Sympathy for the Devils...

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blindpig
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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Tue Feb 04, 2020 1:20 pm

Putin Prepares To Release Iowa Caucus Results

Unprecedented cybersecurity measures being taken to safeguard Iowa caucus results - Jan 29 2020

No one knows how many of Iowa’s 1,700 precinct leaders will opt to use a new smartphone app to report Democratic caucus results Monday night. But the security of that app will be the source of much scrutiny.
After reports of Russian hacking attempts in the 2016 presidential election, party leaders are taking unprecedented precautions to protect against cybersecurity breaches and the spread of disinformation on social media.

On Wednesday, Democratic Party officials in Iowa and Washington confirmed that the Democratic National Committee is deploying security staff to work with the state party to assist with any caucus problems.

---
Democratic Party @DNC - 22:16 UTC · Feb 3, 2020
For three years, we’ve been preparing for the process that officially kicks off tonight in Iowa: the Democratic presidential primary. Today our chair, @TomPerez, reflects on the reforms we’ve made to make this the most transparent primary in our history: How We Prepared for 2020
---
Walker Bragman @WalkerBragman - 5:59 UTC · Feb 4, 2020
Not great optics here, folks:
- Dems paid company literally called Shadow to create caucus app
- Buttigieg campaign also paid Shadow, FEC records show
- Caucus app fails
- Buttigieg declares himself Iowa winner with no results

---
NPR Politics @nprpolitics -6:33 AM · Feb 4, 2020
"By all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious," Pete Buttigieg said in a late-night speech.
0% of Iowa caucus results are in.

---
Pro-Israel Buttigieg backer Seth Klarman is top funder of group behind Iowa’s disastrous voting app

At the time of publication, twelve hours after voting in the Democratic Party’s Iowa caucuses ended, the results have not been announced. The delay in reporting is the result of a failed app developed by a company appropriately named Shadow Inc.
This firm was staffed by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaign veterans and created by a Democratic dark money nonprofit backed by hedge fund billionaires including Seth Klarman. A prolific funder of pro-settler Israel lobby organizations, Klarman has also contributed directly to Pete Buttigieg’s campaign.

---
The Sanders campaign published its internal count from some 40% of the precincts which they say are representative. The unofficial result:

Sanders - 30%; Buttigieg - 25%; Warren - 21%; Biden - 12%; Klobucher - 11%; all others < 1%

What a clusterfuck.

Posted by b on February 4, 2020 at 12:16 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/02/p ... sults.html

Whadda headline

'b' still got Israel Dementia Syndrome, otherwise what can ya say?

Worst Party Ever

If this taint sticks the go-to for the shameless moneybags will be Bloomberg.(please, please, please...)
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

solidgold
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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by solidgold » Wed Feb 05, 2020 2:30 am

This shit is truly embarrassing and pathetic.

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Wed Feb 05, 2020 2:26 pm

solidgold wrote:
Wed Feb 05, 2020 2:30 am
This shit is truly embarrassing and pathetic.
Way I see it anything that degrades bourgeois democracy works in our favor. We ain't gotta do much but stand there & point. So far...

I strongly suspect that we ain't seen nothing yet. The nekked emperor, the clay feet of the great god Mars, perhaps a climate event that puts things in perspective. And this election...there is no better time to bring out the sharpest knives of ruthless criticism for the Democratic Party. They seem to be ceding the election to Trump, not consciously so far but party priorities will lead them to no other conclusion. In this I think Sanders the most reprehensible of them all, sheepdogging to the end, willing patsy, like other SDs before him a bulwark against genuine socialism. If he believed a tenth of his more 'radical' utterances,if he had an iota of honor, he would bail from the party thereby wrecking it. But he is a Social Democrat and a swine.

Image
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

solidgold
Posts: 68
Joined: Mon Aug 07, 2017 7:36 pm

Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by solidgold » Thu Feb 06, 2020 12:11 am

blindpig wrote:
Wed Feb 05, 2020 2:26 pm
solidgold wrote:
Wed Feb 05, 2020 2:30 am
This shit is truly embarrassing and pathetic.
Way I see it anything that degrades bourgeois democracy works in our favor. We ain't gotta do much but stand there & point. So far...

I strongly suspect that we ain't seen nothing yet. The nekked emperor, the clay feet of the great god Mars, perhaps a climate event that puts things in perspective. And this election...there is no better time to bring out the sharpest knives of ruthless criticism for the Democratic Party. They seem to be ceding the election to Trump, not consciously so far but party priorities will lead them to no other conclusion. In this I think Sanders the most reprehensible of them all, sheepdogging to the end, willing patsy, like other SDs before him a bulwark against genuine socialism. If he believed a tenth of his more 'radical' utterances,if he had an iota of honor, he would bail from the party thereby wrecking it. But he is a Social Democrat and a swine.

Image

You got a source for that graphic?

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blindpig
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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 06, 2020 12:35 am

You got a source for that graphic?
No I don't, my bad. Swiped it off twitter. I am remiss for not giving the poster credit. Seems bout right to me though.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

chlamor
Posts: 520
Joined: Tue Jul 18, 2017 12:46 am

Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by chlamor » Thu Feb 06, 2020 2:04 am

Who Exactly are Biden and Buttigieg’s Campaign Money Bundlers?

