By Richard (RJ) Eskow
February 05, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - This
failure casts a shadow on the party’s ability to
carry out its basic responsibilities. Worse, it
suggests that its leaders care more about helping
their friends than serving the public interest.
It’s no exaggeration to call this a crisis of
legitimacy. Like the GOP, the Democratic Party holds
a position that is unique among democracies. It is,
in effect, one half of a state-sponsored duopoly
that controls electoral politics. That kind of
unaccountable power is detrimental to democracy. As
long as it exists, however, it confer an obligation
to serve the interests of democracy.
The Republicans have made it clear they couldn’t
care less. But the GOP’s abdication places an even
heavier burden on Democrats to uphold basic
democratic standards: by rejecting cronyism and
oligarchy, promoting transparency, and ensuring that
every person’s vote counts.
They failed to uphold this burden in Iowa, and not
for the first time.
This kind of behavior undercuts Democrats
politically. To put it in today’s corporatized
vocabulary, “democracy” is the party’s brand — and
lately they’ve been trashing it.
Shadow Play
On its face, the level of incompetence leading up to
the Iowa fiasco seems almost incomprehensible:
First, a party that has spent the last three years
talking about data hacking took a manual process and
shifted it onto on one of the most hackable devices
in the world: a cell phone.
Then, having created a vulnerability where there had
been none, it spent more money protecting itself
from this self-created vulnerability.
The technology in question was then rushed into
production without proper training for its users,
when the stakes for democracy were high — and the
whole world was watching.
Crazy, right? Actually, no.
It all makes perfect sense — once you realized that
the software was only a secondary concern for the
people involved.
Max Blumenthal reports that Shadow Inc, the
software company that produced the app, had ties to
the Buttigieg campaign both as a contractor and
(through its top funder) as a donor. ( “Shadow Inc”?
Really? Were all the best evil names taken, like
“Spectre” and “Hydra?”)
