Today, I am releasing an interview that I conducted with congressional candidate, civil rights activist, and constitutional lawyer Shahid Buttar.
Buttar is running against Nancy Pelosi this year for her seat in the House of Representatives and to represent San Francisco. In the 2020 general election, his campaign received around 81,000 votes, which is more votes than any challenger of Pelosi has ever received since she’s been in office.
Buttar is making the case that Pelosi has been a corporate Democrat, she helped facilitate Trump’s and Obama’s worst actions as presidents, and that, given the existential threat of the impending climate catastrophe and the current pandemic, Pelosi must be defeated in November.
I think the interview is interesting for anyone who wants to gain some insight into the problems with Nancy Pelosi’s policies and her leadership of the Democratic Party in the House, and why, as Shahid Buttar puts it, corporate corruption “continues to race our species off a climate cliff and into an authoritarian abyss.”
Interview Transcript:
Kody Cava: Hello everyone, today I'm going to be sharing an interview that I did with constitutional lawyer and activist, Shahid Buttar. He is running against Nancy Pelosi this year for her seat in the house of representatives and to represent San Francisco. And before we get into the interview, I just wanted to give a bit of context about Shahid Buttar himself and his previous campaign in 2020 to unseat Pelosi, as well as some background on Pelosi herself.
I told some friends of mine that I had interviewed Nancy Pelosi's challenger and I got some revealing differing responses from people. One person said “Thank God.” He was happy that someone was challenging Pelosi. Another person asked a good faith question, “What's wrong with Nancy Pelosi?
So I want to start with some context on Pelosi. In this 2022 election she will be running for her 19th term in congress and she has already served 36 years in congress and if elected again it will be 38 years. She will be turning 82 years old this March and in her time as a Democratic Party leader, she has raised close to a billion dollars for the Democratic Party. And in that same time she has also been hostile to student debt cancellation:
Nancy Pelosi: Suppose your family was not, your child just decided they want to, at this time, not want to go to college, but you're paying taxes to forgive somebody else's obligations, you may not be happy about that.
KC: She has been dismissive of Medicare For All:
NP: But I am not a supporter of Medicare For All, however, it is very popular in my district. But I didn't want to be, uh, I myself think the path to Med-, health care for all Americans is a path down the road of the Affordable Care Act.
Ady Barkan: If the sponsors of the bill want a floor vote in this congress, when will you give them the opportunity that you were requesting back then?
NP: I bring bills to the floor when they advance the cause of the legislation. So I cannot put my members on the spot where it is not helpful in their districts to do this if it's not what they actually believe. They believe the Affordable Care Act is the path to go. And I'm not going to be able to bring a bill to the floor that has 156 votes. I'm just not going to do that. And, uh, that's interesting. But it's not, um, we, I always want to show how strong we are rather than how, how, how lacking we are in having the actual vote. Yeah, just so we're having this honest conversation.
AB: Madam Speaker, the ACA was always supposed to be a starting place for universal health care, not an end point.
NP: That's right. That's right.
KC: She says there that Medicare For All is popular in her district and yet she doesn't support it. She says that she doesn't want to bring a Medicare For All bill to the floor for a vote because she doesn't want to reveal which Democrats wouldn't vote for it and then therefore make them vulnerable to their constituents. She would rather protect the interests of insurance companies then reveal a divided Democratic Party over an issue that is popular amongst American voters.
Pelosi has also been criticized for being deferential and openly supportive of huge military spending as well as the United States’ warrantless domestic spying apparatus.
Abby Martin: Abby Martin, with the Empire Files. Speaker Pelosi, you just presided over a large increase in the Pentagon budget. This Pentagon budget is already massive. The Pentagon is a larger polluter than 140 countries combined. How can we seriously talk about net zero if there is this bipartisan consensus to constantly expand this large contributor to climate change, which is exempt from these conferences? Military is exempt from climate talks.
NP: National security advisors all tell us that the climate crisis is a national security matter. It is of course a health matter for our children, the water they drink, the air they breathe, etc. It is a jobs issue, between clean, good clean technologies being the future of our workforce and the training for all of that. It is a national security issue because of the all of the conditions that climate crisis produces. I won't go into all of them but they are cause for migration, conflict over habitat and resources, and again a security challenge globally. And then the fourth, of course, the moral issue that we need to pass on this planet, future generations in a responsible way. Now, recognizing what you said, we recognize that as well. And a big user of fuel, there have been many initiatives over time, more successful, with more technology to convert from fossil fuel to other sources of fuel to run the military. Because it would make the biggest difference. Transportation, defense, these are two of the biggest, uh, that can make the biggest difference in all of that. And that is something we're very, very focused on. As I say, the Defense Department sees this systemically, that we have to stop it as a national security issue and one way to do that is to stop our dependence on fossil fuels which exacerbate the climate crisis.
KC: She says there that the military understands the threat of climate change, meaning they recognize that catastrophic climate change which they are contributing to will lead to massive disruption, forced immigration, millions of refugees, violence and competition over lack of basic resources, and the military will respond in the only way it knows how which is through force, control, surveillance, and death. And she calls that security. She then gives some vague answer about how we're going to be transitioning the military from fossil fuel to some other kind of fuel. Presumably our Bradley tanks will be solar powered and our bomber planes will have extension cords trailing behind them. She really is an incredibly compelling speaker.
In regards to surveillance specifically, in 2013 after whistleblower Edward Snowden brought forth revelations that the NSA is using a global surveillance system to intercept, collect, and store vast amounts of personal electronic communications, this led to sustained outcry from the public and then support in congress for resting away surveillance authorities from the NSA. Pelosi was opposed to these calls for reform and aggressively whipped democrats away from a bipartisan bill that would have clawed back the NSA surveillance powers.
She did this again in 2018 under the Trump administration, a president who she claims poses a unique threat to democracy. In congress, an amendment was presented by Justin Amash, a Republican, that would have required the FBI to attain a warrant before accessing information that the NSA has collected on people. And Pelosi stood on the House floor and offered a defense of the Trump endorsed bill without that reform amendment that would extend the FBI the power to spy on Americans without warrants. In the process, she denounced the minimal warrant safeguards favored by many in her own party.
NP: But the choice we have today is to pass something that is not, defeat this bill, okay, you've done that if you want to do that. Pass an amendment that won't go anyplace, you can do that. And we will be left with extension of the status quo, of the current law.
KC: Paul Ryan, the House Majority Leader at the time, then thanked Pelosi for doing that.
Paul Ryan: I want to thank the minority leader for coming up and speaking against the Amash amendment and in favor of the underlying bipartisan amendment.
KC And he says there that he's glad Pelosi spoke against the Amash amendment. And he fails to mention that it is an amendment with bipartisan support. In fact, ultimately the reform amendment, proposed by a Republican, lost only by a narrow margin, with Pelosi being at odds with a majority of Democrats in the house who voted in favor of the reforms while she voted against the amendment. She therefore played a key role in extending surveillance powers for a president who she claimed she was resisting because he was so odious and a threat to democracy as we know it. But it doesn't matter who is in the White House, even if you consider them a tyrant the surveillance needs to stay.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been one of the central enablers of giving unprecedented sums of money for war making and surveillance and even criticizing Trump from the right when he wanted to end the 20-year war in Afghanistan. She always votes in favor of military spending bills that have been increasing by billions of dollars year over year.
And Pelosi has also faced criticism for her personal enrichment through well-timed stock trades while at the same time resisting calls to ban congress from being able to trade stocks.
Reporter: Secondly, should members of congress and their spouses be banned from trading individual stocks while serving in congress?
NP: No, I don't, no to the second one. Because this is a free market and people, we’re a free market economy, they should be able to participate in that.
