may be coming By Ed Henry Published October 31, 2016 EXCLUSIVE: Billionaire Sheldon Adelson just committed $25 million to an anti-Hillary Clinton Super PAC to try and help tilt the presidential race and down ballot House and Senate races to Republicans, Fox News learned Monday. There are indications the casino magnate will pony up even more by the end of the week. Two senior Republican sources familiar with the donation described it to Fox News as a "massive" amount of money to be spent during the final week of the presidential race and a sign that Adelson, who has largely been on the sidelines after initially suggesting he would give $100 million to help Donald Trump, is now going all in on the Republican nominee. The money will benefit Future 45, a Super PAC launched by the Ricketts family in Chicago, founders of TD Ameritrade. The group has recently been running a television ad in battlegrounds comparing Clinton to Richard Nixon, calling her a "secretive, paranoid politician who destroyed 30,000 pieces of evidence." The Republican sources said the contribution was made in the last few days as the FBI re-ignited its investigation of Clinton’s email server, and could spark other big GOP donors – who may have thought the Democratic nominee was coasting to victory just days ago -- to step up their support of Trump in the final days. Most importantly, one source familiar with the Adelson contribution revealed he is considering pouring as much as another $25 million dollars into the race before Election Day on November 8. The first major contribution came as Trump visited Adelson’s Venetian resort and casino in Las Vegas for a rally with supporters on Sunday. Trump praised Adelson and his wife, Miriam, without any reference to the money that went to the Super PAC. [...] (9) Trump is to blame for ‘Unprecedented’ Train Wreck of an Election - Jewish Forward http://forward.com/opinion/politics/353212/why-donald-trump-is-to-blame-for-unprecedented-train-wreck-of-an-election/?attribution=home-hero-item-text-1 Why Donald Trump Is To Blame for ‘Unprecedented’ Train Wreck of an Election J.J. GoldbergNovember 2, 2016Getty Images You could say a lot of things about this year’s presidential election campaign, but there’s one word that keeps popping up over and over: unprecedented. And that’s just the right word. This is unprecedented. We’ve never seen anything like it. Never before have the two major candidates been so widely disliked by voters. Never, at least since the Civil War, has the American public been so bitterly divided, nor a presidential election campaign been conducted in such coarse, degrading, inappropriate tones. Let’s be frank: There’s plenty of blame to go around on all sides, and neither candidate is close to ideal. But the debased tone of this campaign is mostly the handiwork of one man: Donald Trump. When we speak of an unprecedented election year, we’re really talking about Trump. This nation has never seen a major-party presidential nominee who was so profoundly ignorant of the nature, scope and limits of the job, of the workings of government and the content of the Constitution. So uncomprehending of the dangerously volatile complexities of international relations, of military power and its uses, of deterrence, of weaponry, treaties and international law. So unaware of his own limitations, so incurious about the things he doesn’t know. Above all, we’ve never seen a competitive candidate for the highest office in the land who was so emotionally unstable, so quick to dole out outrageous insults and yet so quick to take offense, so incapable of taking what he’s dished out. So thin-skinned and narcissistic that he’s perpetually threatening to use organs of the state to take revenge on those who’ve hurt his feelings. So incapable of separating his own needs from those of the nation that he can actually express confidence in his ability to repair relations with Russia because "Putin has said nice things about me." We’ve known all this almost since he entered the race more than a year ago . His campaign speeches from the beginning have consisted of little more than long catalogues of who was "fantastic" because they’d said nice things about him and who was "disgusting" because they’d spoken unkindly about him. All about him. We’ve known all along that he represented something new and frightening in American politics. You didn’t have to be a Democrat to find him alarming. The Trump phenomenon has split the Republican Party, to the point where many question the very future of the GOP. A new movement, Never Trump, has emerged from the ranks of sane conservatives with the sole purpose of repudiating the candidate. We’ve seen and heard the alarms sounded by journalists like William Kristol, Jennifer Rubin, George Will and Charles Krauthammer, by elected officials like Paul Ryan and Jeff Flake, by the entire Republican royal family, the Bushes. All the more disappointing, then, that the Democrats and their standard-bearer, Hillary Clinton, have devoted so much of their campaign to attacking the conservative principles Trump shares with the Republican mainstream, rather than hammering home the ways in which he is not like other Republicans but is rather a malignant mutation. Pursuing business as usual, flogging the liberal cookie-cutter issues that please the Democratic base but unite Republicans in opposition to them. Until the last month or so — until the Access Hollywood video was released on October 7 — the Democrats were practicing business as usual rather than responding to the national emergency that Trump represents. In building a campaign around opposition to Republican policies — on immigration, abortion, racial justice, gun laws — they were effectively reminding anti-Trump Republicans of all the reasons they didn’t like Democrats. They were shoring up Trump’s base rather than shrinking it and expanding their own. This unprecedented election year could have been a rare opportunity to attack one of the most urgent crises in Washington, the polarization and gridlock that embitters all sides and paralyzes government. Rather than — or in addition to — using the Trump phenomenon as an opportunity to push back the Republicans, Clinton could have called for bipartisan unity in the face of an unprecedented threat to America and American democracy. She could have called on Republicans to join her in a sort of government of national unity, with serious Republican representation in her Cabinet and an agenda topped by resetting the tone in Washington. It’s not too late. In the few days remaining before the election, Clinton could issue a declaration of national emergency, a call for unity and an agenda for the next two years including creating task forces, identifying areas of possible common ground, or at least compromise, and trying to define