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The conflict of interest here is stunning. The CEO of this company Acronym, which owns the app developer Shadow, received $100K from the Buttigieg campaign and
by tempsy 7y ago
The conflict of interest here is stunning. The CEO of this company Acronym, which owns the app developer Shadow, received $100K from the Buttigieg campaign and her husband is an advisor for his campaign. Buttigieg's organizing director is also a former employee of Shadow. And the entire company is all former Hilary Clinton employees e.g. centrist democrats.
- vowelless 7y agoThis is unbelievable to me. Didn’t they learn anything from 4 years ago? It is such a scam; makes working on Wall Street feel cleaner and more moral.
- eplanit 7y agoThe DNC also declined offers for pen testing their servers in 2016. Where does their misplaced confidence come from?
- pstuart 7y agoNo offense, but that's a stretch. I worked in ad tech for almost a decade, so I'm no innocent either.
- vowelless 7y agoAdtech is below Wall Street in my admittedly twisted morality spectrum, but above the military industrial complex.
- wayoutthere 7y agoThis kind of crap is why Bernie Sanders is so popular. It's why Trump won the 2016 election too. There is an overwhelming feeling on the part of voters that the "establishment" of the party is beholden to a small group of wealthy neoliberals (or neoconservatives on the GOP side, but there are few differences in policy between the two). Many on the left regard liberalism as a failed project, and Sanders is popular among them because he offers an alternative to neoliberalism. The wealth inequality that accelerated after the 2007 crisis has added a class warfare aspect to national politics where one did not exist before. Trump has largely eviscerated the Republican party by playing on this, and I think we're seeing this dynamic on the Democrat side this election cycle.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago> This kind of crap is why Bernie Sanders is so popular. It's why Trump won the 2016 election too. Yes, but not for the reason you stated. It's conspiracy theories like the GP posted that have led to the rise of Sanders and Trump.
- pstuart 7y agoI've been a liberal voter for decades, and Sanders pretty well represents what the democratic party used to be back in the day. There's genuine hunger for real change and that is the driver for Sanders, as well as the fact that he is no fair weather politician. You can hate Hillary, but she was probably the smartest, most experienced, and best qualified for the job as a maintainer of the status quo. I think we need to go beyond the status quo, but politics is (or was) the art of compromise. Unfortunately politics is at its core a popularity contest and people vote with their emotions rather than their brains, which is why we have the current administration.
- lern_too_spel 7y agoAnd in particular, their emotions lead them to believe conspiracy theories when something doesn't go their way. It's not that the DNC is some cabal hindering progress, like they believe, but that progress requires careful policy consideration that those who advocate large immediate changes haven't thought through. Look at Sanders's early education policy for example. It's just a single line. Getting early education and childcare right will benefit far more people and in a far more egalitarian way than getting postsecondary education right, but if you even suggest it, some "emotional" Sanders supporters will say you must be part of a banking conspiracy.
- pstuart 7y agoConspiracies come in different flavors as it were. The DNC has not hidden its fear of Sanders, and I believe that they are "conspiring" to get a mainstream candidate that their patrons want, e.g. Biden or Buttigieg. Platforms are not policies, they're goals. There's nothing wrong with having ambitious goals and then adjusting to reality whilst trying to implement them. The Sanders camp clearly attracts a lot of emotional people as well, but at least they're emotional for a perceived good rather than perceived grievances -- to put a charitable spin on it :-)
- Reedx 7y agoUnfortunately there has been little learning and self-reflection. It's full steam ahead to another cycle of divisiveness, extreme polarization and getting nothing done.
- frockington1 7y agoSo either 4 more years of Trump of 4 years of getting nothing done. Conservatives must be happy with both prospects
- Donald 7y agoQuick observation: the vast majority of Democrats with the social connections to feel confident starting this kind of company will be affiliated with candidates who have won previous elections. This centralization is by design: the winner of presidential primary effectively becomes "head of party" and installs their own leadership at the national committee level.
- smacktoward 7y agoThis is true, but it's also part of what's broken in the poli-tech space -- if you're starting a business there, the connections you have matter much more than your experience and/or competence in application design, UX, operations, etc. You don't get customers by building a better product, you get customers by lining up influential people behind you. So the software products that serve this space tend in general to be pretty underwhelming. This can be classified as a mutated variation of Enterprise Software Syndrome, the disease that makes enterprise software suck so badly.
- basch 7y agoI dont think "hiring someone who knows the social landscape" for your sales/networking position is a flaw. You really just need to plan for this if you want to start that type of company. A company needs more than just product builders.
