Corruption won’t uproot itself
Are you concerned about the future? Delaying medical treatment due to cost? Wondering whether your children will inherit a world in crisis?
The corporate corruption in Washington driving those concerns is unfortunately bipartisan. We all know that dynasty Democrats, like their GOP allies, have enriched themselves while gatekeeping visionary reforms—like Medicare for All—favored by transpartisan grassroots majorities.
Are you ready for change?
Today's the last day that we can include contributions in our next round of public disclosures that we'll file with the Federal Elections Commission. It's the final report before the June primary, so we'd be thrilled to include your support!
Join us today to send a class warrior for the 99% to Congress!
In Washington, a Congress of millionaires engineered the climate crisis, before responding to a global pandemic by repeatedly prioritizing targeted tax breaks for the wealthy, rather than measures to protect public health.
It’s not OK.
Only voters can impose accountability—but too many never hear about the options before us before completing their ballot. We’re working hard to educate every voter in San Francisco before the primary. Your support comes at a crucial time to help extend our reach.
Thank you for being part of our community, and helping amplify solutions to defend our future from the failures of the past!
Your voice,
Shahid
PS -- Already contributed? Please accept our thanks, and share this video with any friends who share our values!
Send a class warrior for the 99% to Washington
Are you tired of watching oligarchs in Congress fill the pockets of billionaires and robber barons?
Join us today to send a class warrior for the 99% to Congress!
In Washington, a Congress of millionaires has repeatedly prioritized targeted tax breaks for the wealthy, while freezing the federal minimum wage for over a decade.
Meanwhile, working families are struggling with a mounting economic crisis that has stretched beyond supply chain issues and now reached the stage of predicted food shortages. Having lost my childhood home to foreclosure as a teenager, and then struggled to fund my education (for which I'm still indebted to this day), I'm no stranger to struggle.
Are you tired of Washington ignoring predictions and running straight into brick walls over and over again? From climate chaos to public health, corporate Democrats continue to join their Republican allies in choosing to ignore science, disregard long overdue reforms—and force working Americans to pay the price.
Today, Americans are reeling from levels of medical debt never before seen in human history. It is the overlooked rot at the core of an already collapsing economy, and an empire all-too-willing to force its costs onto the most vulnerable.
In every industrialized country in the world—except the U.S.—people enjoy healthcare as a matter of right. Their systems differ, but the one thing none of them do is force patients and their families to endure lifetimes of medical debt.
When you’re sick, you should be able to focus on your health, and getting better.
But for too many Americans, falling ill forces worry—or worse—over making ends meet. It shouldn’t be a struggle to keep mouths fed, or a roof over your head, when you’re sick. In fact, it isn’t a struggle elsewhere.
Only here, in the richest country in the history of humanity, is medical debt the leading cause of homelessness. It’s a shame, a vicious cycle, and a clear reflection of bipartisan policy failure.
Ready for change? Join us today to force change on a system that concedes nothing without a demand!
In addition to fighting for universal healthcare free at the point of service, I’d also like to establish a human right to housing, and a new era of social housing to shift resources from the military-industrial complex to the most pressing needs confronting our communities.
As an immigrant challenging an oligarch to defend the future from the failures of the past, I’m painfully aware of how outgunned I am. That’s why I’m grateful for your support, and why we’re making every dollar stretch. As we close in on the critical FEC disclosure deadline at midnight EST on Thursday, your help has never been more crucial to our campaign!
Your voice,
Shahid
PS — Want to do more to support our campaign, end the Pelosi dynasty, and liberate Democrats from co-optation by Wall Street? Sign up to volunteer from wherever you live! If you’d like to host a videoconference to introduce our work to others in your community who share our concerns, reply to this email and let us know when you have in mind. I’m looking forward to meeting you, as well as your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, and classmates!
Food shortages, gas price spikes
America’s economic struggles are revealing themselves today in many ways: supply chain challenges, inflation in the prices of everything from gasoline to education, and shortages of critical goods including commodities and food products.
These are the signs of policy failures, and Washington’s inability to respond to changing circumstances.