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/02/05 ... -bundlers/

The spooks’ choice: Coup plotters and CIA agents fill Pete Buttigieg’s list of national security endorsers

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/30/coup ... endorsers/

The insider: How national security mandarins groomed Pete Buttigieg and managed his future

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/17/nati ... buttigieg/

chlamor
Posts: 520
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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by chlamor » Fri Feb 07, 2020 2:12 pm

Democrats seek to suppress Sanders victory in Iowa
By Patrick Martin
7 February 2020

The effort by the Democratic Party establishment to conceal or suppress reports of Senator Bernie Sanders’ victory in the Iowa caucuses reached a new stage Thursday with Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez calling on the Iowa Democratic Party to “immediately begin a recanvass” of the state.

The twitter statement by Perez came only hours after the final figures from the Iowa Democratic Party showed Sanders more than 6,000 votes ahead of former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg in the February 3 caucuses, and behind by only two “state delegate equivalents,” out of 2,152, in the process that will lead to the awarding of Iowa’s delegates to the Democratic national convention.

With all but one of nearly 1,800 precincts tallied, Sanders led Buttigieg by 43,671 to 37,557 votes, with Senator Elizabeth Warren in third place with 32,553, among initial ballots cast at the caucuses. Sanders had 24.8 percent of the vote compared to 21.3 percent for Buttigieg.

Sanders had a smaller lead in the second round, after those backing “unviable candidate” (those with less than 15 percent support) were allowed to switch their votes. Buttigieg’s lead in “state delegate equivalents” arises from the overrepresentation of rural areas, where he ran stronger, in the apportioning of delegates.

The statement by Perez appeared to have two purposes: to provide cover for the Democratic Party in response to widespread accounts of inaccuracies and contradictions in the Iowa vote reporting, including a lengthy account posted on the New York Times website Thursday; and to further muddy the outcome of the caucuses, in which Sanders won a clear popular vote victory despite the effective tie in the number of delegates won.

Sanders wiped out Buttigieg’s narrow lead in delegates thanks to votes in satellite caucuses, which were held outside normal hours or outside the state to accommodate voters unable to attend the regular caucuses that began at 7 p.m. Monday night. In two results reported Thursday, one satellite caucus for night-shift workers at a food processing plant in Ottumwa, and the other for students and workers at Drake University in Des Moines, Sanders collected nine “state delegate equivalents” compared to zero for Buttigieg.

It is noteworthy that Perez issued his statement knowing that Sanders was about to hold a press conference in New Hampshire, where he is campaigning for the February 11 primary, to declare victory in Iowa. Sanders again refused to make any criticism of the Iowa Democratic Party for delaying the report of the results for many days.

In his tweet, Perez acknowledged “problems that have emerged in the implementation of the delegate selection plan” and urged a complete recanvass “in order to assure public confidence in the results.” A DNC official told the press that this would involve a hand audit of worksheets and reporting forms from every precinct and satellite caucus, checking for inconsistencies, mathematical errors and other mistakes. The scale of such an effort could postpone any final report of the Iowa results for days, and perhaps even until after the New Hampshire primary, the second contest in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Iowa state Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price said that he was prepared to order a recanvass, but only if requested by one of the campaigns, not by Perez, who has no actual authority to order the review. None of the campaigns has yet requested a recanvass, and it is not clear that any of them will, since those candidates who finished below the top two, including Warren, former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Amy Klobuchar, want the public to forget about Iowa as quickly as possible.

The dueling statements from Perez and Price conceal their underlying political alignment: Price was the Iowa state director for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016 before becoming state chairman; Perez was the choice of the Clinton wing of the party to head the DNC, narrowly defeating Representative Keith Ellison, backed by Sanders and Pete Buttigieg in his first national effort. Both Price and Perez are adamantly opposed to the nomination of Sanders, who calls himself a “democratic socialist.”

The New York Times account, under the headline, “Many Errors Are Evident in Iowa Caucus Results Released Wednesday,” was based on a precinct-by-precinct analysis that suggested both math errors in the tallies and more serious violations of rules governing the caucuses, including more people voting in the second round than in the first, and votes being subtracted from “viable” candidates, when their totals should only have increased.

The Times claimed there was no pattern in the errors, in terms of favoring Buttigieg or Sanders, the two leading candidates. Its analysis did not include well publicized and cruder errors in the initial count, such as awarding hundreds of Sanders votes to former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, who did not campaign in Iowa, and hundreds of Warren votes to billionaire Tom Steyer. These mistakes were publicly corrected by the Iowa Democratic Party, but they obviously did not add to the credibility of the overall result.

The figures showed the gap between Buttigieg and Sanders, in terms of “state delegate equivalents,” narrowing to near nonexistence. That did not stop the bulk of the corporate media from continuing to present Buttigieg as the surprise victor in Iowa and Sanders as the second-place finisher, and even claiming that Sanders’ comfortable lead in the polls ahead of the New Hampshire primary was in danger.

An example of this was a headline on the website of Newsweek magazine, which read, “Pete Buttigieg Gaining Quickly In New Hampshire As Bernie Sanders Stalls: Poll.” The article was actually reporting a poll in which Sanders led with 31 percent of the vote, with Buttigieg in second place at 21 percent. The report admitted that “Sanders maintains a healthy lead in the state where he won more than 60 percent of votes in the 2016 contest.”

The main concern of the Democratic establishment is not Sanders himself—a proven defender of capitalism and a longtime collaborator with the Democratic Party leadership in the Senate and House. It is that the nomination of a candidate who publicly (if less and less frequently) embraces the socialist label and who professes his opposition to war and militarism could provide encouragement to the leftward movement of millions of working people and youth who are looking for a way to fight back against the capitalist system.