new ground rules that might promote civility in public affairs. The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward. (10) In wake of Trump ascendancy, The (Rothschild) Economist switches allegiance to Canada http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21709305-it-uniquely-fortunate-many-waysbut-canada-still-holds-lessons-other-western Liberty moves north It is uniquely fortunate in many ways—but Canada still holds lessons for other Western countries Oct 29th 2016 | From the print edition: Leaders WHO will uphold the torch of openness in the West? Not America’s next president. Donald Trump, the grievance-mongering Republican nominee, would build a wall on Mexico’s border and rip up trade agreements. Hillary Clinton, the probable winner on November 8th, would be much better on immigration, but she has renounced her former support for ambitious trade deals. Britain, worried about immigrants and globalisation, has voted to march out of the European Union. Angela Merkel flung open Germany’s doors to refugees, then suffered a series of political setbacks. Marine Le Pen, a right-wing populist, is the favourite to win the first round of France’s presidential election next year. In this depressing company of wall-builders, door-slammers and drawbridge-raisers, Canada stands out as a heartening exception. It happily admits more than 300,000 immigrants a year, nearly 1% of its population—a higher proportion than any other big, rich country—and has done so for two decades. Its charismatic prime minister, Justin Trudeau, who has been in office a year, has welcomed some 33,000 Syrian refugees, far more than America has. Bucking the protectionist mood, Canada remains an eager free-trader. It was dismayed by the EU’s struggle to overcome a veto by Walloons on signing a "comprehensive" trade agreement that took seven years to negotiate (see Charlemagne). Under Mr Trudeau, Canada is trying to make amends for its shameful treatment of indigenous peoples, and is likely to become the first Western country to legalise recreational cannabis on a national level. In this section Irredeemably dull by reputation, less brash and bellicose than America, Canada has long seemed to outsiders to be a citadel of decency, tolerance and good sense. Charles Dickens, bewildered by a visit to America in 1842, found relief in Canada, where he saw "public feeling and private enterprise in a sound and wholesome state; nothing of flush or fever in its system." Modern Canada’s social safety net is stronger than America’s; its gun-control laws saner. Today, in its lonely defence of liberal values, Canada seems downright heroic. In an age of seductive extremes, it remains reassuringly level-headed. Many of Canada’s virtues spring from its history and geography and are not readily exportable (see Briefing). It is easier to be relaxed about immigration when your only land border is protected by a wall the size of the United States. Appreciation for the benefits of trade comes more easily to countries next door to big markets. British Brexiteers might justifiably claim that they voted for exactly what Canada already has: control of immigration and the freedom to negotiate trade deals with any country willing to reciprocate. Despite such luck, Canada suffers from some of the stresses that feed populism in other rich countries. It has experienced a decline of manufacturing jobs, stagnant incomes for most of its citizens and rising inequality. It, too, frets about a shrinking middle class. Canadians worry about Islamist terrorism, though the country has so far been spared a big attack. Some right-of-centre politicians, playing on fears that one will happen, indulge in Trumpian rhetoric. Yet Canada does not seem tempted to shut itself off from the world. What can other Western countries learn from its example? First, Canada not only welcomes newcomers but works hard to integrate them. Its charter of rights and freedoms proclaims the country’s "multicultural heritage". Not every country will fuse diversity and national identity in the same way that Canada does. Indeed, French-speaking Quebec has its own way of interpreting multiculturalism, which gives priority to the province’s distinct culture. But other countries can learn from the spirit of experimentation that Canada brings to helping immigrants find employment and housing. Its system of private sponsorship, in which groups of citizens take responsibility for supporting refugees during their first year, not only helps them adapt but encourages society at large to make them welcome. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees has called on other countries to copy it. The second lesson is the value of knowing when fiscal austerity does more harm than good. Canada has been managing its public finances conservatively for the past 20 years or so. Now in charge of a sluggish economy, Mr Trudeau can afford to give growth a modest lift by spending extra money on infrastructure. His government has given a tax cut to the middle class and raised rates for the highest earners to help pay for it. These economic policies deserve to "go viral", the head of the IMF has said. Canada has a further economic lesson to impart in how it protects people hurt by globalisation. Compared with America, its publicly financed health system lessens the terror of losing a job; it also provides more financial support and training to people who do. And its policy of "equalisation" gives provincial and local governments the means to maintain public services at a uniform level across the country. Perhaps most important, this mixture of policies—liberal on trade and immigration, activist in shoring up growth and protecting globalisation’s losers—is a reminder that the centrist formula still works, if politicians are willing to champion it. Instead of folding in the face of opposition to liberal policies, Mr Trudeau and his ministers have instead made the case for them. Although free trade is not the hot-button issue in Canada that it is in America, they have been tireless in listening to critics and trying to take their concerns into account. Canada is far from perfect. It remains a poorer, less productive and less innovative economy than America’s. While championing freer international trade, Canada has yet to eliminate obstacles to trade among its provinces. For many liberals, Canada’s emphasis on "peace, order and good government", enshrined in its constitution, is inadequate without an infusion of American individualism. But for now the world owes Canada gratitude for reminding it of what many people are in danger of forgetting: that tolerance and openness are wellsprings of security and prosperity, not threats to them. -- Peter Myers website: http://mailstar.net/index.html |
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