Shahid Buttar

Last August, as the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban took power, Washington seized $7 billion in assets from Afghanistan's central bank. The resulting saga reveals military industrial corruption that demands accountability.

Can you stand with us to challenge corruption, stop wars for profit, and protect human rights in countries targeted by the Pentagon and CIA?

After a mounting outcry, the Biden administration last week agreed to release half of the funds. Yet the administration continues to drag its feet, pointing the finger at domestic courts resolving claims by the families of 9/11 victims.

At no point in this saga have Washington’s actions been defensible. From the fraud pervading 20 years of war waged on Afghanistan, to the decision to seize its assets in the first place, U.S. foreign policy has reflected a continuing bipartisan commitment to neocolonial resource extraction and impunity for human rights violations.

Even the recent decision to subject Afghanistan’s funds to domestic court proceedings reeks of corruption. No Afghans were involved in the 9/11 attacks, which were perpetrated by Saudi hijackers. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, remains the beneficiary of U.S. weapon sales enabling an ongoing genocide in Yemen.

The hypocrisy is even worse than that. Biden not only seized Afghanistan’s central reserves, but also imposed crippling sanctions targeting not the government, but the civilian population. As a result, the New York Times estimated that “22.8 million people—more than half the country’s population—are expected to face potentially life-threatening food insecurity this winter.”

Even worse, the administration officials who engineered these disturbing policies include at least one lawyer poised to reap a personal financial windfall by representing the 9/11 families seeking Afghanistan’s funds in federal court. The dimensions of corruption in Washington compound each other, constructing a whole worse than the sum of its parts.

Are you willing to defend human rights from Washington? As a candidate who emerged from the direct action movement challenging Bush’s wars, I’m running for Congress in 2022 to expose the fraud pervading U.S. foreign policy, and educate Americans about a history that too few ever learn.

Many Americans ignore foreign policy, focusing instead on domestic social needs that impact our communities here at home. A recent survey by journalist Henry Norr documented that pattern even among candidates for Congress, while specifically citing our campaign among the exceptions to that disappointing rule. As an immigrant, I find political myopia more than merely disturbing.

It may seem reasonable for voters to be most concerned about the issues that directly impact them and their families, but that focus obscures a perverse irony. Only U.S. voters have any influence at all over the military industrial complex that subjects civilian populations around the world to occupation, random acts of arbitrary lethal violence, and the corporate resource extraction that has tragically accelerated global climate chaos.

Our race to end the Pelosi dynasty is motivated by more than politics, including a commitment to human rights, democracy, and accountability. Each of those principles are routinely violated with bipartisan support, which is why we so desperately need civilian oversight of the Pentagon, Washington & Wall Street's extended military industrial complex, and the pattern of war, resource extraction, and climate chaos that they together enable.

Can you join us to end the 34-year career of an oligarch complicit in ongoing colonialism?

For 20 years, I’ve taken direct action to challenge Bush’s fraudulent wars. For that entire time, Americans who pay attention have been outraged by Nancy Pelosi choosing to fund them.

While grateful that Biden formally ended the last of them, we're disturbed by the seizure of Afghanistan‘s central reserves. It represents not only a continuation of Bush-era colonialism, but also profound cowardice and corruption. It’s also ironic: the funds had been held in the United States in order to keep them secure, yet it was the United States that ultimately stole them.

Washington knows no shame, or limit to the extent of its public hypocrisy.

That hypocrisy, however, relies on the political deference of Congress, which has routinely rubberstamped every proposed military spending increase of the past generation, while failing to hold accountable agencies from NSA to CIA that continue to undermine the rights of foreigners and Americans alike.

I frequently call out corruption, which emerges in many forms. Its most direct reflection is congressional insider trading, but a foreign policy establishment that wages fraudulent wars, and then steals from governments in crisis while their citizens starve, is no less corrupt. Its abuses abroad are simply less visible, since the impacts of our actions are felt halfway across the globe.

Can you make a campaign contribution today to send to Congress a voice from the peace movement poised to help stop the next war before it starts?

Our campaign is running up the steepest hill in politics because solidarity—either with the future or with other countries—demands it. We’re grateful for the solidarity that you & our thousands of other supporters have shown with us!

