I met Shahid Buttar after an EFF event. He was an impressive speaker, and I was pretty quickly taken with his mission and wanted to figure out how Coursicle could help. As it turned out, he's most likely a pretty big fraud. The sexual harrasment stuff is one thing, but what really did him in for me was that he was paying himself $100,000/year while working on his campaign while many of the people on his campaign working incredibly hard were working for free. I frankly found it unjustifiable; if he actually had practiced what he preached, he would have made things work on as low of a salary as possible. Oh, also, he was apparently very rude to his employees and yelled at them. That's not cool.
read morehttps://player.fm/series/the-jimmy-dore-show/endless-war-defeating-pelosi?t=1755 https://shahidforchange.us/issues/ Shahid Buttar, the candidate running against Nancy Pelosi in my district of San Francisco. I first met Shahid by happenstance on a bus after an EFF event (the only non-profit dedicated to protecting user privacy against large tech companies like Facebook and Google). We talked about his work on user privacy and what we’re doing at Coursicle to minimize the collection of information on users (https://www.coursicle.com/blog/loginless-a-new-standard-for-user-identification.php). He is a brilliant, very caring man who was kind enough to invite me to the EFF offices afterward. A couple fast facts: he was a very early advocate for marriage equality for same-sex couples (he represented the first marriage equality case in the state of NY). He cares deeply about privacy, the right to encryption, and putting an end to mass warrantless surveillance: he confronted the director of the NSA when he lied to congress saying: "What do you have to say to communities of color who are so hyper policed that we’re subjected to extrajudicial assassination for selling loose cigarettes [referencing the death of Eric Garner by police; 'I can’t breathe'] when you can get away with perjury before the Senate?" He believes measures need to be taken to reduce homelessness in SF. He wants everyone to have healthcare, including the homeless, and assist them with housing by funding the HUD (housing and urban development), since its funding has fallen nearly 80% since the late 70's. 2/3rds of homeless in SF have a disabling medical condition. Medicare for all will allow them to get the care they need. Shahid was 1000 votes away 2 years ago from a runoff with Pelosi. https://berniesanders.com/issues/housing-all/