KC: Most of her husband's stock trading is among Silicon Valley companies, particularly Apple, while Speaker Pelosi, who oversees committees that have hearings on bills to regulate big tech, has had personal, private conversations with the CEO of Apple, a company in which she and her husband are heavily invested and off of which they make millions of dollars in personal wealth. And Google, one of the companies in which the Pelosi’s stock trades have made millions of dollars, is one of the top five donors to Nancy Pelosi. And because Pelosi is able to fundraise so much money for herself and the Democratic Party, her institutional power remains entrenched and she holds it over any Democrats in congress such as the squad members who would dare to speak out against her or the party or who would support progressive primary challengers against centrist Democrats.
Pelosi uses her power in the House and in the Democratic Party to keep people in line, because she can turn off the spigot of money and access to anyone who makes trouble.
Now shifting to Shahid Buttar, Pelosi's challenger, he is a civil rights activist and constitutional lawyer as I mentioned before. He is facing Pelosi for the second time in the general election, having first run in the primary in 2018 and coming in third place and therefore unable to face Pelosi in the general election that year. In the 2020 general election, last go-around, his campaign received around 81 000 votes which is more votes than any challenger of Pelosi has ever received since she's been in office. And Buttar is running a grassroots campaign against the House Speaker who is one of the wealthiest members of congress. And his campaign is fueled overwhelmingly by small dollar donations and he is making the case that Pelosi has been a corporate Democrat, she helped facilitate Trump's and Obama's worst actions as presidents, and that given the existential threat of the impending climate catastrophe and the current pandemic, Pelosi must be defeated in November.
I'm glad that Shahid Buttar had some time to sit down and talk about his campaign and I hope that you enjoy the interview and find it insightful.
Well, thank you so much, Shahid for taking the time to sit down.
Shahid Buttar: It's my pleasure. Thanks so much for your interest.
KC: Yeah, absolutely. So, this 2022 election will be your third time challenging Nancy Pelosi. What brings you back into the race this time?
SB: The thing that brings me back into the race is the deepening rot of the corporate corruption that continues to race our species off a climate cliff and into an authoritarian abyss. I see San Francisco represented in Washington ultimately by agents of Wall Street and the Pentagon rather than representatives of the visionary values that unite and have long united our city. And as an immigrant and a constitutional lawyer working in San Francisco, in Washington for the last 20 years to defend the future from the past, I recognize the threat to the future posed by agents of the past co-opting the Democratic Party in particular, and that leads me back to the voice that represents our city in Washington. Ultimately, my representative in Washington is part of the problem. And so I'm running to offer my city a better alternative.
KC: And you've been very critical of Pelosi and other members of congress for enriching themselves with, frankly, what appears to amount to legalized insider trading and corruption, as you've called it. Pelosi's husband has traded tens of millions of dollars in the Silicon Valley tech industry alone, while she's a representative of the big tech metropolis of San Francisco. Just recently after pressure, some members of congress have begun introducing bills that would bar members of congress trading stocks while in office.
Reporter: Rare bipartisan support: to prohibit lawmakers from owning any individual stocks. While insider trading is already illegal, lawmakers have still profited from background briefings or legislation that can influence stocks. Now, a call to make that much more difficult with support from the left:
Elizabeth Warren: No owning the stock, no trading the stock for the member, for the members spouse.
Reporter: And the right:
Steve Daines: An important step forward to restore the faith and trust of the American people in this institution.
Reporter: Lawmakers from both parties bought and sold stocks after receiving closed door Covid briefings before the pandemic began to rage. A recent poll found 63 percent of voters believe lawmakers should be banned from stock trading. But Speaker Pelosi, whose husband is a wealthy financier, has until now opposed a stock ownership ban.
NP: We're a free market economy, they should be able to participate in that.
KC: And Pelosi has just recently shifted her position on this. But it's not clear if those bans will include the spouses of congress members. How do you respond to those recent developments regarding stock trading?
SB: Thank you for raising the issue. First, her concession or pivot represents the seventh time over the course of our campaign where she has been forced to abandon an untenable position due to the combination of public controversy and the electoral heat presented by an alternative on the ballot. And so, I see her being forced to pivot vindicating a theory of change that our campaign embodies and has enabled on issues from worker rights to civil rights in the face of predatory policing, funding the postal service, stopping a war, holding your criminal president accountable.
To pivot off of the recognition of sort of our role here, or my gratitude for the system, holding her accountable for a set of issues we've been banging the drum on for years. I want to press on some other points here, so, Pelosi is trying to claim credit for evolving on an issue that she was forced to change on because her open corruption was unacceptable when anybody looked. And so, this was the odd, this is an example of an oligarch’s corruption hiding in plain sight for decades. And here I'm drawing attention to the timing. Nothing in particular made this specifically controversial recently beyond the attention of the press. But this problem was never acceptable to begin with. This has been an open festering soar on our democracy for a long time and it's why we don't have universal health care, it's why we don't have climate justice, it's literally what entrenches war. When Eisenhower wrote about a military-industrial, the initial versions of his speech referred to a “congressional complex,” what this international insider trading is the structural lever that divides the loyalties of individual legislators such that the policy making emerging from congress does not reflect a loyalty to we the people of the United States. It reflects a loyalty to capital and that is ultimately the problem. And it is a subversion of democracy by capitalism that, frankly, forces and I think is drawing now attention from across the partisan spectrum in the defense of nothing less than democracy.
Gone, you know, overlooked in this discussion, in this long overdue discussion, is any serious consideration of whether and how the policymakers, pardon me, the vulture capitalists masquerading as policymakers, are going to recoup the public and give back their ill-gotten gains. You know there hasn't been any discussion of restitution. If you've been profiting off insider trading for decades, like, someone should get something back for that. And there hasn't been any discussion of it. A further point, insider training is just one of many ways in which Nancy Pelosi has unfortunately enriched herself with the public's expense in violation of a constitutional prohibition on emoluments.
So, I'm going to give you two other examples: One of them is repeated tax breaks for the wealthy which disproportionately accrue to her and her wealthy campaign donors. Another example is the PPP program. The Paycheck Protection Program was designed to help small businesses keep their doors open during the period in the pandemic when, you know, basically helping small businesses survive shutdowns was the point of the PPP program. One of the beneficiaries was a so-called small business co-owned by her husband and meanwhile the San Francisco Chronicle ended up doing an entire spread, deep dive long-form story into how the PPP funds ran out before they ever reached the black and brown parts of our community. And so, how is it that business is co-owned by the member of congress who is not only it’s seventh wealthiest member of the body but the leader, the most politically powerful of them, the one with the best stock performance and returns relative to the market of any Democrat? The mere fact that that coincides with political power is in itself so incredibly suspicious and demanding of attention. It just amazes me that it took until 2022 for anybody to look under the hood. And again, I'm glad it's finally happening.
There are a bunch of other questions that remain to be asked let alone answered. Like her stock portfolio is a problem, so is any real estate portfolio. When members of congress own real estate, property period is a problem for legislators because it divides their loyalties. And so, unless it's aggregated in the way like an index fund might be, and even that presents ethical qualms that we should be overt about. There is a pretense that if you invest in index funds as opposed to individual equities then you're not necessarily legislating on behalf of particular industries but you're still legislating on behalf of industry. Right? And so, it's not clear to me that the preferred alternatives are in fact sufficient, either, within the narrow sphere of the reform that is on the table.
I know that was a lot but, sorry, it's an issue I care a lot about.
KC: And have you seen amongst the constituents of the 12th congressional district much of a consciousness or an interest in these kind of getting money out of politics issues?