Your voice,
Shahid

My proudest moments as a candidate for public office have been when strangers approach me in public to thank me for having taught them something about policy, law, history, or movement building. It happened in the grocery store just the other day!

I’m more than happy to share analysis through every channel available, from social media to the streets. Opportunities to inform voters through mass media have also helped carry my voice far beyond our campaign’s reach.

Can you join us today to help me reach—and teach—more voters?

Last Wednesday, I joined a livestream with Punch Up Pod, hosted by Leila Charles Leigh and Pat the Berner. Our discussion addressed included my explanation of how the dynamics driven by congressional insider trading essentially amount to “capitalism eating democracy.”

My interview with Farron Cousins from Ring of Fire posted last Friday dug further into the controversy surrounding insider trading by members of Congress, and the many ways in which it insulates corporate power in Washington. We discussed how, “When we talk about congressional insider trading, we’re talking about the corruption of two different things at once: both the marketplace, and Congress.”

Are you able to you join us today to help us reach more news outlets and inform their audiences about the policy issues that traditional news sources often fail to cover?

Just yesterday, Business Insider quoted me in a story exploring insider trading by Members of Congress:

In Pelosi's own California congressional district, Democratic socialist Shahid Buttar is hammering the House speaker on her stock ban reluctance as part of his...attempt to upend her in the 2022 midterms.

Democratic leaders' resistance to a congressional stock trade ban, Buttar told Insider, reveals their willingness to "prioritize capitalism over democracy.

"That preference, and Pelosi's history of putting her stock portfolio before the public interest, violate the oath of office and demand accountability," he said.

Ultimately, the corruption that we’re concerned about infects every conceivable area of federal policy.

For instance, when corporate policymakers divide their loyalties between the public and their private portfolios, the resulting conflict of interest constrains them from even considering ideas like nationalizing the fossil fuel sector. That’s all the more reason we need to end corporate corruption and recover popular control over our federal policymaking apparatus.

By working to end the Pelosi dynasty and support a long overdue ban on congressional insider trading, we’re working to help in more ways than one.

Will you join us today to spread our message further, extend our reach, and strengthen our demand for accountability?

Thanks for standing with us! Your help makes a crucial difference.

Shahid

Democrats in Washington work hard every day on behalf of their corporate donors to evade public scrutiny and pull proverbial wool over the eyes of the public. While that pattern continues, we’re excited to share a case study of how anyone can make a difference and help force accountability.

Can you join us today to help hold Pelosi accountable in more settings?

This week, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) endorsed the leading corporate Democrat in the House, Nancy Pelosi. The Union did so without any debate, a public vote, or any chance for its members to inform a decision driven by union leaders ultimately deferring to corporate influence.

It’s frankly foolish for SEIU to endorse Pelosi, for any number of reasons that a long overdue debate would make clear: SEIU members are among the most meagerly compensated members of any major union, and Pelosi is a mega-millionaire policymaker with a continuing history of insider trading, denying support to working families, and engineering tax breaks for the wealthy.

That’s why I was so grateful to be invited by rank & file union members who support our campaign to the virtual meeting announcing the union’s endorsement. It offered an important chance to inform members about the facts that apparently neither the party, nor union leaders, want them to hear.

Can you help expand our capacity to leverage more creative opportunities to reach voters?

While the format of the event did not permit me to speak, we posted an analysis in the zoom chat that members never got to hear. The union leadership disabled the chat in response.

Here’s what I posted before Pelosi’s enablers cut me off:

“Pelosi has been working for decades to put Wall Street before working families. Her positions on healthcare, rent & mortgage relief, and congressional insider trading all prove the point.

She has never debated an opponent in 34 years. How many of you get to go so long without ever sitting for a job evaluation?

SEIU members deserve a chance to hear the alternatives before them, including a voice more committed to Green jobs, as well as human rights to basic human needs including healthcare, housing, and food.

Don't let the House continue to put the military industrial complex before our communities. You deserve better.

Demand it.”

The looks on their faces were priceless. But they’re no substitute for a debate.