There are further signs of the deep political crisis wracking the Democratic Party. Campaigning in New Hampshire, former Vice President Biden took up the anti-socialist cudgel wielded by Trump in his State of the Union address. “If Senator Sanders is the nominee for the party, every Democrat in America up and down the ballot, in blue states, red states, purple states, easy districts and competitive ones, every Democrat will have to carry the label Senator Sanders has chosen for himself,” Biden said. “He calls him—and I don’t criticize him—he calls himself a democratic socialist.”

The Biden campaign was in visible crisis, purging both the Iowa state director and the Iowa field director after the dismal showing there, and shifting advertising money from the South Carolina primary on February 29 to the Nevada caucuses February 22 in an effort to avoid losing the first three contests in the Democratic race. Biden admitted in one campaign appearance Wednesday that the Iowa caucus had been a “gut punch” to his campaign.

Meanwhile, the Sanders campaign announced that it had raised $25 million from more than 648,000 donors in January, the best fundraising month of the campaign, with an average donation of $18, most of it on-line. These included 219,000 first-time donors. A campaign statement declared, “Working class Americans giving $18 at a time are putting our campaign in a strong position to compete in states all over the map.” According to Sanders aides, “teacher” was the most common occupation, and the top five employers of those making contributions were Amazon, Starbucks, Walmart, the US Postal Service and Target.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/0 ... a-f07.html

chlamor
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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by chlamor » Fri Feb 07, 2020 2:13 pm

February 6, 2020
Acronym group that sabotaged Iowa caucus birthed by billionaire who funded Alabama disinformation campaign

Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman funded the creation of ACRONYM, the group that sabotaged the Iowa caucus results, after bankrolling voter manipulation campaigns including the notorious online “false flag operation” in Alabama’s 2017 senate race.
By Max Blumenthal

At the time of publication, February 6, the winner of the Iowa’s Democratic Party caucus is still unknown. Senator Bernie Sanders, the clear winner in virtually every exit poll, is currently ahead in votes. Yet somehow Pete Buttigieg, a favorite of the party establishment who was unknown to most voters until last year, has claimed victory.

The force accused of sowing the confusion and disarray surrounding the first Democratic Party contest of the 2020 election season is a dark money nonprofit called Acronym. It was Acronym that launched Shadow Inc, the mysterious company behind the now-infamous, unsecured, completely unworkable voter app which prevented precinct chairs from reporting vote totals on caucus night.

The exceptionally opaque Acronym was itself created with seed money from a Silicon Valley billionaire named Reid Hoffman who has financed a series of highly manipulative social media campaigns.

The billionaire founder of LinkedIn, Hoffman is a top funder of novel Democratic Party social media campaigns accused of manipulating voters through social media. He is assisted by Dmitri Mehlhorn, a corporate consultant who pushed school privatization before joining Hoffman’s political empire.

One of the most consequential beneficiaries of Hoffman’s wealth is Acronym CEO Tara McGowan, a 33-year-old former journalist and Obama for America veteran.

Acronym CEO Tara McGowan Obama
Acronym CEO Tara McGowan with Barack Obama, her former boss
Once touted as “a weapon of a woman whose innovative tactics make her critically important to the Democratic Party,” McGowan’s name is now synonymous with the fiasco in Iowa. She also happens to be married to a senior advisor to Pete Buttieg’s presidential campaign.

Back in December 2018, McGowan personally credited Hoffman and Mehlhorn’s “Investing in US” initiative for the birth of her dark money pressure group, Acronym.

“I’m personally grateful and proud to be included in this group of incredible political founders + startups @reidhoffman and his team, led by Dmitri [Mehlhorn], have supported and helped to fund over the past two years,” she declared on Twitter in December 2018.


Tara McGowan
@taraemcg
· Dec 21, 2018
Replying to @taraemcg
So many of the most innovative organizations changing our politics today, including @anotheracronym wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for bold funders + leaders who believe in our vision, are unafraid to take risks and provide the resources for us to test and scale new models.


Tara McGowan
@taraemcg
I’m personally grateful and proud to be included in this group of incredible political founders + startups who @reidhoffman and his team, led by Dmitri, have supported and helped to fund over the past two years. https://medium.com/@DmitriMehlhorn/inve ... afe222face


Investing in US
2017–2018 in Review

medium.com
7
2:07 PM - Dec 21, 2018
Twitter Ads info and privacy
See Tara McGowan's other Tweets
At the time, Hoffman had just been exposed for funding Project Birmingham, a covert disinformation campaign consisting of false flag tactics that aimed to depress voter turnout and create the perception of Russian interference in the 2017 Alabama senate election.

Hoffman and Mehlhorn have also faced scrutiny for their alleged operation of a series of deceptive pages which attempted to manipulate center-right users into voting for Democrats. Today, Acronym’s McGowan oversees a massive Facebook media operation that employs similarly deceptive techniques to sway voters.

Through youthful, tech-centric operatives like McGowan, Hoffman and Mehlhorn are constructing a massive new infrastructure that could supplant the party’s apparatus.

As Vanity Fair reported, “Hoffman and Mehlhorn, after all, are not just building a power base that could supplement traditional Democratic organizations, they are, potentially, laying the groundwork to usurp the D.N.C. entirely.”

‘Laying the groundwork to usurp the D.N.C. entirely’
Having fostered friendships with nationally known Silicon Valley oligarchs like right-wing libertarian Trump supporter Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, is now making his name as a top sugardaddy of the Democratic anti-Trump resistance.

