Shahid Buttar

I joined Abby Martin on "Breaking the Set" tonight to talk about how the NYPD slowdown reveals an opportunity for cities to save costs by shrink unnecessarily large police departments, and why police body cameras won't help solve the police violence & accountability crisis, and could instead make mass incarceration even worse. 

My latest writing, Police Violence? Body Cams Are No Solution, appeared on Truthout today. It presents my concerns with proposals for police body cameras, explaining how they could ultimately become a vehicle to extend mass surveillance and entrench mass incarceration without advancing either accountability or even transparency.

As I explain in the article:

Nearly 20 music producers from around the world remixed NSA vs USA, rendering it in versions ranging from hip-hop and house to trap and techno. Stream each of these remixes from Soundcloud, and stay tuned for a free downloadable single.

Over the past week, I've had a series of chances to criticize CIA torture and promote executive accountability for human rights abuses. Most exciting to me has been connecting them across contexts to show how police murder in low-income communities finds a parallel in torture by intelligence agencies -- both of which reflect formal legal impunity for grave human rights violations committed by public officials, and at least tacitly faciliated by elected leaders. My second interview below also offered a chance to call for Dick Cheney's long overdue prosecution and prison sentence.

This Thanksgiving, I had a chance to return home and visit my sister's family and my parents in St. Louis. They live in the same county (though not the same town) where I grew up, roughly a 20 minute drive from Ferguson. The two suburbs are part of the same county but seem like different countries altogether.

While in St. Louis, I had a chance to join in several actions organized by local activists. The night I arrived, I joined a march in the Grove, followed two days later by a die-in that shut down the St. Louis Galleria (where I used to watch movies with my high school buddies) on Black Friday, when the movement claimed credit for shrinking holiday retail sales by 11%. 

I wrote a letter to Congress exhorting it to enact transformative reforms to stop the NSA dragnet, and recruited nearly 50 organizations from across the political spectrum and every corner of the country to sign it. The Hill quoted it at some length, while noting the remarkable breadth among the signing organizations, before the Washington Post also quoted it at length in the context of criticism to which I responded publicly.

While far more verbose than a Twitter post, the letter more or less captures the sentiment we articulated earlier this year at a light brigade action outside the White House.

Do you dig your rights as much as you like electronic dance music? The indie producers of "NSA vs USA" invite producers to submit remixes for a contest including 4 cash prizes (of $300 for the winner, $100 for the runner up, and two $50 prizes), as well as inclusion on a free digital single, and opportunities for radio play.