Do you want to see the debate on the issues that San Francisco has been waiting for since 1987? Your donation—and introductions—can go a long way.

Why are corporate Democrats—and their enablers in labor unions that should be dedicated to their members’ interests—so afraid of debate?

Had SEIU invited me to debate Pelosi, I would have emphasized a particular point of special interest to labor: that she & the Democratic establishment opposed the Protecting Right to Organize Act until spring 2020, when mounting support for our campaign forced her to abandon her previous opposition. I’m grateful that she caved, and hope that labor might recognize the distinction between solidarity and opportunism.

Many SEIU rank & file members have publicly shared their frustration with their union leadership denying them democracy. What other organizations have you seen defer to the Democratic Party machine in which that pattern of deference can be contested?

We’re eager to address any forums to help expose the corruption of the bipartisan corporate establishment. Please don’t every hesitate to reply with your suggestions!

Thanks for being part of the solution, and for helping us hold Washington accountable!

Shahid

Every year, our nation poetically recalls Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But most who remember Dr. King water down his legacy as a socialist critic of military industrial corruption. Liberals tend to recall his inspiring odes to color blindness, while conveniently overlooking his broader vision.

Can you support our efforts today to pursue the radical vision of MLK and others before him who dreamed not of a color blind neoliberal fantasy, but rather of a world actually free of economic, racial, and political injustice?  

First, Dr. King issued blistering critiques of how racism, militarism, and capitalism intersect, as well as the complicity of “the white moderate” who settles for order at the cost of justice. While the civil rights movement that he helped lead is celebrated today for its victories, it was ultimately denied its most transformative goals.

Second, his experience at the hands of government intelligence agencies revealed a layer of corruption enabled by the intersecting evils that he observed. For years, the FBI monitored him, and actively worked to neutralize his voice by (among other things) blackmailing him and encouraging him to commit suicide.

Finally, King effectively forecast the climate crisis that emerged decades after his assassination. Today, humanity confronts an advancing global catastrophe that we could have averted had Washington heeded his voice instead of vilifying him.

As our nation continues to stumble into moral and policy pitfalls that he identified over half a century ago, the real legacy of Dr. King’s work grows only more relevant with every passing day.

Can you support our campaign today to breathe new life into that legacy, and continue the struggle for human rights that MLK and others began?  

Most Americans today remember the civil rights movement as a story of triumph. In this age of racial reckoning, we should remember, however, that the most pressing demands of civil rights organizations in the 1960s—like the right to be able to buy a hamburger, or to be free from foreign wars for conquest and corporate plunder—were rejected in favor of voting rights and anti-discrimination principles.

Not only were the movement’s greatest aspirations frustrated, but even the important concessions extracted from the establishment have withered in the years since then. The Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in its 2013 Shelby County decision, setting the stage for today’s attacks on democracy unfolding in state legislatures across the country.

While the civil rights movement was righteous, and appealed to the best parts of our nation’s conscience, it fell on the shoals of the continuing racism that many liberals have come to recognize only recently.

Remember MLK not as a triumphant victor over injustice, but rather as a tragic victim of it whose work remains unfinished today.

Can you join us today to continue pressing to enshrine in policy the crucial human rights that MLK was killed for pursuing?

King’s experience also illuminates another dimension of white supremacy beyond racism: its aspect of preserving existing power.

Most Americans today think of Dr. King as a national hero. In his own time, however, he endured vicious attacks from our government before he was taken from us. The FBI actively spied on him. Paid government agents encouraged him to commit suicide. He faced critics from across the political spectrum who had been driven to hate him by propaganda.

On the one hand, while King’s experience at the hands of the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Programs (COINTELPRO) were secret at the time, they were eventually revealed by the Church and Pike committee investigations that birthed today’s Senate and House Intelligence committees.

And the discovery of those programs and their voluminous abuses helped prompt legal restrictions. Congress passed statutes including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), while the executive branch also issued guidance, like the Attorney General’s Guidelines put in place to avert the imposition of a statutory charter to constrain the Bureau.

On the other hand, the various legal restrictions imposed on the agencies during the Watergate era have all been watered down to once again enable similar domestic surveillance abuses. FISA was gutted in 2009 with the support of then Senator Barack Obama, while the Attorney General’s Guidelines have been diluted on at least half a dozen occasions since they were imposed in 1979.