The failures in Washington are driving more than just crises impacting our aggregate economy. Each of the challenges that we confront together as Americans also impact each of us as individuals, and members of families and communities.
And across America’s many communities, the economic crisis is driving ever wider the profound disparities in wealth and income that have already grown to world-historic proportions.
No campaign embodies that disparity more than ours. I’m an immigrant who owns no property, challenging an intergenerational oligarch worth over $200 million.
During this challenging time, we’re all tightening our belts. Our campaign is no stranger to that dynamic: due largely to establishment character assassination, in addition to challenges confronting the broader economy and working class on whose support we've relied, we’re operating with a fraction of the budget that fueled our 2020 campaign, when we won 81,000 votes.
Yet we’re reaching a wider community of voters and volunteers than ever before. And—having roughly doubled our vote count between each of the elections in which I’ve participated since entering politics in 2018—we’re ready to expand on that base to liberate San Francisco’s voice in Washington.
A critical reporting deadline looms this Thursday night, after which contributions can no longer be counted in the Q1 totals that we report to the Federal Election Commission and the press.
Given Pelosi’s profound influence in Washington, I know how much is at stake in our election. Opportunities for universal healthcare or climate justice to find reflections in policy over the next two years will turn largely on whether we’re able to end the Pelosi dynasty this November.
Thank you for bringing us closer as we continue our quest to defend the future from the failures of the past. A Congress of millionaires is never likely to recognize the challenges confronting working Americans. But—as a renter burdened by student loan debt who has lost a home to foreclosure, and experienced hunger as a young adult—I recognize the class war that has gone on for too long, and mounting an active counter-attack whose strength depends on your support.
Thank you for seeing through the establishment’s smoke & mirrors, and choosing to stand with us as we force a long-overdue debate in both San Francisco and Congress!
Your voice,
Shahid
PS — Have you contributed and want to do more to support our campaign? You can sign up to volunteer from wherever you live. And if you’d like to host a virtual gathering to introduce me & our work via videoconference to others in your community who share our concerns, reply to this email and let us know when you have in mind. I’m looking forward to meeting you, as well as your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, and classmates!
Race, politics, and hypocrisy
Last week, our country was forced to confront the white supremacy that continues to infect Washington. Rarely has it emerged as obviously as when GOP Senators mounted their craven attacks on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who has been nominated by President Biden for a trailblazing seat on the Supreme Court that would make her both the Court’s first Black woman, as well as its first public defender.
We’ve discussed elsewhere how Judge Brown’s experience as a public defender could be especially informative to a Court currently dominated by veterans of the executive branch. At the moment, we’d like to focus on how to fix the Court and restore judicial independence.
The key is ending judicial life tenure to force turnover on the bench. Many voices have fixated on expanding the Court, forgetting the predictable consequences. Others defer to the Court as the exclusive arbiter of what is constitutional, overlooking the roles of Congress in both presenting constitutional questions, and as an independent branch of government charged with the task of checking and balancing the other branches.
When I first proposed the idea of Congress forcing Justices to retire after serving staggered terms of 18 years, few people noticed. I’m grateful that supporters of that vision have expanded since then to include figures like Ro Khanna and Andrew Yang.
Judge Jackson’s hearings were also notable because they forced many Americans to recognize the white supremacy that infects Washington. Unfortunately, the hearings cast an artificial picture, since the problem revealed by Republicans in those hearings are ultimately widely shared across both parties.
America watched an eminently qualified Black jurist demeaned by ridiculous questions from entitled career politicians who lack her depth, poise, or integrity. Will We the People hold Senators accountable and ensure her confirmation?
I can relate to Judge Jackson, having spent 20 years building a track record disregarded entirely by writers who proved more interested in publishing lies—which have since been debunked—than covering the facts. Still widely suppressed is the recent investigative report documenting how some of those writers accepted previously undisclosed payments from self-promoting sources, including a former tech executive with an undisclosed business interest in promoting the false narrative of partisan climbers who were later rewarded by establishment politicians.
The GOP’s Senators in Washington are inescapably racist. So, unfortunately, are Democrats in San Francisco. For decades, voices from Dave Chappelle to James Baldwin have observed the same dynamic. Were I the only candidate of color to have recently encountered it, I might have thought it my problem.