- sky_rw 7y agoThis is true for all business. People don't buy the objectively best product, they buy the product from the people they know best. Until you are capable of changing human nature and purchasing behavior challenging this phenomenon will be an uphill battle.
- ethbro 7y agoI would say: they buy the product they trust the most to fulfill their needs (as they see them). Barring actual corruption, oftentimes ability to eventually get it done is more important to the buyer than features.
- duxup 7y agoDo you feel like they'd rig the app and risk the company over that?
- tempsy 7y agoI don't necessarily think they purposefully rigged the app, but do you not think the campaign may have gotten extra training or a direct line to Shadow for support questions on how to use the app that other campaigns wouldn't have gotten? I'm seeing on Twitter that the app interface wasn't very intuitive and officials there were confused on how to use it.
- duxup 7y ago>you not think the campaign may have gotten extra training or a direct line to Shadow for support questions on how to use the app that other campaigns wouldn't have gotten? Well other than there is no evidence of that and would that have even helped? My understanding of how the Iowa caucuses work ... what you describe would not advantage anyone. As I understand it the campaigns themselves are not reporting "I got X votes" directly. I've not been to Iowa but I've been to some caucuses.. what you describe would not advantage anyone in my experience.
- tempsy 7y agoI have no idea how the app works. Buttigieg's comms director tweeted worksheets with the pin number to login to the app on Twitter https://twitter.com/bhalle87/status/1224558925946793985?s=20 https://twitter.com/bhalle87/status/1224558925946793985?s=20
- TurkishPoptart 7y agoOn top of all that, it seemed like Bernie Sanders had the biggest turnout (just from qualitatively observing the number of people in his corner). As it stands, I suspect foul play. I do not have evidence of this, however.
- sappapp 7y agoThis is a conspiracy theory. Please don't amplify this disinformation. There is no proof anything this commenter is stating has anything to do with the issues in Iowa. https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1224577210897453057 https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1224577210897453057
- _bxg1 7y agoAre you disputing the stated facts, or just the (unstated) connection to the other issues? A conflict of interest is a conflict of interest, no matter how far it may or may not have gone.
- sappapp 7y agoBoth. Shadow provides peer to peer engagement software, which is being used by the Buttigieg campaign. Just because the same software is being used in Iowa doesn't mean there is a conflict of interest. https://shadowinc.io/ https://shadowinc.io/
- ameister14 7y agoBut you're not really disputing the facts there - the CEO's husband being an advisor, Buttigieg's organizing director being a former employee, etc?
- sappapp 7y agoNo one has provided evidence of this either. But, if the evidence is presented it still doesn't prove that there is a conflict of interest.
- aksss 7y agoI think the standard is to avoid the appearance of a conflict, not to have plausible deniability. I think the person’s point is that it doesn’t look good, and this is the kind of scenario where _you need everything to look good_, because when shit like this happens, it erodes confidence all the more.
- _bxg1 7y agoIn the pre-Trump era politicians had to at least pretend they weren't corrupt. Now that it's clear there are no consequences, I think we'll only see them get more and more brazen.
- sappapp 7y agoYeah, you're right! The Buttigieg campaign should have withheld that 100K until Shadow successfully rigged the Iowa caucus.
- jmull 7y agoWhat $100,000 is that?
- Rebelgecko 7y agoWhat is the endgame here in this conspiracy? That Buttigieg pays $100,000 for software he doesn't need to cover up a bribe used to "rig" the preliminary results of the caucus? If that's the case, wouldn't it backfire horribly once the paper ballots get manually tabulated? Especially since that would probably happen around the time of the next (NH?) primary. A story like that ("Buttigieg didn't actually win in Iowa!") would totally derail any momentum (since the actual # of delegates in Iowa is fairly insignificant, about 1% of the total, my understanding is that the main value of the Iowa caucuses is to construct media narratives)
- HBKXNCUO 7y ago>In the pre-Trump era politicians had to at least pretend they weren't corrupt. I guess you should let Hillary know she should not have been in control of a foundation that was receiving millions of dollars in donations from foreign leaders while she was the head of the department in charge of US foreign policy.
- _bxg1 7y agoMost people didn't know about that. I didn't know about that until this moment. I'm not saying it's right, I'm saying there was enough of a lack of tolerance in our society for that sort of thing for discretion to even be necessary at all. The whole country knows about Trump's most recent cronyism, and both his voters and his congress have made clear that they intend to do exactly nothing about it.