Following Trump’s election in 2016, Hoffman plowed his money into an array of new Democrat-aligned social media groups through a funding hub he founded called Investing in US.

To run Investing in US on a day-to-day basis, Hoffman tapped Dmitri Mehlhorn, a venture capitalist and political strategist accustomed to walking the line between the corporate world and Democratic Party.

“There was no risk-capital or growth-capital arm of the resistance, and so that is what we’ve tried to build,” Mehlhorn told Vanity Fair. “Now, in terms of what that implies, that implies that we are backing founders, so people who we think have big, potentially game-changing ideas.”

Mehlhorn’s career path tracked closely with neoliberal party favorites like Pete Buttigieg and Cory Booker. He studied at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, launched his career at McKinsey Associates, and became a leading advocate for school privatization as the chief operating officer of Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst.

According to Mehlhorn’s bio, he sits on the board of American Prison Data Systems, a company that claims to reduce recidivism by giving prisoners tablets to study coding for five hours a day.

Dmitri Mehlhorn Democratic Party Reid Hoffman
Dmitri Mehlhorn
Mehlhorn is also an advisor to the Democratic group DigiDems, which Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign paid $1,540 for technology services.

In a 2018 Medium post, announcing the “founders” that Investing in US planned to back, Mehlhorn resorted to distinctly neoconservative talking points to emphasize the mission of his organization.

After quoting Ronald Reagan, he declared, “Trump and his movement, borrowing heavily from other authoritarian criminals such as Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin, promised to hollow out America’s principles in favor of his own personal enrichment.”

Pledging to “inoculate our politics and our economy against corruption, white nationalism, and mass deceit,” Mehlhorn announced major donations to “diverse groups” with names like Woke Vote, PushBlack, and an “anti-Nazi” organization known as Integrity for America.

Among the top recipients of support from Investing in US was McGowan’s Acronym, which Mehlhorn described merely as a “media group.”

As The Grayzone reported, Acronym has ballooned since its founding into a massive dark money operation, even launching a Super PAC dubbed Pacronym that has raked in money from hedge fund billionaires like Seth Klarman and Donald Sussman.

What Mehlhorn and Hoffman never disclosed to the public, however, was their support for a Democrat-aligned group that waged a covert online disinformation campaign which aimed to influence the outcome of the 2017 special senate election in Alabama.

Project Birmingham: From New Knowledge to no knowledge
The 2017 senate election in Alabama was one of the most dramatic races of President Donald Trump’s first term in office. Treated by national media as a referendum on Trump in a red state, it pitted a far-right Republican, Roy Moore, against Doug Jones, a moderate Republican who ran as a Democrat. In the end, Jones won an upset victory in a deep red state, thrilling Democrats across the country.

As Dan Cohen wrote in a series of reports for The Grayzone, the outcome of the 2017 Alabama race was heavily influenced by an online disinformation operation. The campaign, which was unknown to voters at the time, was called Project Birmingham.

Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman provided $100,000 to the architects of this black ops campaign. His money was pipelined through American Engagement Technologies (AET), a company run by Obama administration veteran and Democrat tech operative Mikey Dickerson. Through AET, another firm comprised of Obama campaign veterans and national security state operatives called New Knowledge was contracted to carry out the secretive voter manipulation project.

In internal documents first covered by the New York Times, Project Birmingham’s architects described the scheme as an “elaborate false flag operation” which aimed to convince voters that the Kremlin was supporting Moore through thousands of fake Russian bots.

Project Birmingham went to absurd lengths to drive voters away from Moore. Its architects deployed a phony Facebook page encouraging Alabamians to vote for an obscure write-in Republican candidate, arranged interviews for the candidate in major newspapers, and even sought to arrange SuperPAC funding for his dark horse campaign.

The deeply un-democratic campaign was overseen by a cast of characters remarkably similar to those who bungled the 2020 Iowa caucus count. Like the staff of Acronym and Shadow Inc., the New Knowledge operatives who carried out Project Birmingham were 30- and 40-something techies who had worked in the Obama administration and on various Democratic campaigns. (New Knowledge was rebranded as Yonder after the scandal was exposed in national media.)

The devious tactics they waged in Alabama likely influenced the outcome of the election. A leaked “Project Birmingham Debrief” claimed that New Knowledge’s black operations “moved enough votes to ensure a Doug Jones victory.”

After the scheme was exposed, Hoffman issued a public apology and claimed he had no knowledge of the New Knowledge disinformation project. He said nothing about the Investing in US employee who worked directly on Project Birmingham, however.

This was hardly the first time Hoffman and Mehlhorn’s finger prints were discovered on a deceptive voter manipulation campaign.

Aiming to ‘mirror’ the tactics of Russia’s Internet Research Agency
Following the 2018 midterm congressional election, Reid Hoffman and his henchman Dmitri Mehlhorn faced further scrutiny in national media, this time for operating a fake news-style organization called News for Democracy.

This shady outfit managed an array of community Facebook pages initially focusing on sports, Christianity, patriotism, and other topics that were likely to generate interest from right-wing voters in swing states.

Yet the seemingly locally-branded cultural pages took a decisively political turn as election night approached. After racking up millions of likes, News for Democracy slipped in ads for Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke on a Facebook page targeting evangelical Christians, and attacked a Republican candidate, Senator Marsha Blackburn, on a page focused on local Tennessee sports.