But coming to recognize the pattern of orchestrated accusation repeatedly targeting leftists of color who run for office in our city—from Julian Davis to Gloria Berry, Eric Curry, and too many others—forced me to finish what we started in seeking to end the Pelosi dynasty.
Exposing the corruption and racism on which Pelosi relied to return to Congress in 2020 is one key to ending her dynasty before she entrenches her daughter in her seat for another generation.
As we work to block that nepotism from ripening into aristocracy, we need your help today to level the playing field.
With the end of the Federal Election Commission’s quarterly reporting period looming later this week, your support for our campaign has never been more crucial.
Thank you for standing with me, and for your solidarity in the face of weaponized racism defending the establishment in Washington!
Shahid
High theater in Washington
This week’s Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson have offered a window into our broken judicial nominations process. I’m no stranger to it, having worked from 2005-2008 for the American Constitution Society for Law & Policy in Washington.
15 years ago, we prepared a pipeline of potential appointees for the next Democratic president. After President Obama took office, it was frustrating to see him nominate only one of them—Goodwin Lui, who went on to serve on the California Supreme Court—before abandoning his nomination when it proved controversial in the Senate.
From that point forward, Obama nominated mostly government prosecutors and corporate lawyers. His administration was careful to diversify their ranks, but they came largely from the same professional backgrounds as the GOP nominees who today dominate the bench.
That pattern is much of why I’m so excited about Judge Jackson’s nomination, and eager to see it confirmed by the Senate.
The most common pathway to the federal bench is serving as a prosecutor. It’s ironic, bizarre—and frankly a constitutional problem, because it subverts the independence of the judiciary. Alexander Hamilton described judicial independence in the Federalist Papers No. 78 as a crux on which liberty rests.
The problem of former prosecutors serving as judges, and subverting judicial independence by sitting in judgment over their former colleagues, is especially acute at the U.S. Supreme Court. That’s why Judge Jackson, if she is confirmed and sworn in as Justice Jackson, could play such a tremendous role.
If confirmed, Judge Jackson would be not only the Supreme Court’s first Black woman, but also its first public defender. Each of those dimensions of her representation—demographic, and professional—render her poised to make a contribution to an institution that frankly needs her voice.
A Justice Jackson would be the Court’s first public defender, the only one on a panel that remains dominated by former Justice Department lawyers. Her addition to the bench would help introduce a crucial—and notably absent—perspective of someone who has battled the leviathan of mass incarceration. There has been no balance on the Court for decades. I wrote about that problem in 2009 in a 4-part series published on Huffington Post.
It’s no surprise to see GOP Senators come out of the woodwork to oppose Judge Jackson’s nomination, even though the depths to which they were willing to sink may have been surprising—even for them!
For instance, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) disingenuously accused Judge Jackson of being soft on people convicted of child pornography. His attacks were so baseless that even conservative National Review columnist Andrew McCarthy was moved to write that Hawley’s “allegation appears meritless to the point of demagoguery.”
We’re glad to see voices from across the political spectrum rallying around Judge Jackson’s nomination. She not only deserves Senate confirmation, but the Court frankly needs her to help address its own crumbling legitimacy.
With your support, I hope to work across the street from Justice Jackson in Washington. Thanks for helping me get there!
Your voice,
Shahid
Forcing change on a system that concedes nothing without a demand
Our latest video explains my theory of change, and history of winning struggles for human rights.
The video’s hosted on several platforms. We encourage you to share all of them!
YouTube
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1) Share this video on whichever platform you use most often!
2) Volunteer
3) Donate
4) Vote for change on June 7!
Defending democracy from disinformation
We originally expected to focus our message today on a long overdue congressional hearing that had been scheduled for tomorrow. It was poised to explore insider trading, and reform proposals to restrict Members of Congress and protect the public from their conflicts of interest.
Unfortunately, committee chair Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) was recently diagnosed with COVID, forcing a delay in the hearing schedule. We wish Rep. Lofgren a speedy and comfortable recovery.
