Meet the LA Progressive Who Could Oust an Entrenched Corporate-backed Incumbent
Photo by Steven Chun
We spoke with Shervin Aazami, candidate for US Congress in CA-30, the western San Fernando Valley and the eastern Simi Hills of California’s LA and Ventura counties. Shervin is a progressive with a background in public health who previously worked with the National Indian Health Board, an organization that advocates for Native American tribes in Washington DC and helped initiate legislation that provided crucial relief to tribes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, Aazami draws on his experience as an immigrant, activist, and lifelong resident of the San Fernando Valley, to explain the necessity of major structural reforms like single payer healthcare, a Green New Deal, and cancellation of student debt.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
RIFT Magazine: Tell me a bit about your background and what led you to run for congress.
Shervin Aazami: My name is Shervin Aazami. I’m a public health activist, I’m a community organizer, I’m an immigrant, and I’m running for US Congress in my hometown in the west San Fernando Valley, California’s 30th district, in 2022. I’m the son of two Iranian asylum seekers, who fled religious persecution in Iran during the time of the 1979 revolution, just about 25 years after our government here in the United States deposed the only democratically elected leader in Iranian history. So, our family is here and I’m alive because of political decisions.
I was born in Italy, and then my parents immigrated here to the United States, to the Valley, when I was an infant. I grew up in Canoga Park, Chatsworth, and then when I was in high school my parents moved to West Hills. My mom worked in retail at Macy’s for most of my youth, while my dad went back to school to become a primary care physician, and that left me being raised by my grandparents.
What I always say is; I learned the power of responsibility from my mother, and the power of service from my father. Being the son of a primary care physician, always growing up in that healthcare environment, I started fighting for social justice through the lens of public health. I’ve always been a big-picture thinker, and focused on what the systems are that we have in place that engender population health at the local level, and how do we create built environments where people have their basic needs met. From food security, to health care coverage, to living wages to clean air and water, and how all these things collectively impact our health in our communities.
And so I started off after graduating from high school, I went to Santa Monica College and then transferred to UCLA. I worked on the health impacts of toxic urban runoff on low income communities of color. I continued working down the public health road. I did HIV prevention, harm reduction work with our unhoused neighbors, with sex workers, doing syringe exchange. I ended up moving over to Washington DC, and getting more involved with public health policy.
I ended up working for the National Indian Health Board, as their Legislative Director. NIHB is the only national indigenous healthcare nonprofit fighting to make sure the Federal Government honors its treaty obligations to native people.
I ended up working for the National Indian Health Board, as their Legislative Director. NIHB is the only national indigenous healthcare nonprofit fighting to make sure the Federal Government honors its treaty obligations to native people. And I was doing that work during the height of COVID-19 on Capitol Hill. You may have heard, Native people were disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, and through our advocacy we were able to get over $10 billion in direct funding to tribal governments to respond to the crisis — the first time in US history that during a pandemic Congress provided direct aid. Even during H1N1 under Obama and the Spanish Flu pandemic a century before that, our government provided tribes body bags, as opposed to vaccines or testing kits or resources. And one of the bills I’m most proud of getting across the finish line is a bill that cancelled copays and deductibles for Native American veterans, getting us one step closer to the passage of something like single payer.
Throughout all this work, I thought about our community, and the issues that the San Fernando Valley faces. We are ground zero for our housing and homelessness crisis. We are ground zero for our healthcare crisis. Over a third of our state’s 3.4 million uninsured live in Los Angeles. We are ground zero for our climate crisis. The largest natural gas blowout in US history happened in our district in 2015. 109,000 metric tons, polluting neighborhoods for miles, leading to all kinds of health conditions, from nosebleeds to vomiting, things that impacted my friends, my family, our community members. We’re also the location of the largest nuclear meltdown in US history, that happened back in 1959. Over a period of 20 years over 30,000 rocket tests were done at this site, and all that radioactive waste was dumped into the surrounding soil and groundwater, polluting LA’s water for years and years and years. And neither site has been shut down.
Brad Sherman [has] been our congressman for over 24 years, and he’s financed by the very corporations and lobbyists that are polluting our earth, that are working for and propping up our military industrial complex and creating our housing crisis.