While Hoffman’s right-hand man, Mehlhorn, claimed to reject the spread of misinformation, he told the Washington Post that through projects like News for Democracy, he aimed to “mirror” the tactics of the notorious Russian Internet Research Agency troll farm.


Max Blumenthal

@MaxBlumenthal
· Dec 27, 2018
A Senate report on $100,000 of Russian Facebook ads (56% of which appeared post-2016 election) sent US media into a frenzy. Its authors have since been exposed for spending the same amount on a "Russian style" op to swing a Senate race: https://grayzoneproject.com/2018/12/25/ ... operation/ … via @dancohen3000


Senate Report on Russian Interference Was Written By Disinformation Warriors Behind Alabama ‘False...
Hailed by Congress and the media as defenders of democracy, high-tech Russiagate hustlers Jonathon Morgan and Ryan Fox have been exposed for waging "an elaborate 'false flag' operation" to swing the...

thegrayzone.com

Max Blumenthal

@MaxBlumenthal
Tech billionaire Reed Hoffman funded the @NewKnowledgeAI Alabama black op. His advisor, Dmitri Mehlhorn, has called for efforts to "mirror" the tactics of the Russian Internet Research Agency troll farm. This IRA Facebook ad is clearly worth emulating. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... 4128002954

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter
137
6:39 PM - Dec 27, 2018
Twitter Ads info and privacy
102 people are talking about this
Facebook eventually launched an investigation into the insidious manipulation ploys of Hoffman and Mehlhorn’s News for Democracy.

The very tactics that landed the two in hot water are remarkably similar to those that Tara McGowan, the Acronym founder who disrupted the Iowa caucuses, has put on display.

McGowan recently founded Courier Newsroom, a seemingly journalistic initiative that appeared to take on a more overtly partisan role with time. Like News for Democracy, Courier Newsroom has opened local news pages on Facebook with unassuming names like “The Virginia Dogwood” or “Arizona’s Copper Courier.” After seeding the pages with folksy local stories, Courier Newsroom bombards users with pro-Democrat political messaging.

As Bloomberg reported, McGowan used “her sizable war chest and digital advertising savvy to pay to have her articles placed into the Facebook feeds of swing-state users.” McGowan then used “that feedback to find more people like them.”

One of McGowan’s dubious news pages, the Virginia Dogwood, spent a whopping $275,000 on Facebook ads during the 2018 midterm elections.

“We’ll try it, see if we can make it work, and hopefully become a permanent piece of the new infrastructure,” McGowan told Bloomberg.

Tara McGowan’s shenanigans in Iowa could be seen in the light of a wider string of manipulations by the Silicon Valley-backed neoliberal network behind her. While Democratic Party elites blame incompetence for the fiasco in Iowa, the history of Acronym and its billionaire backers casts a disturbing shadow over the whole episode.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/06/acro ... formation/

chlamor
Posts: 520
Joined: Tue Jul 18, 2017 12:46 am

Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by chlamor » Fri Feb 07, 2020 2:16 pm

Acronym, the dark money group behind the Iowa caucuses app meltdown, explained
“People have been waiting for this to blow up.”

By Emily Stewartemily.stewart@vox.com Updated Feb 5, 2020, 10:03pm EST

A staffer stands in the shadow ahead of the Bernie Sanders caucus night celebration in Des Moines, Iowa.
A staffer stands in the shadow ahead of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ caucus night celebration in Iowa. Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images
This isn’t how Acronym wanted to rocket onto the national stage.

The Iowa caucuses debacle drew a lot of attention to a new app made by a company called Shadow that was at the center of many technical failures of the evening. It’s also putting scrutiny on Acronym — the Democratic group that backed Shadow — which has sought the spotlight in recent months though probably didn’t hope for this situation.

Acronym is a relatively new Democratic group that launched in 2017 and got active around the 2018 midterms in digital organizing. Its structure is, in a word, complex. Acronym is a nonprofit, but it also has a political action committee — under its nonprofit are for-profit entities that its nonprofit sometimes pays into. It is brazen and ambitious, which is not unique for a political strategy group, but it’s also somewhat shadowy and secretive. And it’s been trying to distance itself from the Iowa debacle, even though it’s really at the center of the storm.

Acronym is a lot of things all at once
If you pay attention to political media, you’ve probably noticed stories about Acronym popping up here and there in recent months.

In November, the New York Times covered its plan to launch a $75 million digital advertising campaign to counter President Donald Trump in 2020, and the Wall Street Journal profiled a former Facebook employee who was embedded in the Trump campaign in 2016 and has since joined Acronym’s ranks. Bloomberg wrote about the Courier Newsroom, a for-profit media company under Acronym’s umbrella that runs multiple local sites that deliver left-slanted news, countering a tactic often employed by the right. Acronym’s CEO, Tara McGowan, has quickly become a high-profile figure in Democratic politics and digital strategy.

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Acronym talks a big game when it comes to its political strategy prowess — though it’s new enough and opaque enough that it’s not entirely clear what the organization is actually delivering. Now that Shadow, one of the companies affiliated with Acronym, is under the microscope, Acronym is too.

In the wake of the Iowa caucus debacle, Acronym has tried to distance itself from Shadow. In a statement, spokesperson Kyle Tharp said that Acronym just happens to be an investor in the firm, along with others. “Acronym is a nonprofit organization and not a technology company,” Tharp said.