As it happens, we have another hearing on which we’re also focused this week. It remains on track for this Thursday, St. Patrick’s Day, March 17. Rather than a congressional hearing in Washington exploring conflicts of interest among policymakers, this will be a hearing in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California exploring ethical failures by journalists.
RSVP to join us this Thursday via zoom! Our case will be heard by the court shortly after 1:30pm PT.
I’ve spent two years working to hold accountable media sources for publishing election disinformation fabricated to mislead voters. Many falsely think of disinformation as exclusively a right-wing strategy, failing to recognize how voices from the corporate center to the “socialist” Left have actively employed it to promote their careers at the cost of election integrity.
That’s why we took the extraordinary step of filing a federal lawsuit against the San Francisco Chronicle. The publication of racist election disinformation was bad enough.
Suppressing whistleblowers including women of color, hiding key facts from the public, repeating racist accusations even after they have publicly debunked, and then failing entirely to ever correct false stories are all ongoing failures by local reporters with continuing implications for election integrity.
We’re in federal court to expose the real story: the Democratic Party’s use of racism as an election strategy, and the disappointing complicity of the press establishment. They reveal further layers of institutional corruption insulating the individual corruption of a powerful oligarch, and the corporate political party that she leads in Congress.
This Thursday, (on St. Patrick’s Day) we face a critical court hearing before U.S. District Judge Edward Chen that could decide the outcome of our case. The hearing is open to the public via zoom, and will take place sometime shortly after 1:30pm PT.
Thank you for standing with me, press ethics, and the right of the public to expect accurate information from news sources. Democracy relies on ethical journalism, and I’m grateful for your help defending that principle from the failures of weaponized corporate news outlets.
See you Thursday!
Shahid
PS – Feel free to review our papers that the judge will be examining if you’re curious to learn more about our legal position.
PPS – Know any journalists who write about press ethics, election integrity, corruption, disinformation, or racism & white supremacy? We’d like very much to invite them to attend! Please reply to this email to request a media advisory that we would be thrilled for you to share.
Endorsement alert!
It’s always exciting to welcome new allies to our campaign, and I’m especially excited to introduce one of them to you. Our most recent endorsement is from Eric Curry, who—like me—ran to replace Pelosi as San Francisco’s voice in the House.
We’ve collaborated on several projects over the past year, from direct action promoting universal healthcare to joint statements calling out institutional racism. I’m grateful for his recent announcement endorsing our campaign.
Eric Curry is a grassroots activist, direct action organizer, small business owner, and native San Franciscan. As a man of color challenging the city’s power establishment and Democratic Party machine by mobilizing grassroots support, he reminded me a lot of myself. That was true even before we met, and eventually took action alongside each other from the East Bay to the streets outside Nancy Pelosi’s house.
I’m deeply grateful for Eric’s support.
I’m equally outraged to observe the dynamics that drove him from the race. They include some of the same headwinds that emerged to blunt our campaign’s momentum in 2020, after we—with your support—had forced Pelosi to shift on half a dozen policies.
Eric is a mixed-raced gay man who grew up in San Francisco. After announcing his campaign challenging Pelosi, he confronted bias, ad hominem attacks, and the smug self-assurance of “progressive” values from the leaders of some of the very same “grassroots” groups in San Francisco that orchestrated a racist character assassination in 2020 to insulate Pelosi from our challenge.
In a previous era, northern support for civil rights activists in the South proved crucial to expose local corruption. Today, multiple candidates of color in San Francisco have called out a pattern that persists only because the local establishment refuses to acknowledge it.
The latest public revelations about the plot targeting our campaign & San Francisco voters in 2020 include the documentation of payments from a former tech executive (who now leads a public relations firm) to local media outlets. They unethically published his fabrications not only without investigating—but also without disclosing their own conflicts of interest, let alone those of their self-serving sources.
Those revelations came on the heels of whistleblower Gloria Berry's 2021 exposé reaching a wider audience than ever through the SF Gate's long overdue reference to it. More previously unreported facts revealing the corruption and depravity of the Democratic Party’s use of racist character assassination as an election strategy remain forthcoming. They ultimately make the false, politically motivated, racist accusations weaponized to insulate Pelosi pale by comparison.