Our government's attacks on dissent by figures including MLK inspired my work over the past two decades to address the assault on our democracy from the FBI to local police departments. No candidate for public office in the country has done more to challenge secret government surveillance over the past twenty years.

Do you want a voice in Congress who has enabled executive branch abuses for decades, or instead one who has fought for decades to expose and end them?

Beyond demonstrating the effectiveness of government marginalizing dissent, and the continuing frustrations of a movement whose aims have yet to be secured in policy, King also named the precursors to the climate crisis. It has grown to the point of global catastrophe precisely because, under the leadership of both corporate political parties, Washington chose to follow the money, ignoring his warnings.

Today, we all the pay the price. It will weigh even more heavily on the future.

In King’s era, scientists had already come to recognize the greenhouse effect. Fossil fuel companies would soon start working to suppress public awareness of its profound implications. Public concern about the climate crisis would take another generation, but even in his own time, King named its components—consumerism, racism, and militarism—as “intersecting evils.”

Millennials and Zoomers concerned about the climate crisis are right to bemoan the failures that preceded them. The world they inherit has been effectively poisoned, from the oceans to the atmosphere. Meanwhile, the slavish dedication to capital that continues to drive federal policy ensures that the plunder, for now, will only continue.

But those failures are not those of older generations. Indeed, they’re failures of not any generation, but rather a set of effectively permanent corporate institutions that outlive and co-opt them all. Dr. King championed the very same interests of today’s intersectional climate activists over 60 years ago.

History has proven King’s prescience. It grows only more profound by the day.

Do you want to be represented in Washington by a voice who is not only aware of this history, but has also worked for decades to challenge the intersecting evils named by MLK?

It’s long past time for Washington, and Americans, to finally heed the lessons that Dr. King tried to teach—as well as those we could learn from the establishment’s vicious response to him in his own era, and its continuing attempts to water down and neutralize his legacy today.

May the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. be a blessing to all of us.

Yours,

Shahid

One reason I’m so grateful for our thousands of supporters is the litany of headwinds that we continue to confront. A story published by the San Francisco Examiner offers the latest example of one of them.

Can you stand with us to help level the playing field?

Some of the obstacles we work to overcome are predictable, like the 15:1 fundraising deficit against Pelosi that we faced even after raising $1.6 million in 2020.

Some are at least generalizable among candidates to entrenched incumbents, like the global pandemic that has forced profound changes in campaign tactics over the past two years.

Others among our challenges, however, appear unique to our race. Personally, I see them as reflections of how crucial our campaign is, and how much damage we have already done to the bipartisan consensus underlying corporate rule in Washington.

Can you join us again today to help fight the corporate establishment, and overcome the biased journalism that continues to prop up oligarchs and their dynasties despite their repeated and continuing failures?

The latest example of biased journalism about our race is a story in the San Francisco Examiner exploring the hypothetical possibility that Nancy Pelosi might retire.

First, the story’s premise indulges a fantasy that we all might share, despite the incumbent’s repeated and continuing statements rejecting any suggestion that she retire.

Continuing the theme of indulging conjecture over the facts, the story also focuses entirely on hypothetical candidates who aren’t even running for the seat, while ignoring the one who is not only running, but just won the 2020 primary and then 81,000 votes in November.

It’s almost as if journalists allow DNC operatives to write their stories for them.

Can you support our efforts to ensure a public debate? San Francisco hasn’t had one in 34 years. Forcing a debate is not only a goal of our campaign, but also a crucial step for democracy to enjoy any legitimacy.

Beyond suppressing public visibility of challengers to corporate incumbents, the willingness of journalists to overlook conflicts of interest among establishment politicians and their patronage networks is an even worse example of biased journalism.

For instance, the DCCC blacklist in 2020 incentivized sabotage by former campaign workers, who in several races across the country were co-opted by the establishment to undermine campaigns that they had once worked for.

The most profound example of biased journalism, however, is the press covering Pelosi stenographically, without noting whenever quoting her that she has ducked debates for 34 years.