Except it’s more complicated than that. Shadow is a tech company, and both Acronym and Shadow have described their relationship as an acquisition, not an investment, in the past and on multiple occasions. Acronym and McGowan have touted their work with Shadow — McGowan has often mentioned it on Twitter and talked about it on a podcast as recently as last month. But now, Acronym has scrubbed its website of mentions of launching Shadow and says it’s just one of multiple investors along for the ride. Acronym’s decision to distance itself from Shadow — or perhaps lying about it altogether — is making the situation worse, not better.

A precinct chair shows the smartphone app made by Shadow that was at the center of the confusion in the Iowa caucuses.
A precinct chair shows the smartphone app made by Shadow that was at the center of the confusion in the Iowa caucuses. Alex Wong/Getty Images
“I don’t think they’re evil, but in their thirst to take over the world using a bunch of short-term donor money, they leveraged their political connections to get contracts that they didn’t have the expertise to fulfill,” one Democratic strategist told me.

“There’s this whole group of organizations that are feeding each other, and they’re ultimately all controlled by the same group of people”
But there’s a lot more to Acronym than Shadow. Under its nonprofit umbrella are multiple for-profit operations, including the digital media operation Courier Newsroom and Lockwood Strategy, a digital strategy firm that McGowan runs. Acronym also operates a political action committee called Pacronym and publishes a podcast hosted by McGowan as well as a weekly newsletter.

“There’s this whole group of organizations that are feeding each other, and they’re ultimately all controlled by the same group of people,” another strategist said.

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Acronym has for months been building itself up as one of the loudest players in the room in Democratic strategy. Now, people are starting to look under the hood.

Acronym did not return requests for comment for this story. On Wednesday evening, McGowan published a lengthy post on Medium as well as a series of tweets attempting to clarify the situation. She sought to cast Acronym as an investor in many of its projects, though she did acknowledge some “warts” in Shadow’s operations and wrote that “progress requires taking calculated risks and doing things differently.” McGowan also appeared to distance herself and Acronym from Shadow. She did not acknowledge Acronym’s attempts to downplay its relationship with Shadow, including altering its website.

Acronym has been around since 2017 — and its reputation has skyrocketed in recent months
McGowan, 34, has deep ties to the Democratic Party and has worked in Democratic circles for years. She started her career as a journalist and according to her LinkedIn profile got into politics when she worked as press secretary for Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island in 2010. Then in 2011, she went over to the Obama White House, where she worked as a digital producer, after which she had stints at Tom Steyer’s NextGen America and the consultancy Purpose. She later headed digital strategy at the Democratic Super PAC Priorities USA Action. In early 2017, McGowan founded Lockwood Strategy, a digital strategy firm she still runs. A month later, she launched Acronym.

On its website, Acronym describes itself as a “values-driven organization focused on advancing progressive causes through innovative communications, advertising, and organizing programs.” The organization claims that its affiliated PAC helped get 65 progressive candidates elected in 2018 with “new tech and digital-first strategies to register and turn out voters.”

A handful of traits have marked Acronym’s development in recent years: its intertwining with Facebook, its ability to get good press, and, in turn, its growing popularity with donors.

In September 2019, Ozy profiled McGowan as the Democrats’ “most dangerous digital strategist.” In November 2019, the New York Times ran a splashy story about Acronym’s plan to raise $75 million to push back against President Donald Trump on Facebook. The organization had raised only about 40 percent of that amount at the time.

Trump’s reelection campaign manager, Brad Parscale, has cultivated a public reputation for himself as a political digital guru — which, depending on whom you ask, is or is not an accurate portrayal — and Acronym plans to answer that. And it has some big names in tow, the most prominent being former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, who told the Times that the idea behind the effort was to have a Facebook ad mechanism in place before the Democratic Party’s nominee has been picked.

“Our nominee is going to be broke, tired, have to pull together the party and turn around on a dime and run a race for a completely different audience,” he said.

Weeks later, the Wall Street Journal published a profile of James Barnes, a former Facebook employee who had been embedded with the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential race. The 2,500-word story cast Barnes as a figure who had seen the light and come over to the Democrats’ side with Acronym to try to undo what he’d done in the last election. Barnes isn’t the only former Facebooker in Acronym’s ranks; earlier on Monday, hours ahead of the caucuses, a former Facebook data scientist announced he was joining the organization.

McGowan herself has become an increasingly common fixture in media stories, often commenting on the issues of the day. (Acronym has spoken with and sent statements to Vox about digital political strategy in the past.) When Google announced it would limit microtargeting around political ads, igniting speculation that Facebook might follow suit, McGowan slammed the decision and said it wouldn’t curb disinformation but would instead “hinder campaigns and others who are already working against the tide of bad actors to reach voters with facts.” She said the decision affects Google’s ad inventory as well as inventory across the internet. “They are essentially using their market power to limit how campaigns can speak to voters where they get their information,” she said.

But there are indicators that things within Acronym are not as seamless as they would appear from the outside. One Acronym staffer told the Outline it is “far and away the most disorganized place I’ve ever been a part of.” According to the staffer, leadership says it’s just the “startup environment” of a new company, but it’s unclear how many people work at Acronym, or whom they work for. There are a lot of blurred lines between the various Acronym outfits — for example, job links on the Courier News website redirect to Lockwood Strategy.

Acronym has gained popularity with big donors, while some onlookers have expressed skepticism
Acronym is a dark money group. That means donations to its 501(c)(4) nonprofit don’t have to be reported, and we don’t entirely know who their money is coming from — or how much they have.