SB: Absolutely. It might be the 11th district now after the redistricting in California, but, that notwithstanding, it was the 12th before. But yeah, we did a rally actually at Pelosi's office over the holidays and you know I remember distinctly hearing from military veterans, students, entire families, you know, this is absolutely a concern. Realize, you know, anybody who has money in a 401k plan is implicated here because they're basically getting taken advantage of by members of congress gaining the markets that they claim are free markets that they are bending to their advantage. And everybody is getting fleeced in a particularly direct way. And this is a city where, you know, in San Francisco we have a very dramatic economic stratification. And so, it tends to be either you know people with money to invest who are implicated in this way or people who are just barely getting by, if at all, and the idea of a bunch of wealthy people scamming the market and sitting on reforms that would guard human rights against the vagaries of our predatory system, I think it's, you know, it's offensive across that spectrum. So it's not just ideologically diverse in terms of who cares but it's also socioeconomically diverse in terms of who cares. You can be wealthy, you can be middle class, and you can be working class, or you can be destitute, and it doesn't matter, you can still be outraged about the corruption of wealthy intergenerational dynastic oligarchs gaming the markets and subverting congress to fill their pockets at the public expense.
KC: And that kind of brings me to my next question which is what you alluded to earlier of the socioeconomic stratification within San Francisco, it's got some of the highest earning households in the country, with most of those households, I looked this up earlier, about 105,000 of those households earning $200,000 or more per year. And given your political and economic positions that don't -
SB: You said there's a hundred thousand households earning two million or more a year?
KC: $200,000 or more per year. And I just found that from, it's called Data USA, is the website that looks at specific congressional districts demographically.
SB: Okay, thanks for pointing me to that.
KC: Yeah, and so, you don't really represent the kind of neoliberal, upper elite, more capitalistic wing of the Democratic Party, which is generally the wing that is more favored by that kind of upper, high earning class. And so, it would seem to me that you're up against a lot in your district just demographically speaking. So how do you kind of respond to those elite interests in your district?
SB: I educate them. The crucial point here is that there are parochial interests that people have, for instance to lower their taxes if they're in a high tax bracket. But then there are interests that are widely shared like the interest in human rights or climate justice and those interests. A growing awareness of our shared interests is the basis for the political revolution that we are living through today. It's why socialism is ascendant. It's why there is this crisis of legitimacy within each of the corporate political parties. It's why the corporate consensus is fraying at the seams and in its wake we have this, you know, bizarre fracturing of all of the what seem to be before coherent political ideologies into a thousand different camps.
And this reflects people coming to realize that the neoliberal vision of individuated interests, the interest for instance in lowering one's tax rate or choosing policies that benefits one's family at the cost of the community, it's the bankruptcy of that approach that has led us to this point, this precipice of climate catastrophe. And I think that even people who are wealthy in San Francisco tend to be empiricists, that they are not normally the, you know, don't look up, ignore science, bury your head in the sand types. They tend to be alarmed by the climate crisis if nothing else. And so, even if there's an oligarch, and maybe they aspire to be one themselves, as in the office at the moment, even if they might share some affinity with Pelosi or some, you know, thing about her that they might appreciate, I think in San Francisco if they come to understand her role and, this is a key I'll come back to this in a second, but if they come to understand the incumbent's record on everything from engineering the climate crisis and ensuring it would accelerate, to funding every war for profit in the last generation, to helping eviscerate federal spending on affordable housing, to paramilitary policing, to kids being in cages at the border; if the district has a chance to understand the history and the record, even the wealthy people here are alarmed and the need for change is so desperate and so widely understood that I'm quite confident San Francisco will make a better choice if the word gets out.
I mean in the last cycle we won 81,000 votes in the face of sustained disinformation about everything about, you know, from me and my record and my past and my character to the incumbent's record and performance in office. I mean, if San Francisco understood how much Pelosi helped Trump when they were both in Washington I don't think there's any way she wins an election again. But you combine that with racist smears against the challenger and like, oh yeah go figure, she was able to hold us to 80 000 votes. I'm ultimately eager simply to get a modicum of legitimate democratic process here. And if that happens I have a great deal of confidence that my neighbors will make more informed, ultimately better choices than they have in the past.
KC: And when you say that Pelosi helped Trump, what are some of the ways that she did that?
SB: The most conspicuous would be July 2019. She funds to the tune of $4.6 billion a series of concentration camps at our nation's borders, sacrificing any requirement for human rights that she affirmatively abandoned in the negotiations with the white house. She expanded Trump's corporate trade authority on the very same day that she announced the first impeachment process.
NP: There is no question, of course, that this trade agreement is much better than NAFTA. But in terms of our work here, it is infinitely better than what was initially proposed by the administration.
SB: It's the first impeachment process that she delayed for years in spite of mounting public calls to hold the criminal president accountable. And each of the two times that she did finally show up after long dragging her feet she affirmatively hamstrung both processes, and I said this at the time, by taking the most meaningful, powerful, trans-partisan-ly resonant, I'm kind of making up a word there, charges. And that was the emolument clause. The same emoluments clause, I think I alluded to it in our conversation a little while ago, the prohibition on self-enrichment at the public's expense, that was the ground that would have taken Trump down. Because even, in fact, frankly especially, right-wing audiences, if the impeachment hearings were a litany of all the ways in which that guy is taking your money and putting it in his filthy pocket, GOP senators would start hearing calls from their base. That is, they care more about, frankly, that kind of corruption than Democrats do apparently. Democrats embrace Pelosi and she's a poster child of it.
And then contrast that with the right-wing knee-jerk reactions to welfare queens. The ultimate welfare queen was Donald Trump and Pelosi insulated him affirmatively, twice, after delaying each of those processes. I could go on here, she expanded his surveillance authority, she supported every military budget expansion request that he proposed, the tax breaks for the wealthy under his administration. Even the points in time when she got credit for resisting him, you might remember there was a moment when she tore a speech of the president’s and tried to claim that that was resistance. That was the State of the Union address that she invited him to give in congress after having impeached him. So, you impeach a president, it doesn't stick in the senate, you bend over backwards, you invite him into the House, he gives a campaign rally in the middle of the House at her invitation, and then she has the gall to tear the speech up and act like that was any meaningful resistance. She literally rolled out the red carpet for him and then tried to say for the cameras oh yeah just kidding while he's brainwashing the public.
And frankly, just a point attendant to this, it's not only the case that Pelosi helped Trump when he was in office, but it is also the case that the journalistic establishment fell completely asleep at the switch. And the construction of an artificial caricature of a liberal lion around a neoliberal, self-serving intergenerational oligarch is a reflection of profound institutional failure across the entire press establishment. And the deference to congressional insider trading, this is not new or episodic this is sustained and entrenched, long-standing, and I dare say as much a threat to the republic as the machinations of a criminal would-be aspiring tyrant.
KC: And I remember during the impeachments that Ralph Nader had sent a letter to Nancy Pelosi laying out a bunch of things that they could bring in an impeachment case that were more along the lines of the emoluments clause and personal enrichment.
Ralph Nader: If Nancy Pelosi wants to remove Donald Trump, she went on a very narrow base. She is clearly not supportive of impeachment, generally. She took it off the table when it was proposed to her in 2007; the impeachment of the criminal war criminals George Bush and Dick Cheney. And she's come forward with a very narrow hand, a very narrow hand for the most impeachable president of all time.
KC: And making the argument as what you just said of, that these things are much more important to the American people than anything about Ukraine. And again, that they just ignored those kind of arguments probably because that kind of self-enrichment is a bipartisan issue.
SB: You nailed it. Pelosi showed up for impeachment like a boxer throwing a fight and the whole time she was there what she prioritized before executive accountability was protecting the corruption in which she and her party are actively complicit.
KC: You mentioned earlier, you alluded to some of the press coverage that your campaign had received the last go around in 2020 in regards to allegations of workplace hostility. And outlets such as The Intercept and the San Francisco Chronical were doing some of that reporting. And you later filed a defamation lawsuit against the San Francisco Chronicle for their reporting unsubstantiated accusations against you of sexual harassment. How has that coverage affected your 2022 campaign and what is your view on how the media has treated your campaign and others similar to it of challengers coming at the Democrats from the left?