Eric said to me that he didn’t think he could take it if he was forced to endure what I did in 2020.
Hearing that redoubled my resolve, even as it broke my heart.
I’ve often thought of my persistence—despite the attacks on my name and character—as necessary to defend the integrity of the electoral process. I particularly wonder what lessons other candidates of color are poised to learn from watching my experience at the hands of San Francisco’s white “progressive” establishment.
It was jarring to discover how prescient my concerns were.
Having come to realize the depth of Eric’s commitment to the issues, watching a fellow candidate of color feel driven out of the election by the corruption of local groups felt downright painful—not unlike the trauma from being publicly subjected to their smears in 2020.
People who have suffered in retaliation for standing up for the truth share a common bond. It’s one reason why I have always had such deep respect for whistleblowers, from those who expose federal government corruption like Edward Snowden, to their local counterparts who expose local partisan corruption like Gloria Berry.
It’s another reason why I’m still here: I recognize that fire can help forge stronger steel. Having been battle-tested by everything from enduring false accusation and overcoming the racism embodied by petty partisan climbers, to forcing the corrupt party leadership to sink to such unethical depths to defend itself in the first place, I’m ready to finish the job with your support.
We’re vastly outgunned by the dynastic corporate incumbent and the establishment she represents. That’s why I’m all the more grateful for your help and support—and Eric's—as we continue building momentum to confront and overcome them.
Thanks for standing with us!
Your voice,
Shahid
P.S. — Want to learn more about our work holding the press accountable for abandoning ethics, accuracy, and democratic accountability? Mark your calendar and join us for a crucial court hearing via zoom on St. Patrick's Day, Thursday March 17!
A story suppressed for years
Two years ago, I became the only Democrat to have ever faced Nancy Pelosi in a general election.
After we won the primary, and forced half a dozen policy concessions that ultimately passed the House of Representatives over Pelosi’s initial objections, the San Francisco Chronicle published a front page story, with a headline above the fold: “Pelosi Ignoring Calls for a Debate.”
The next week, I was falsely accused of sexual misconduct by a network of former staffers who we had replaced on our team, working with an accuser in Washington with a long history of targeting anti-war politicians and activists with fabricated accusations of harassment and assault.
I believed then, as I am reminded today, that the truth shall set us free.
This weekend, the Marina Times published an exposé revealing the conflicts of interest among the sources on whom the writers who smeared me relied, as well as conflicts of interest among some of those writers, themselves.
Investigative journalist Susan Dyer Reynolds has a long history of exposing corruption in San Francisco, from previous smear campaigns targeting other candidates of color like Julian Davis, to the corruption scandal engulfing our city’s Public Utilities Commission. As I explained to her, “The only thing more alarming to me than being the target of racist accusations was watching the fragility of ‘progressives’ and ‘socialists’ in San Francisco lead them to double down and shoot the messenger even after the lies were exposed.”
Fearing overdue accountability for their self-serving lies, some of the voices who orchestrated the disinformation to insulate Pelosi in 2020 have suggested that the Marina Times is biased, conveniently overlooking the 2021 exposé published by whistleblower Gloria Berry in the SF Bayview, a national Black newspaper based here in SF.
In a one-party city, it’s not surprising that the entire press establishment would ignore a story about the corruption of the dominant party, its use of racism & Islamophobia as an election strategy, and the vindication of the only challenger to ever pose a threat to the dynastic oligarch who continues to occupy the seat.
For two newspapers with essentially diametrically opposed editorial perspectives to corroborate the same story reveals the depth of the corruption infecting the rest of the local press.
That's part of why we're dragging the San Francisco Chronicle into federal court to defend election integrity from corporate publications that abandon journalism in favor of character assassination. Lawsuits, however, require resources that Pelosi has in much greater abundance than I do.
Given the headwinds we have faced and overcome, I feel overwhelming gratitude to the thousands of supporters who are fueling our campaign today.
We could not have gotten this far without you!
Many thanks for standing with me—and with the future, against the continuing corruption of the past!