But Federal Election Commission filings show Acronym’s PAC, Pacronym, is doing pretty well. Billionaire hedge funder Seth Klarman gave $1.5 million to the PAC in the fourth quarter of last year, venture capitalist Michael Moritz $1 million, and director Steven Spielberg $500,000, among others. As Recode’s Teddy Schleifer pointed out this week, the donation was Moritz’s first since 2011, and his largest disclosed political contribution ever.


Michael Moritz speaks at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on October 19, 2016. Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Vanity Fair
To raise that much money and obtain such a high profile, an organization like Acronym has to talk a big game. That’s what some of the four Democratic strategists I spoke with — all on the condition of anonymity so they could speak freely on the matter — see as part of the problem. Acronym knows how to get eager donors, especially those who are eager to get in on the next big thing, to buy into what it’s selling.

“Their pitch is that everyone is doing it wrong, and they’re here to disrupt and innovate,” one Democratic strategist told me. “And they don’t always follow through with that in a successful way.”

“On paper it sounds great,” another strategist said. “Investors want to invest in shiny, new, cutting-edge things, but there’s not a ton of actual evidence there.”

Part of the issue is that Acronym’s structure is complex, unusual, and opaque. Its major plank may be a nonprofit, but the entities under it are not. McGowan runs Lockwood Strategy and is, presumably, paying herself a salary out of the companies coffers, which is not illegal. Shadow and the Courier Newsroom are also private companies. So sometimes, when Acronym makes public pronouncements about what it’s going to do and spend on, it’s not clear where the money is coming from — or where it’s ending up. For example, in October, Acronym said it would spend $1 million on digital impeachment ads in swing states. And its FEC filings show that many independent expenditures for digital ad buys against Trump were filtered through Lockwood Strategies, which McGowan runs. That’s all really hard to track.

“With public pronouncements about things they’re doing that don’t happen, there’s less transparency about why,” one strategist said.

Some observers have also raised questions about the Courier Newsroom, which runs hypertargeted local news with a lean to the left. Last year, McGowan told Bloomberg that Courier Newsroom planned to focus on six swing states — Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin — and “fill the news deserts, deliver the facts favorable to Democrats that [McGowan thinks] voters are missing, and counter right-wing spin.”

While politically biased news is hardly a new phenomenon in American politics — look at Fox News and the myriad right-leaning outlets, for example — the Courier Newsroom launch did raise some eyebrows. If this were a Republican operative declaring its strategy like this, a lot of Democrats probably would have criticized it. So the reaction from the left has been a bit awkward.

Lachlan Markay at the Daily Beast drilled down on what’s so odd about Acronym’s approach:

But in trying to take on such a wide swath of digital political roles, ACRONYM has also been drawn into roles that appear to be in conflict: not just political vendor and vote tabulator, but also ostensibly-independent media mogul and Democratic activist.

Such conflicts have been apparent in ACRONYM’s backing of a handful of state-specific media organs billed as editorially-independent journalistic outfits. Through investment in an entity called Courier Newsroom, McGowan’s group has seeded such outlets in the key swing states of Wisconsin, Virginia, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. The left-leaning consulting firm Lockwood Strategy, in turn, has helped staff up the outlets, and in at least one case, Lockwood was on the payroll of the Virginia Democratic Party as an ACRONYM-backed outlet favorably covered the party’s 2019 statehouse candidates.

In other words, one McGowan company was drawing a paycheck from the party as another pumped out news content boosting its election prospects.

Acronym’s founders made a bet that donors are often willing to throw money at vague digital projects, especially amid anxieties about the 2020 elections and concerns Democrats are lagging in terms of online and data strategy. So they’ve built out a complex organization that lets them raise money and spend money — including on themselves — with their actual impact remaining unclear. At least until Iowa.

Acronym’s founders made a bet that donors are often willing to throw money at vague digital projects
Acronym changed its story after the Iowa caucuses screw-up
Sometimes, despite the best of intentions, technologies fail. And when they do, many would argue that the best path forward is for whoever built the tech to own up to the problem and quickly try to fix it. But that has not happened in Iowa.

This is not to say that Acronym is to blame for the meltdown in the Iowa caucuses. However, it’s become increasingly clear that the organization hurried to distance itself from the situation.

After it came out that the Shadow-built app, which according to Vice was called the IowaReporterApp, was at the center of the Iowa caucuses delays, Acronym came out with a statement saying it was just an investor in the tech company. It read, in part:

Acronym is a nonprofit organization and not a technology company. As such, we have not provided any technology to the Iowa Democratic Party, Presidential campaigns, or the Democratic National Committee.

Acronym is an investor in several for-profit companies across the progressive media and technology sectors. One of those independent, for-profit companies is Shadow, Inc, which also has other private investors.

But the tenuous relationship described in the statement above doesn’t appear to be accurate. Or, at the very least, both Acronym and Shadow have described their relationship differently in the past.

Shadow was initially a tech firm named Groundbase, founded by Hillary Clinton campaign veterans Gerard Niemira and Krista Davis and funded by the progressive nonprofit Higher Ground Labs. The company was struggling after its campaign texting platform failed to take off, and Acronym stepped in to inject some cash and keep it from going bankrupt. They launched Shadow from there along with new products, including an email app that was supposed to help the Democratic Party centralize its data. In a 2019 article, Shadow described its flagship product as a “universal adapter for political data and technology.” What that means in practice is pretty indecipherable.