The press plays a constitutional role: to inform the public. Covering career politicians—or those who represent intergenerational dynasties—without observing their machinations to evade public scrutiny is a failure of not only independence, but ultimately, ethics.

This deference to establishment power threatens the very purpose of journalism: informing the public to enable meaningful democracy.

We know that we confront the most tilted field in U.S. politics, because the incumbent we challenge is the most powerful in the country. While it may be disappointing to observe how the cards are arrayed against us, the bias we have faced among institutions—from ActBlue to Wikipedia, and from the SF Examiner to the Intercept—only strengthens my resolve to secure the transparency and accountability on which democracy and human rights depend.

Thanks for choosing to stand with me! As an immigrant facing a powerful oligarch to defend values that you & I share, I need your help and can’t do it without you.

Happy MLK weekend,

Shahid

PS – You’ll hear from me again this weekend about the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday, and some of the many ways in which Dr. King’s legacy has been watered down and co-opted by the establishment. For now, take a few minutes to read (or, if you prefer, listen to) his iconic Letter from Birmingham Jail. It remains eerily relevant to U.S. politics despite being nearly 60 years old. I’ll explain my analysis of its significance in a few days.

Today, Senators Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) reiterated their continuing opposition to changes in Senate rules, including filibuster reform. Given the razor-thin Democratic majority in the Senate, their position more or less dooms the Biden administration’s plans with respect to a wide range of issues.

It also threatens principles at the core of our democracy, including voting rights, as well as majority rule in the Senate.

Some of us have shared concerns about voting rights long before America came to recognize the current crisis. Would you rather send to Washington figures who challenged these crises, instead of career politicians who were instead complicit in them?

In 2017, I wrote an article for Truthout titled “Elusive Victories: Voting Rights, Desegregation and the Erosion of Civil Rights.” In it, I explained how policy victories that many have taken for granted had largely eroded under our feet:

The Voting Rights Act (VRA) eventually grew widely supported across the political spectrum. Under the Bush administration, in 2006, when the Senate was controlled by Republicans whose party opposed voting rights in other forums, the chamber passed a bill to reauthorize the VRA’s provisions by a unanimous vote.

At the time, Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin) said, “The Voting Rights Act is vital to America’s commitment to never again permit racial prejudices in the electoral process.” Then House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) described the VRA as “an effective tool in protecting a right that is fundamental to our democracy.”

15 years ago, House Republicans were more willing to commit to voting rights than Democratic Senators are today.

Seven years later, in 2013, the Supreme Court struck down one of the VRA’s most critical provisions as unconstitutional in Shelby County v. Holder….

Predictably, over a dozen states assaulted voting rights in the wake of the Shelby decision. Although courts in several jurisdictions did intervene before the 2016 election, those new rules suppressing voters could alone account for the result of the 2016 presidential race. It was the first in 40 years conducted without the VRA’s full protections.

But even before the Shelby case, voting rights had been largely eviscerated, reduced to a shadow of the civil rights movement’s goal of securing rights to fair and equal representation. The right to merely cast a ballot in no way correlates to fair representation, which the Supreme Court has affirmatively rejected as a component of voting rights….

Narratives describing the historic victories for voting rights obscure the ultimate reality. What few gains the civil rights movement did secure, unfortunately, on the most part did not survive.

I’m running for Congress not only to remove an oligarch from the House, but also to continue the struggle for civil rights in a previous era that—while righteous—was ultimately denied its most visionary demands. Can you help me reach a position in which I can directly craft federal policy on behalf of our shared principles?

We know that Sinema & Manchin are playing the same roles played at other points by figures including Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and the parade of corporate Democrats who surround them.

Democrats in Washington play a shell game to protect Wall Street from We the People of the United States.

Today, it’s Manchin & Sinema.

But capital has many allies throughout the Democratic Party, including the millionaires who lead it.

Can you join us today to help us hold that leadership accountable? As an immigrant confronting a dynastic oligarch, I can’t do it without your help.

We recognize how deeply corrupted the political process has become. It’s exactly why I’m running for public office, and why I think that my voice—and the movement we are building together—can help make a difference with your support.

Shahid