SB: Thank you for another good question. In terms of how it's affected, can we come back to how it's affected? I'll start with my view of the press just to take your questions in inverse order. So, what we encountered from the press establishment was its weaponization in the service of character assassination, insulating partisan corruption. And this infected everyone from corporate news outlets to non-profit news outlets from local white journalists to a black journalist writing from New York for a major international news organization. It was wide-ranging. It was, frankly, pretty simple insofar as it was a bunch of people silencing whistleblowers and evidence to support a series of rumors without facts without not only without evidence but even without specificity. I wasn't even accused, the things I was accused of included one set of things that was exposed as fraudulent affirmatively by The Intercept, that was the harassment accusations, which again, a corporate newspaper published within hours of learning about it without any attempted due diligence at all in a quintessential reckless disregard for the truth the likes of which the law protects people against, even public figures running for office. And in suing the Chronicle, I'm ultimately aiming to vindicate, not our campaign and not me or my reputation, what I’m aiming to vindicate there is the right of the public to have elections that are not being skewed by racist fabrications indulged by newspapers of record.
And to publish an accusation, not just a false accusation and not just an unfounded accusation, but an accusation that the news organization knew was unreliable before it ever published, and then to hold all of the facts from the public indicating the unreliability of the accusation, that is as racist as burning a cross on the steps of city hall. And that's what the San Francisco Chronicle did not to me but to the voters of San Francisco and the democratic process. So while I am suing the chronicle technically for defamation, this is an integrity, an election integrity and press ethics lawsuit, ultimately.
And frankly, the chronicle was not alone. The only reason they're the only ones I'm suing is because they're the only ones I have the resources to hold accountable. I don't have the resources unfortunately to hold all of the journalists accountable. But from 48 Hills, to Mission Local, to The Intercept, you know, there was a remarkable failure of journalists to do something as simple as check their facts or their biases or disclose the conflicts of interests of their sources or in some cases their own as journalists. And these are all baseline reflections of, or I should say, baseline requirements of press ethics that were violated. And I would say for me the biggest impact of the smears was I lost all faith in the press. And now, I have long defended press freedom more than the press itself does. And I would cite the prosecution of Julian Assange as an example here. And we can talk about that if you're interested. But having long outflanked the press as a guardian of its own interests, I have been struck in the last two years by its complete absence of capacity and it's, particularly capacity for subversion and weaponization in the service of the establishment.
And, you know, I used to think of journalists as sort of like guardians of democracy. And I recognize now that they're sort of like, you know, they attempt to be that, I think, while they just have an infinite number of sources pulling on them. And in the service of trying to better educate the public, even if I am standing on an uneven playing field I'm basically forced to engage that system. It forces me into the role as a candidate of doing a lot more public education than I wish I would have to do. Again, if the public knew the facts I would have won this seat two years ago. And it forces me to work against the press establishment to a large extent to inform the public about the fact of the incumbent's record, of the long-standing history of any of the policy issues, about me and myself, everything from the accusations about me to stories about my compensation, stories about events that I supposedly performed at that I didn't even know about until reading in The Guardian article that I supposedly, I mean, just every conceivable lie that one could imagine I dealt with two years ago.
And it would have been comical if it were not so devastating, again, not just to me but the city and our interests. And I do think that San Francisco deserves a lot better. It did ultimately embolden me because I recognized if the city knew the facts that I would already be in congress. And it is that recognition that forces me back to the table. Not just to fight for the issues but also to guard the process for leftists of color who might run in this city that has a profound, profound, and largely overlooked problem with white supremacy, if I may chase that rabbit for a minute.
KC: Well, I was going to ask just real quick, because you described that reporting and those accusations as racist and you likened it to a cross-burning. So how do you specifically make that connection with these kind of smear tactics?
SB: I want to hold two pieces, let me first respond to that, how do I connect white supremacy to the smears but I want to get beyond it to the other dimensions of white supremacy in San Francisco beyond what I encountered. But first in terms of what I encountered: To smear me, all of the white journalists here in the city who published their stories had to silence an Afro-Latina whistleblower who is an elected member of the San Francisco Democratic Party central committee who was not only ignored by all of the clubs that had their own stacked processes driven by Democratic Party careers loyal to the establishment but then when she tried to speak up and correct the record because they tried to recruit her to participate in their plot she had inside information relevant to the journalists and the clubs that they actively suppressed and when she brought it forward she was harassed she was hacked she was threatened and then she was smeared herself by some of the very same people i actually didn't think it was racist at first i just thought it was corrupt it was watching gloria berry and the retaliation that she had to endure that forced me to confront the racism um and and frankly being racialized in this way kind of opened my eyes to a great many things i mean i was already outspoken about for instance just the vicious gentrification that's unfolded in san francisco over the time that i've lived here but you know there are dimensions to the white supremacy here that escape even the sustained attention of observers for instance the last black enclave in san francisco is bayview hunter's point are you familiar with it at all no i'll just give you a little bit of information about it so bayview hunters point is a superfund site it's the site of decades of radiation poisoning by the u.s navy which operated for years a shipyard there it was the shipyard where the ships that were detonating the bombs in the south pacific the nuclear test bombs where those ships were being cleaned at hunter's point and the soil is so contaminated that property owners there today are required to sign covenants that they will not grow vegetables because anything that grows out of the soil will be radioactive and this is a district represented by the most powerful member of congress and the only thing she's done for them is privatize the land in the first place has now exposed tens of thousands of people to radiation force the last black enclave before that the fillmore was destroyed in the 70s in an urban renewal project overseen by democrats that has been widely reported and understood since as basically the destruction of a generation of black wealth the black population in san francisco which was at one point well into the teens is now at four percent and i can't think of a city in the country that has become that racially exclusive and you know these are dynamics that get lost in the statistics but behind the statistics are any number of fractured communities and displaced families and to come back to where i started when i came to understand the history of journalism and politics in san francisco i also came to learn that i'm not the first leftist of color to face these kinds of sneakers julian davis who ran for the board of supervisors in the very district that i'm standing in where i live he was smeared similarly by agents of the now mayor in the race that he ran and other leftists of color has been smeared by the very same people who falsely accused me in the years since then and you know it was even more vicious in his case and like i can't say more about it but like you know if there was so many examples of this pattern and and if i may just to press on this the obvious counterpoint that a great many people might say is well you know san francisco has a black mayor and you're sent to washington a mixed race including african-american vice president of the united states so it can't be that racist and the response to that is to remember how dr king described racism as an intersecting evil with capitalism in other words you can racism isn't just about race it's about power ultimately and so there are plenty of opportunities for people of color within a racist system if you serve capital and you can see that demonstrated in the relative successive figures from mayor london breed to vice president to supreme court justice clarence thomas for that matter there is there are many opportunities for people of color within racist systems if you support capital and san francisco is a poster child of exactly that dynamic maybe the last thing i'll say here is i'm not even the first person to say this james baldwin reflected on this in a documentary take this hammer recorded i think about 60 years ago what is very crucial is whether or not the country the people in the country the citizenry are able to recognize that there is no moral distance no moral distance which is to say no distance between the facts of life in san francisco in the backs of life and burning up
one's gotta call you know we've got to tell it like it is
and that's where it's at and it is painful how little in some respects has changed even while so many other things have