Acronym distancing itself from Shadow is a new development. In 2019, McGowan celebrated acquiring Groundbase and marketed the company openly on Twitter. Acronym put it on its website as well. While Acronym has since clarified it doesn’t own Shadow entirely, the organization has previously said it is “launching” Shadow and described the deal as an acquisition. On LinkedIn, Niemira lists himself as a former Acronym employee.

The problem is, Acronym left a lot of evidence that suggests it used to have a much closer relationship with Shadow than it’s now admitting to. According to the Intercept, for instance, Acronym and Shadow share an office space in Denver, and as recently as last month, McGowan said Acronym was the “sole investor” in Shadow.


Kate Knibbs 🏄🏻‍♀️

@Knibbs
If you look at Acronym's "About" page today it says "we invested in Shadow" but if you look at the Wayback Machine from last month it's "we launched Shadow"

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The, well, shadow around Shadow has been part of what’s so weird about the Iowa debacle. Before Monday, Shadow’s involvement in the Iowa caucuses had been kept secret. The Iowa Democrats said they were using a new app, but they wouldn’t name it, arguing that it was a security precaution to keep it from being hacked. Had they not been secretive about it, maybe someone would have noticed the problems with it prior to caucus day. Multiple sources told the Times that the app was under-tested and that caucus volunteers were poorly trained on how to use it.

Curiously, David Plouffe was asked about Acronym and Shadow on MSNBC on Monday as the Iowa caucus debacle unfolded. Plouffe, seemingly unfamiliar with the app, said he didn’t know about it and had spoken via text with the CEO — presumably McGowan — who confirmed that Acronym was an investor in the tech. “I have no knowledge of Shadow or what’s happening,” he said. It’s entirely possible that Plouffe hadn’t heard of Shadow, as a board member whose main role seems to be to boost the group’s profile and fundraising. The Acronym team seems to have decided to stick with that distancing of ties to the app.

Regardless of the level of Acronym’s involvement, it still remains unclear how Shadow managed to release such a problematic app for an event as important as the Iowa caucuses. One strategist I spoke with speculated this may have simply been a case of an overly ambitious agreement between Shadow and the Iowa Democratic Party, which reportedly paid just $60,000 for the app. Perhaps there was just too much excitement over the new, shiny thing.

“This has all the markings of a pet project of someone who says, ‘Oh, we can do that,’” the strategist said. “You let a company that has no track record just build the most important thing you’ve probably done in the last decade, and yeah, it was going to fail.”

Was Iowa just a massive screw-up, or is there something more nefarious at foot?
At best, Acronym’s behavior around Shadow could be described as odd. That and the Iowa Democratic Party’s initial secrecy around its relationship with Shadow has led to a number of conspiracy theories around the app malfunction and results delay. Some Bernie Sanders supporters have suggested this is an effort to undermine the Vermont senator, who before the caucuses was leading the polls, and boost a more establishment-friendly candidate, namely, Pete Buttigieg. Some on Trump’s side have claimed this amounts to rigging the election as well. And after the Des Moines Register’s Iowa poll was pulled from being released over the weekend, suspicions and conspiracies had already been afoot.

Shadow is raising even more suspicion now that its work with Democratic candidates has also been revealed. Buttigieg, Joe Biden, and plenty of others have paid Shadow for services, and in the past, McGowan has expressed her support for Buttigieg. (McGowan’s husband is also a senior strategist for Buttigieg.) Some Acronym employees have previously worked for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and are well-connected among Democratic insiders.

Many on the left — especially Sanders supporters who believe the cards were stacked in favor of Clinton in the 2016 election — are highly skeptical of the legitimacy of the Democratic primary.

During the last election, the Democratic National Committee held few debates and at awkward times, which some alleged was an effort to keep Sanders from getting airtime, and undertook other efforts that appeared to favor Clinton. Superdelegates pledged to her early in the process, seemingly anointing her the nominee. Sanders’s backers believe the Democratic establishment doesn’t want him to win the nomination this time either (and indeed, some don’t) and worry about what lengths they might go to in order to stop him. Iowa’s big app fail doesn’t appease those concerns, and Acronym’s lack of transparency around its ties doesn’t help.

That there is some bad blood regarding Acronym among Democratic politicos — which is natural in any competitive industry — has become clear in the wake of the Shadow debacle. One strategist told me that the scrutiny on the organization was natural — it’s very young, very hyped, and seems primed for a misstep. Another was more cutting in their assessment of the situation: “People have been waiting for this to blow up and did not foresee that this would blow up in quite a spectacular way.”

https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/5/211 ... us-results

What's with the constant references to "dark money?" Scumbag capitalists rigging elections is the norm.

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Fri Feb 07, 2020 3:11 pm

Democrats seek to suppress Sanders victory in Iowa
By Patrick Martin
7 February 2020
No doubt Sanders is being messed with again. And while Biden's cautionary is certainly true it is likely that Trump will play the 'commie card' regardless of who they run, though a real stretch with Bloomberg. That existential fear has been showing up more & more in Trump's pronouncements of late. What the bosses really fear is verification that a very large number of USAians approve of at least the idea of socialism, however muddled. The real job of the Democratic Party is to prevent that by any & every means, even if it means losing a presidential election. It would be better for the Party if they got 'clean hands' and the candidate blows it himself. Leaving aside dirty tricks we might look at previous Dem campaigns mentioned at the beginning of this thread: the faux pas & inexplicable incompetencies which delivered such weiners as Raygun & Junior to the White House. And then they blame it on 'socialism', mission accomplished.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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