Shahid
PS — Want to do more to help defend election integrity from disinformation? Check out our grassroots media activism toolkit, and reply if you'd like to join a volunteer team coordinating outreach to journalists, editors, and podcasters.
PPS — Want to learn more about our lawsuit agains the Chronicle? Read our complaint, and if you're available on March 17, join us via zoom for a crucial court hearing.
Before the Pentagon drags us into yet another war….
Today’s invasion of Ukraine by Russia has sparked alarm around the world. Anytime civilians are forced to endure violence, outrage and concern are thoroughly appropriate.
While many voices have shared concern for human rights and democracy, however, we are compelled to observe that the U.S. has no credible claim to have stood for either of those values over the past half century.
In times like these, it’s important to remember the past before repeating its path.
Many foolishly clamor for U.S. military intervention, but we remember the recent history in both Ukraine, as well as the United States.
Thinking that the Russian invasion of Ukraine justifies a military response erases the history of the region. In 2014, the U.S. supported a right-wing coup in Ukraine that created the conditions for the current conflict. It did not start this week, nor do countries that have long instigated international conflicts (like the United States) have any legitimate claim to later stand for peace.
The continuing history of U.S. military industrial corruption is also crucial to consider. The United States is the only country to ever deploy weapons of mass destruction against civilian populations. We’re the only country that embraces extended solitary confinement (recognized across the world as a human rights violation) in our domestic prison system, which imprisons more people than any other country in the world—by far.
We’ve intervened in dozens of countries over the past three generations, set up military bases around the world, “tortured some folks” with impunity, assassinated journalists before outrageously prosecuting the publisher who revealed those war crimes, continue to illegally detain thousands of migrants at our nation’s militarized borders, and created a global mass surveillance network.
Each of those examples enjoyed widespread bipartisan support.
For better or worse, Washington can’t credibly claim to support human rights, leaving NATO with no legitimacy to intervene in Eastern Europe, or frankly anywhere else.
As I explained recently in SF Gate, political considerations are generally unimportant to me. I didn’t help establish LGBTQ marriage equality and impose the first restrictions on the domestic surveillance state by following the crowd.
Doing the right thing often requires standing up against an uninformed consensus. I’ve done that before, and I’m happy to do it again.
Before our country gets dragged into yet another war—this time, with a nuclear armed adversary—we implore everyone to take a breath.
Policymakers need to emphasize diplomacy, and restraints on executive power to prevent potential escalation.
Journalists need to emphasize accountability, for acts including the 2014 coup that prompted the current conflict.
Finally, voters need to remember which candidates chose to prioritize military industrial corruption over the still unmet social needs confronting communities across our country. Ultimately, that's the surest way for Americans to prevent conflicts in the future.
We’re grateful that Washington’s response has remained limited to sanctions up until this point, especially given the continuing risks of military escalation. Sanctions, however, unfortunately impact civilian populations more than governments or military capacity, so they don’t really offer a meaningful solution.
Nor does the route of sanctioning Russian oligarchs—for a particularly disturbing reason: their American counterparts who dominate Congress blocked money laundering laws from reaching the hedge funds and private equity instruments preferred by oligarchs around the world as money laundering vehicles.
If you’re as disturbed by human rights abuses as I am, it’s understandable that you’d want to do something in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
One reason so many of us took action against CIA torture and recurring wars-for-profit was so that our country might retain some shred of international legitimacy to challenge abuses of human rights by other countries.
But Washington failed that invitation, reducing itself to casting stones from a glass house.
Before anyone pretends that the Russian invasion of Ukraine lacks any parallel precedent in U.S. history, we’d invite them to recall the staggering loss of life—and cultures—imposed through the ultimately imperial westward expansion under figures including Andrew Jackson, or the human rights violations that continue en masse at our nation’s borders today.
Moments when we feel compelled to action are especially important moments to think about consequences. We remember what happened when war drums beat before, which is why I’m categorically skeptical of any claims that support the interests of the U.S. military industrial establishment.
Human rights and democracy are the values that most concern me. But while I’m concerned about how they’re being violated in Ukraine, I’m frankly more concerned with how they’ve been—and continue—getting violated in Washington.
Thanks for thinking independently!
Shahid