- dralley 7y ago>received $100K from the Buttigieg campaign This company produces the textbanking software that the Buttigieg campaign uses. It's frustrating to watch people repeating the phrase "received money from the Buttigieg campaign" with the implication that it's a bribe when the actual situation is that both the Iowa Democratic Party and the Buttigieg campaign used the same contractor for some software.
- markhalonen 7y agolol that totally clears potential corruption
- tempsy 7y agoBiden and Gillibrand use them for similar services but paid far less than Buttigieg. I would want to see how much other campaigns paid for textbanking software but that seems unusually expensive.
- fuqmachine 7y ago100k is a lot more for that software compared to what Biden paid.
- sappapp 7y agoDo you have a source?
- abnry 7y agoNobody creates a ledger in their accounting books called "money from bribes". At the very least, you can argue there is a conflict of interest.
- freewilly1040 7y agoThere's a pretty clear conflict of interest between the Buttigieg work of helping his campaign and the caucus tabulating work for the DNC. There might not be actual foul play, but the reason we look to avoid conflicts of interest in things like this is that it's easier to establish a lack of conflict of interest than it is to establish a lack of foul play.
- rhino369 7y agoButtigieg is probably hurt the worst by the confusion and delay. His probable second place finish is unexpectedly good. He probably is also hurt by Biden’s bad finish being lost in the chaos.
- fuqmachine 7y agoYou're just peddling the probable media narrative. It's undoubtedly the worst for Bernie. He didn't get to tout his "first count" win, which would've given him a boost going into second alignment. And he would've given a victory speech which is historically equal to at least a +5 bump in the polls.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoNot Acronym, ACRONYM. Someone fancies themselves as a Bond villain. They should apparently rename themselves to KAOS.
- pasquinelli 7y agoThey contracted it out to a company called shadow. Isn't M. Bison the ceo of that outfit?
- jmull 7y agoThese is vague to the point of meaninglessness. Also, what’s your source for Buttigeg’s $100K payment to the CEO of acronym? I head about $42K the buttegieg campaign paid to shadow, but that appears to be legitimate text messaging services. It’s dirty politics to pedal conspiracy theories. I hope you can refrain around here. (Also, I know some people in Newtown — conspiracy theories can get down right evil quickly. Be careful not to down a dark path because you don’t know where it’s going to end.)
- iak8god 7y agoDo you have a source for: Acronym CEO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tara_McGowan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tara_McGowan is married to an advisor for the Buttigieg campaign?
- notJim 7y agohttps://www.providencejournal.com/article/20150913/ENTERTAINMENTLIFE/150919968 https://www.providencejournal.com/article/20150913/ENTERTAIN...: "The wedding of Tara Elizabeth McGowan and Michael Mackay Halle took place Sept. 5 [2015]…" https://twitter.com/mhalle https://twitter.com/mhalle: "Strategist for @Petebuttigieg… Maximizing time with @taraemcg in the Ocean State"
- iak8god 7y agoThanks. I also just found it in this article https://newrepublic.com/article/156444/abolish-iowa-caucus https://newrepublic.com/article/156444/abolish-iowa-caucus > ACRONYM’s CEO, Tara McGowan, is married to Michael Halle, a strategist for Pete Buttigieg.
- emberswitch 7y agoSomething that nobody here has pointed out. I could maybe understand why you would think that the DNC would want to make the process slow, but Buttigieg has just as much reason as Bernie to want the Iowa Caucus to run smoothly. His campaign only existed on the hope that he would win last night, and if he doesn't create any momentum out of Iowa he is DOA for super Tuesday. Anyone making up these theories hasn't thought things all the way through, clearly.
- pasquinelli 7y agoWell, if he can claim he won and the media will run with it without any clear results, that works ok too. Thinking all the way through here, any momentum buttigieg gathers in iowa and new hampshire will be lost is south carolina and nevada, and then bloomberg will be a factor competing for his voters on super teusday. Buttigieg's path to the nomination is having it given to him by superdelegates if no one gets a majority.
- emberswitch 7y agoIf he claims to win and he loses he's basically fucked himself out of a political future. That would be monumentally stupid. I understand that his chances are low regardless, but they're non-existent if he can't build a media narrative off of actually winning Iowa. That's been his plan from the start, and why he's sunk so much money into winning the state. It makes absolutely 0 sense to me that anyone thinks he would want to sabotage the caucus.
- mattrp 7y agoI think the key takeaways here are -- - always test your code - always test your code with people - never ever succumb to the temptation to ironically name your organization no matter how funny it is to you What buffoons.