um you mentioned earlier about the ascendancy recently of um socialism and there has been a lot of talk since at least the bernie campaign i would think of 2016 about the tactics of leftists and progressives either running within the democratic party or outside as a third party and we've seen some encouraging success with figures such as shama sawant the socialist city council member of seattle running with a socialist alternative at the end of the day yes we need candidates to run against corporate democrats but as long as those candidates are running from the democratic party we're never going to succeed i mean i will predict you if we have a wave of left-leaning democrat left-leaning people running on the democratic party ticket against corporate democrats most of those endeavors are not going to succeed by themselves because at the end of the day the democratic party itself does not support a progressive and working-class agenda and she's been winning re-elections and successfully defeating corporate sponsored recall elections in seattle where do you uh fall on this kind of third party debate and why are you choosing to run in san francisco as a democrat instead of as a third party good questions kashana sawant is my political idol i have enormous respect and admiration for her i'm frankly amazed at the influence she's had as a local official who has made the fight for 15 national cause celebrities she's frankly shamed everyone in congress for not showing up for work for the preceding decade um in terms of the multi-par party identification so i i was a registered green for 15 years and i only registered as a democrat because i'm running for office in a one-party town the only path to city-wide office in san francisco at the moment is through the democratic party and i i am openly hostile to the party leadership i'm openly antagonistic i have not only no love for it but i describe it public as corrupt so you know you could think of my relationship to the democratic party as sort of like the same role let's say that the cia has to democracy you know like they talk about democracy a lot right but they are engaged in destroying it everywhere they can get and while i'm very committed to democracy and i would love to see the democratic party recover its principles in the fdr era you know committed to the second bill of rights the democratic party as it's currently constituted is something that absolutely needs to be burned to the ground and that's why i'm running against the leadership uh and calling out her corruption because it's not just her either it's an institutional corruption that infects the party's policy-making and it impacts our communities and it has already had devastating effects on the present let alone the future and the future i don't think can sustain much more so you know i run as a democrat in san francisco as a strategic recognition of the party's weight and influence here and i recognize that if i were to run as a third party which frankly i would love to be able to do it would immediately resign our campaign to effective irrelevance let me press on this from a different direction even short of winning the seat i've had the remarkable experience of in 2020 winning much more than that and that is six different policies where pelosi had to change positions because of the controversy you know around positions she's taken and that only was possible because we were threatening the seat if i were not running as a democrat i don't think that play reaches the end zone in other words to credibly threaten the seat in a one-party city i have to be running under the party with which the majority of voters identify if i were to disaffiliate i would effectively neutralize myself such that i would take off the table the opportunity to force policy concessions which again are more important to me than the seat um last thing i'll say here is that i frequently said that were the circumstances different i would very happily defect from the democratic party if for instance pelosi were to have retired which a great many people expected uh the next thing that would have likely happened is that a bunch of democrats would have gotten in the race and then i could have defected from the party because they would have split the partisan base but because she didn't retire and all of the careerists who would want to follow her in office don't have the political courage to face her i it basically leaves me in what is effectively a one-on-one race there are other challengers but you know it's going to be me and her in november and in a one-on-one race the only way you win in san francisco is a democrat
and there is the um the squad in the house there's the the progressive caucus of congress um the squad's composed of people like ilhan omar aoc jamal bowman and the squad has been criticized for being both ineffective and unwilling to use its voting leverage in the house um yeah aoc has voted present not for or against but present on key bills that increased funding for police at the capitol and for funding the apartheid state of israel was it worth doing present because it didn't really satisfy anyone the supporters of israel are mad at you for not voting for it critics of israel are mad at you for not voting against it do you regret that
you know i it is something that i weigh because there is the there's always the macro and then there's the micro and in the macro of narrative of politics of of national impact um you know it i probably should have just gone with with my value but in the macro which would be to vote no but in the micro i do believe that this created um a window in our community to be able to bring all folks to the table because my great fear is that we are going to import the same sort of um contention around this issue and we can have a progressive movement that defends palestinian human rights that is muslim christian jewish but i so in the micro i believe that it created a a window of opportunity for us in in the bronx um but in the macro it was very difficult yes so just before we finish on a lighter note than israel palestine my teenage daughter reminded me of this instagram video that you did that made me and her both laugh um if you were elected what would you see your role as being in relation to the squad and also in using your vote for leverage thank you i would be first to the left of the squad in two different dimensions uh substantively which is to say the right to housing and food as a thing that is not you know widely talked about at the moment but then also in terms of methodologically you might remember when corey bush camped out on the supreme court steps around the eviction moratorium that's my political mode of operation and so i would be you know hopefully impelling the squad into action my biggest impact i think would be simply removing the sort of damocles that hangs over them at the moment you know pelosi is an enforcer in congress and so by removing her i do hope to shift the calculus for other members and also to embolden them to give them political space by outflanking them and i think that because of my decades of work as a non-profit leader and public interest advocate and civil liberties issues and addressing the various intersecting compounding dimensions of authoritarianism i think i can lend some depth to the squad specifically as it relates to oversight of the pentagon the military industrial complex and intelligence agencies and in the wake of seeing just this week new documents declassified showing that the cia has been exploiting executive order 12 triple three to conduct illegal and unconstitutional domestic surveillance that sensibility and that experience is frankly desperately needed another way i might put this relative not to the squad but to a different generation of congressional leadership i hope to stand in the footsteps of the late senator mike gravel mike cravel fought the military-industrial complex and he was a true bonafide american hero he was a legislator who stood up for the people he was a legislator who called out the lies supporting a corrupt war and if there was any dream that i would have as a member of congress it is reading a classified document into the congressional record to make sure that the american public knows something that would otherwise be kept from us and i say congressman let me interrupt you right there i know you need a federal building in your district and i'd love to give you a federal building in your district but i've got to tell you our government's broke we don't have any money to give you a federal building and let me tell you why we're broke because we're squandering all this money in southeast asia and let me tell you how we got into southeast asia and i haul out the papers put them on there and i'm reading
so i move and ask unanimous consent to put all these papers that i was going to read at the record to put them in a record automatically bang they're in the record they're that's how it officially got into the record of the united states of america
and having fought in the streets to try to end a war having fought in the courts to expand civil rights i've led nonprofits for years to defend privacy and freedom of thought from an increasingly omniscient surveillance state in each of those contexts i've seen the policymakers prove their loyalties to be on the wrong side and for me politics is a gateway to the policy and and i want to shift policy so that it serves our communities and that it serves the future instead of kicking it off a cliff so in that regard congress not too long ago recently failed to pass a vote that would have restricted the selling of millions of dollars of arms to saudi arabia over the war in yemen which the us is materially supporting and we're currently conducting hybrid dirty warfare in syria giving material support there to anti-government jihadists and also support to the apartheid state of israel that just recently has been carrying out bombing attacks in damascus the capital city of syria and congress passes billions of dollars every year to fund the israeli military and our own military we have hundreds of bases in foreign nations and the democratic party has been completely on board the military-industrial complex train how does a politician such as yourself being opposed to large military spending help working class americans how do you connect that to working class interests
the quintessential sort of classic depiction of that dichotomy as guns versus butter i think the more poignant one at the moment might be missiles versus medicine but it is that simple you know we can have aircraft carriers or we can have medicine and this is a time ironically when this is an aspect of the pandemic that doesn't get discussed much um so about a million americans have died
we know that the average icu hospitalization is well over a hundred thousand dollars the average the diagnosis is over ten thousand dollars the amount of medical debt that uniquely americans no other people in the world are incurring medical debt the way we are because in every other country healthcare is a right and so the fact that we are denied basic human rights in this country by a bipartisan establishment that is more committed to relentless increases in the military budget than allowing people to get care and medicine when they need it in the middle of a damn pandemic where millions of people died we still can't get universal health care the congress threw an extra 25 billion dollars at the pentagon beyond what it requested the sheer audacity of that prioritization of spending on destruction at a time when millions of americans are just trying to stay alive is in my mind simply de-legitimating and you know you asked me how is a candidate running against the military-industrial complex am i able to make that case at the end of the day
all i can do is lead horses to water and i'm committed to speaking the truth and offering a better alternative and making sure that people know about it and i do hope that enough people are paying attention that they will make better choices at the end of the day i see the most powerful endorsement of our campaign is that a reality and this continuing erosion of opportunities that so many people are feeling is a reflection of that failure and maybe to come in your question a different way you asked me how to make the case to the working class that repudiating militarism serves their interests the co-optation of the labor movement by the military-industrial complex was one of the greatest slights of hand i think of political history and you hear every pentagon spending increase put and depicted in terms of jobs this many jobs that many jobs the highest ratio of federal spending to job creation by far is the department of education so if we were sincerely committed to jobs that's what we'd be investing and
i do hope in office to do things like help break ground on measures that would for instance create a federal jobs guarantee and revolutionize worker rights and put people first and the pentagon in its place and
to the extent especially in a pandemic that people need care i think it's an especially poignant and compelling time to make that case and you mentioned earlier the case of julian assange um the biden administration is currently pursuing charges against the journalists um he's been holed up for years first in the ecuadorian embassy and now in belmarsh prison in london awaiting appeal of his extradition case um edward snowden is still exiled in moscow and the squad who we talked about before has been relatively silent on both of those cases how do you see congress's role in being able to address those injustices so there's layers of this the very first assange is a publisher being prosecuted for revealing military crimes and cover-ups what he published were the findings of whistleblowers who are poised to inform congress if it defends them congress goes through elaborate rituals that are fact-finding the whole process of hearings is a process to investigate facts when whistleblowers come forward to reveal that officials have been lying the very first people who should be lining up to defend those whistleblowers to give them microphones are members of congress the people's representatives should be the very first people defending government whistleblowers who are risking their careers to tell the public the truth that they discover behind their walls of executive secrecy and every member of congress who has failed to show up for whistleblowers has abandoned their oath of office it is that simple there's no two ways about it i think most of them don't even realize it and i think even that is even more disqualified the so that's just in terms of giving opportunities to whistleblowers to inform the congressional record and the public conversation an example of this you know one of the whistleblowers that assange published was chelsea manning who revealed among other things a video of an apache helicopter strike that left two reuters journalists dead that was then covered up light them all up those are two traffic 260s come on fire
the two things we need to move time now all right we just engaged all eight individuals hotels two six crazy horse one eight oh yeah those dead bastards
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oh it's their fault
now if i'm in congress and a whistleblower comes forward with video showing that the us military is assassinating journalists you can be damn sure that i'm gonna be looking at every conceivable lever for accountability from getting people fired to defunding programs to making sure that there are uh you know reaching out across the aisle to advocates on the other side of the partisan fence for good government and transparency whatever the right wing might you know couch its terms in that day they're taking this case to the public taking that case on the road particularly to the congressional districts represented by voices in washington who are complicit now i don't have any partisan loyalty uh this is a bit this relates a little bit to what you talked about just you know asked me to compare myself to the squad before i'm quite eager to be an agent to support turnover in other entrenched seats i have no interest in uh you know fighting that fight in washington by myself i'll be very eager to take on and support challengers to entrenched incumbents in other places uh and that's something that the squad has decidedly you know not been eager to do i've never been able to get a call back from any of them um that's not true corey bush did an event with me before she was elected and i have enormous respect for her as well as in ilhan omar i think of her and ilhan to some extent in the class unto themselves but i digress um
i lost my place now in terms of what the question was could you do you mind reminding me yeah and so there was the the case of julian assange as a publisher and then also the case of snowden as a whistleblower right right yeah snowden you know when he came forward congress could have been informed about any number of things they had just been lied to by the director of national intelligence about the subjects that snowden brought forward a few months before his revelations and did congress ever invite edward snowden to explain to it the facts about which the director of national intelligence had lied no does the nsa collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of americans no sir it does not not wittingly there are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps uh collect but not not wittingly all right i asked the director of national intelligence just to justify why he never faced a charge for perjury in 2015 after the conclusion of the congressional hearing and i was arrested as a lawyer journalist just for asking a question and
you know i i would like as a member of congress for somebody to answer my damn questions you know because it's like it's a question that everybody has an interest in when i do james clapper did you do that in dc yeah there's a video of it on youtube that code pink captured and it was probably my most viral moment before running for office and i this was a few months after eric garner had been killed in new york he was the first of the recent people to die while choking out his last words i can't breathe and i asked james clapper after the conclusion of a senate hearing in the i believe it was the foreign relations committee it was chaired by the late uh senator john mccain and i was i had no interest in getting arrested i waited until after the hearing because i didn't want to get arrested i was trying to get a quote march 2013 you missed there senate intelligence committee about the scope of nsa surveillance what do you have to say to communities
why is your agency above the law why can you lie to the senate about mass surveillance presuming the entire globe to be subject to pervasive collection twisting the meaning of the terms and violations of the statutes in the u.s constitution constraining your agency why are you above the law for perjury and why is the nsa above the law for mass surveillance violating even the contours that the authors of the patriot act intended to authorize in 2001. why are you above the law and senators why won't you do your job you're charged with oversight of these officials okay
can you tell me why you just spoke in in front of a james clapper because the director of national intelligence committed perjury before the senate in march 2013 about the scope of national surveillance domestic tell me your name i'm shahid bhutah from the bill of rights defense committee i asked his lawyer james clapper's lawyer bob litt the very same question of the cato surveillance conference a few months before bob zlitz answer was i gave my boss bad legal advice so here i chased down his boss i'm trying to get a quote for an article i was gonna write and i asked him if director clapper you misled the senate under oath about the extent and scale of mass surveillance after being disproven by a whistleblower you're still in office you've never faced a charge for perjury what do you say to communities of color that are so hyper-policed that people are being killed in the street without charge or trial on the suspicion of selling cigarettes without a license so you know basically you've got meaningless justice for powerful people who are walking out of rooms with an entourage and a pension after lying to the public about issues of grave constitutional importance and you have powerless people who are going home in early you know in coffins for no reason at all so you've been hyper vigilant predatory so-called justice for the powerless completely permissive absence again air quote justice for the powerful these two systems of unequal justice have also persisted in our country since before the founding of the republic and and i i'm grateful that a great many more americans in the years since this was 2015 when i was arrested sort of after the ferguson uprising before the george floyd uprising was around the time of the freddie gray uprising in baltimore and and i'm grateful that more people are coming to recognize the legitimacy of separate and unequal systems of justice but it plays in here because when we talk about whistleblowers and publishers julian assange is as much a reflection of it as chelsea manning let's pivot to his experience as a publisher we've been talking mostly about whistleblowers here and you know the sort of like issues about unequal justice that their experiences indicate and that they bring to the public assange is a publisher it's the first time in american history that we're prosecuting a news organization and a journalist for informing the public if it becomes criminal to inform the public about government crimes and cover-ups the constitutional goose is cooked that's like the end of the republic as we know it we can have no meaningful pretense of being a free society after that and and it is a bipartisan prosecution to which both republicans and democrats have been committed and it's not just an attack on the right of the practice to report the facts it's an attack on the right of the public to know the facts it is an attack on democracy by the executive branch and the reason we have a divided system of powers between the judicial executive legislative branch in this country is because the founders of our country envisioned the branches fighting each other adversarially and i am going to congress to fight the executive branch on behalf of the people of the united states there's also been a general media silence blackout in regards to the assange case um and a whole lot of the coverage is when it is covered is is more about how assange deserves the the prosecution that he's facing can i give you one riff though because you what you introduced there was the press as distinct from the prosecution and i would love to touch on that if i made this for a minute yeah the press has actively abdicated its constitutional role when you in two dimensions this is both the press failing to inform the public about the prosecution in the first place just as a matter of fact that it is happening but there is a deeper even more disturbing complicity and that is the press and i mean here editors at cable tv at network tv at major prince journalism outlets editors failing to understand either their own interests as journalists or their own rights and ethics you know rights and ethics are almost like counterbalancing rights are like the things that journalists can do ethics are sort of like the things that they must do the idea here is that they are failing both their own rights and press ethics and democracy all at once by simply not showing up for work and it's so disturbing when you think of it in context because we are talking about journalists abandoning coverage their job of the prosecution of a journalist their colleague who is being prosecuted for among other things bringing to the public video showing the assassination of reuters journalists other colleagues by a military industrial establishment that is now prosecuting the one who brought the facts so it's almost like you know they're allowing the messenger to be shot even though what the messenger showed was literally journalists being shot it's it boggles the mind the the extent of the abdication is so profound and its potential consequences are so dangerous and i'm just grateful for the chance to talk about it because i it does drive me mad that somehow journalists in the us find more important things to talk about than the collapse of their own profession under a bipartisan assault yeah i mean i think a lot of people have pointed out that the larger corporate media outlets by and large don't engage in that kind of um coverage that that wikileaks and assange embody um and so if he is to be charged and convicted it's not that threatening to what they do because they don't do what wikileaks does generally it's it's not right part of their model about the press they hate i'm talking about the institution like the times they hate julian and they hated him when he was giving them that information and the reason they hate him is because he shamed them into doing their job the alternative press does it shames them but there's a real hatred because they want to present themselves as the journalistic and kind of moral center and so that's why the press after these revelations turn with a vengeance it doesn't threaten them right it only threatens ethical journalists who are willing to show up for work i mean another way of putting that is that it
it structurally entrenches deferential journalism and i'm using journalism in air quotes as an alternative to the adversarial journalism on which democracy depends and for the press to be complicit in its own marginalization and erosion into that cosmetic simulacrum of a constitutional function that frankly is timeless the interest of transparency of communities to know how their governments are working on or against their behalf i mean that's something that stretches well beyond our political system the reason we inspired the world to follow democracy as we supposedly announced a set of commitments about that that we are just abandoning and the press is abandoning you know before our eyes yeah so we were talking a bit about the uh military spending and yeah there's a lot of defense lobbying within congress um and this is somewhat related to that i wanted to get your stance on our current intellectual property rights system and patent law specifically as it relates to the health care industry um and also big tech industry like you said we're currently suffering a pandemic and there's no medicare for all right president biden recently stated that he wants to cure cancer and yet we have we have a we have a patent regime that allows for private monopolization of taxpayer-funded medical research and in regards to big tech there there's a worrying trend of public officials pushing private companies to censor the public on their platforms while at the same time as we've discussed the government partners um with technology monopolies to help carry out mass surveillance um so i wanted to get your thoughts on what you see as some of the best avenues for regulating big tech breaking up healthcare monopolies and and dealing with our patent system right on you're asking great questions i'm uh i'm grateful for them okay so i do want to break them up because i think the pharma context and the tech context presents somewhat different issues but um you're definitely and i think the relationship of intellectual property and its fetishization is attendant to both again i think the remedies might be different so in the pharma context i would like first to nationalize the insurance layer that's what medicare for all represents i'm quite adamant about leaving the delivery layer privatized which means that people get to choose their own doctor but in between them are layers like pharmaceuticals and pharmaceuticals present a very compelling case for nationalization the other industry i talk a lot about nationalizing is fossil fuels just because of the externalities implicit in it pharma has different externalities but this idea that we are funding research as a people that we are then paying for on the back end or you know even more vicious version of that that's kind of parochial presentation of it in my mind as an immigrant where i see ip in the pharma industries intersecting most viciously is the delay of the ship's waiver and in the middle of this pandemic billions of people around the world have been at risk while the vaccines have been being hoarded by rich countries for their own use while there's plenty of manufacturing capacity in the global south to manufacture vaccines if we will just let them have the design but we care more about corporate profits than we do about human life even the human lives of billions of people and it is gross it's revolting reprehensible and struggle for words and and that is a result entirely of what we described as intellectual property which is nothing more than putting the profits of corporate interests and entities before again the the lives of entire communities and countries that's pharma to pivot to tech ip is definitely a problem there and you can see this presented in so many different ways i was just talking with a friend about this not even a couple hours ago but for instance the proliferation of standards or for that matter peripherals like every time a new charging protocol comes out or you know a new device with a new connector i think often about what the sort of like excavations of the future when archaeologists are you know excavating our times they're gonna find you know five different kinds of lightning connectors and audio jacks and this usb and this usbc and this is like interoperability as a counterpoint an alternative to the proliferation of proprietary platforms is an interest that is a publicly shared one and it's an interest that is absent precisely because the marketplace and ultimately government are so deferent control to industry and monopolies and market power even shorter monopoly now this gets me in the tech context beyond ip i think the way to reign in big tech is particularly through antitrust both the enforcement of existing statutes and i'm grateful to see unicod now leading the ftc i think that's an encouraging step forward not nearly enough because in addition to seeing the enforced enforcement of existing statutes i would like to legislate new ones to more vigorously empower anti-trust authorities to take down corporate monopolies and abusive industries couple examples of that the most important among them is the codification of the essential facilities doctrine there was a judicial doctrine that has long been practiced it was instrumental in allowing trains to cross the mississippi river it was instrumental in allowing sprint or credo to access the mci network it was instrumental in breaking up at t the essential facilities doctrine is quite radical and it is the notion that a company with a and in the law historically this is brick and mortar facility that is necessary for competition is effectively under an affirmative obligation to share it with competitors for the sake of the public and competition and that is an incredibly radical proposition relative to today's practice particularly because the courts abandoned years ago and congress can enshrine it in the law congress can do lots of things with respect to anti-trust law that it has not yet done largely because tech firms gained them you specifically raised corporate censorship and constant moderation while antitrust would provide some relief there i don't think it would do enough what the ultimate point the valence of antitrust there is to diminish any platform from being so central that it becomes the equivalent of a public square because ideally if one platform is going to censor you or i don't think it's censorship because it's not state action but if one platform is going to take down your content you just go to another one but when the platforms attain monopolistic weight that becomes an untenable alternative and that's where antitrust law can come in is diminishing the power of individual tech companies to dictate the terms of the marketplace that's exactly what it was created for it serves the combination of fairness and efficiency and for the last generation it has done neither my very first job as a lawyer the first job offer i had was from the justice department to join the antitrust division in 2001 and they just shut it down and it hadn't been seen from since until more recently and i am eager to see
not just through the intellectual property regime process but particularly also through antitrust law and in the context of pharmaceuticals through uh policy related to health insurance and nationalizing industries uh to get more democratic control over those industries beyond simply countering their influence in congress yeah so in regards to the nationalization of pharmaceuticals um it it used to be before uh the 1980 beethole act that um public funded research defaulted to being in the public domain and since then it's now more defaulted to private ownership and so when you say nationalizing pharmaceutical industries what what does that look like to you because i think some people would say well if if we can just put patents in the public domain that's not necessarily nationalizing a company or an industry but that would still go a long way towards reducing prices it would i mean they're almost i suppose they're complementary they could conceivably effectively presented as alternatives um though i do think they're more complimentary so in the context of patents uh releasing into the public domain we're talking about democratic control over individual technologies when we talk about nationalizing the companies we're talking about democratic control over the entire enterprise so i think about open sourcing so to speak particular pharmaceuticals as a step perhaps on the broader road insulin is an especially compelling case for this i mean the creator of it just claimed any patent but it's still basically priced according to a monopoly cartel regime and it indicates market failure essentially but i think you know and i would love to see um and i think there are at least some projects that attempt to make insulin more freely available those efforts shouldn't stop there ultimately and the nationalization of the industry is one way to make sure that it does absolutely there's also the consideration of future pharmaceuticals so making established pharmaceuticals accessible to the public by putting them in the public domain
that more freely allows access to existing medicines but when we talk about the development of future medicines uh there is a distributive question in any enterprise as to like what things to focus on and for instance you know think about like the amount of pharmaceutical uh energy going to address the issues that were you know ultimately addressed say by like viagra versus like malaria right and and it's this idea of the development pipeline being skewed by market interests where is the market for the medicine and if the market for the medicine is in the global south and let's say it's a market for direly needed medicine will keep people alive it might be a lot less economically lucrative than medicines for you know what might are argued or ultimately cosmetic purposes for relatively rich people in the north and it's not to say that nationalization will fix that because we'll ultimately be democratically controlled by ultimately relatively rich people in the north but the point is it will be democratic decision making instead of by people like martin shkreli you know the guy who is jacking up the i can't even remember what the pharmaceutical was but he was you know price gouging basically sick people and
nationalization will not only i think increase the accessibility to medicines but hopefully put us in a position to more reasonably allocate development and research resources so that they're meeting the greatest instead of the greatest deepest pocket set of pockets yeah that's a good point the the profit motive of pharma companies is always going to tend to focus research and patentization on big ticket treatments as opposed to things that may be more important from a health perspective but aren't going to be as profitable that's right it's particularly acute when you apply that to fossil fuels right where the industry is intrinsically committed to things with negative externalities that poison people and poison the atmosphere and ensure climate chaos the and it's intrinsic in the business model right so the case for nationalization there i think is even more acute but yeah we're on the same train um well i just had one more question um we'll finish with something that's perhaps a bit uh lighter um i don't know i saw from your website that you are a uh a burner um yeah uh a tender of burning man um you're also a poet creative writer musician rapper and as you said before a constitutional lawyer um you're not what i would describe as the kind of usual run-of-the-mill milktoast politician um what are some of the formative experiences of yours perhaps outside of the realm of politics that have nevertheless influenced your positions and led you to where you are today right on thank you for that um my political consciousness was forged at spoken word open mics hearing from my neighbors about what their lives were like and i did that in chicago i did that in washington and down in the bay area i've been doing that for years and in my 20s you know i was going to night school i was working for banks i was finding my creative voice and i was just learning about the world and go through my own experience from my family having lost our home to foreclosure when i was 16 and then in chicago particularly during the 10 years i was there just hearing people's experiences you know it's really hard to uh as a poet in a community of poetry hear people's experiences and come away insulated from them you know with poetry has a way of encouraging empathy and my politics are ultimately driven by that you know it's an awareness of human suffering and the ways that we can relieve it by making better collective decisions it drives me to politics another really pivotal moment for me was the run-up to the invasion of iraq uh and i think about this also through the lens of journalism you know in the conversation we were having before about its ethical capacity i remember reading the san francisco chronicle and the stanford law library this would have been maybe like october 2001 pardon me two yeah it would have been october 2002 maybe november and there was a reference to direct action to stop the war a group that was uh organizing direct action in the event of a potential invasion i plugged in and a bunch of months later you know we're up in san francisco with hundreds of stanford students and we're using our bodies as like at the point of intervention to basically shut down a major commercial center to try to pull the corporate plug on an invasion and that arc for me was
radicalizing but inspiring and a bit indelible because you know since then i graduated from law school i've gotten to do things of course i've got to do some things as an advocate run a non-profit but that spirit of direct action you know which i've had a chance to reprise in lots of different moments from you know the occupy movement uh i mean every time i've taken direct action with the movement for black lives going back to before the ferguson uprising to the banner drop that we did outside the nsa headquarters after snowden to the music video i did the nsa versus usa sort of like public education project the nsa breaks the law every day now all of these are sort of an expression driven by my awareness from that era of what popular sovereignty means ultimately that's that's what that era taught me is that we if we the people choose to take action it doesn't frankly matter what washington says and you know just as an example of that we took the oakland docks twice that year and i've been part of actions that have taken them since and when the pentagon is trying to ship striker brigades to iraq and there's a bunch of people at the docks that block the trucks from loading guess what the strikers don't go right the pentagon cannot overcome sustained resistance and non-violent resistance are we the people of the united states if we choose to act in solidarity with the people of the rest of the world human rights we can shut down the pentagon and i'm ultimately under running for office as an expression of that same sensibility you know to do through a formal channel what i've tried to do with the street with my neighbors um if i may throw one other moment out there yeah november 2017 i think it was at catharsis it's a regional burning man event that happens in washington dc thrown and organized by a number of my friends and one of my proudest moments as a dj was was playing it was around midnight sat across the street from trump's white house and i started with the howard zinn quote i think i ended with malcolm x and it was revolution the whole way in between and that idea of the combination of culture community and discourse radicalizing the dance floor reaching people in recreational spaces to help them understand the context in which we live and to sweat and have a good time on the dance floor my tagline is i like to move minds and behinds and you know it's not enough for art to be aesthetically compelling you know if you move behinds as a house dj like that's kind of easy you know but to like take people on a journey and hopefully help them connect with each other and perhaps some struggle beyond them that's hard and i'm not saying i'm successful at that all the time i mean who knows if anybody's listening to the lyrics but like as an artist at least making sure that the consciousness is part of the art uh for me is is is critical and i'll say this i always envision being an artist with a political interest and as state has had it you know i'm a literal politician now with you know who dabbles in art so i kind of feel like i've been somewhat um conscripted by my own subject uh yeah yeah i i come from the world of theater uh i worked for for years as a technician uh performer lighting designer and i similarly agree that it can be frustrating to work in an art form that is so often merely spectacle at the expense of of instigating radical thought in in theater goers which i think theater can absolutely play that role and we just oh yeah i can't we don't see it hardly enough so absolutely thanks for that sensibility and the question you know i i appreciate the chance to put on a different hat maybe the one last thing i'd say there in terms of the creative piece is that the we tend to select policymakers based on how much money they can raise and i do think that as an artist with legal training i have a unique opportunity to help because i see the law as a creative medium for the creation of either equity and justice or instead domination oppression and too many people encounter it through a different set of lenses you know as this accreted phenomenon that they just whittle at you know guardians of an established superstructure and i'm approaching it as a liberation agent aiming to sculpt clay in a decidedly more humane way
well i think that's a great place to leave it off right on thank you cody you asked great questions too i'm looking forward to seeing what else you cover and i appreciate the uh rigor that was apparent in your questions and the perspective of being able to see through some of the editorial spin of your colleagues so keep up your work yeah thank you so much thank you for the time and similar to you i i also came from the uh the non-profit world recently um okay where were you working i was working at a local food bank um hell yeah and it was it's it's a kind of an interesting story uh a few of my colleagues and i we got uh fired and also quit did you write a piece very critical of like neo-liberal food banks was that you yeah yeah okay i read your piece maybe i read it after you reached out because i was wondering you know okay great work i was actually fascinated by that it reminded me a lot of the critique of the sort of like housing and homelessness service industrial complex in san francisco and the persistence of homelessness like we spend you know a billion dollars a year on services when you know frankly it doesn't make a meaningful dent in the program when we could just provide housing for however many people we might reach it would be more impactful and i think that is kind of analogous to what you're describing um in what i remember of your critique yeah and there's you know there's a lot of food banks that are are doing more systemic critiques and work in that regard um it just not only was it not present at our local food bank but the leadership was kind of actively hostile to it so um yeah unfortunately it came to a head and and that's what produced that piece but yeah thank you for it and your work yeah journalism right now well yeah anytime uh you're writing and i can be helpful feel free to reach out yeah absolutely thank you so much thank you cody have a great weekend you too all right peace better bye
Transcript of the full interview coming soon.
"The Democratic Party Needs To Be Burned To The Ground" - The Full Interview With Shahid Buttar, Leftwing Candidate Challenging Nancy Pelosi For Her Seat In The House