With all these issues, looking at the representative we currently have, Brad Sherman, he’s been our congressman for over 24 years, and he’s financed by the very corporations and lobbyists that are polluting our earth, that are working for and propping up our military industrial complex and creating our housing crisis. He’s financed by private equity, by weapons manufacturers, by credit card companies, commercial banks. He hasn’t championed a single progressive bill in his 24 years, despite representing a district that’s D+18 [where Democrats won by 18 points] and that Bernie won during the presidential primary. There’s really no political downside for him to be the bold advocate on structural reforms that we need him to be, and really step up and fight for our communities. But he’s never been that guy. And when I tried to work with him, when I was an advocate on Capitol Hill, trying to appeal to him as a constituent who grew up in his district, I got the most perfunctory response imaginable. He simply is not there to fight for his community, and I believe we deserve a true advocate. For too long we haven’t had someone fighting to uplift and empower working people, people all across our district, to dismantle white supremacy and end corporate welfare, and that’s what our campaign’s all about.
RIFT: I want to dive a little bit more into your thoughts on the incumbent there. I talk to a lot of candidates like yourself, and often it is a definite uphill battle. You’re talking about the way that Brad Sherman is funded, I remember in 2020 I talked to CJ Berina, who ran in this district —
SA: Yeah! Yeah, I know CJ well.
RIFT: I spoke to him over email while working on a different piece, and he brought up the same thing you’re talking about; Brad Sherman being funded by defense contractors…I think Boeing was one of them.
SA: Yup. Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman.
RIFT: So you have an incumbent who has all this money coming towards him, and I imagine running a grassroots, progressive campaign is a definite challenge, and you have to rely on making an impression on the community. So how do you do that? How do you distinguish yourself from Brad Sherman and say ‘I’m a different type of candidate’, even ‘I’m a different type of Democrat than you’re used to here.’ How do you do that?
SA: Yeah, that’s a fantastic question. I think it starts with focusing on the policies, the community’s voices, the community’s priorities in our platform. I fully believe in the power of co-governance, and believe that is going to be the most effective way to basically dismantle that revolving door between corporations and politicians.
If COVID-19 — a pandemic that left millions of Americans without their employee-sponsored health coverage — if that’s not our clarion call for single-payer Medicare For All, what is?
And so our campaign proudly accepts zero corporate pac money. I’ve taken a number of pledges, including the No Fossil Fuel Money pledge, the No Cop Money pledge, the Patients over Profits pledge, the pledge to divest from the US war machine, and the Sunrise pledge to invest in climate justice and union-backed living-wage jobs. And these pledges are not just promises, they are commitments recognizing that we need transformative, structural reforms to our policies. We’re at this precipice in our country, where we can’t stand for more incremental changes and band-aids on bullet wounds and just tinkering around the edges. Too many people are hurting. If COVID-19 — a pandemic that left millions of Americans without their employee-sponsored health coverage — if that’s not our clarion call for single payer Medicare for all, what is?
And on something like climate justice, I mean everything we’re fighting for now, from housing and homelessness to healthcare coverage to education to immigration reform, all these things will become exponentially worse in a condition where we have catastrophic climate change. So we have to fight this issue head-on, and invest in all of the resources and workforce and funding we need, to ensure climate resiliency, mitigation and adaptation.
That’s really the main difference between Brad and I, it’s what our campaign is fighting for. We’re fighting for housing as a human right. We’re fighting for single payer. We’re fighting to abolish ICE and decriminalize our immigration system. We’re fighting to divest from the US war machine. We’re fighting to end militarization of police and carceral punishment, and move towards a system where we reimagine public safety, and are investing in the necessary resources in our communities to ensure population health. Things like having stable housing, education, living wages, like we talked about. And as someone who’s worked on Capitol Hill, and successfully moved progressive legislation forward, I can say that I’ve successfully done this work at a national level.
Brad Sherman has never been the guy to fight for these progressive policies…less than 1% of his campaign contributions are small dollar donors, the rest are corporations and lobbyists. So it’s no surprise that we’re not seeing him fight for us in Congress.
I’m someone who firmly believes budgets reflect values, budgets reflect priorities. And we hear at the local level, progressives like Kenneth Mejia, who’s running for LA controller, talk about how our housing budget here in LA is 2% of our total budget, while at the federal level it’s 3%. Our federal spending on police is more than 3 times what we spend on housing. Carceral punishment is roughly double. That demonstrates that our focus is not on actually protecting and serving our communities; the focus is on oppression and militarization and incarceration. And that’s hurting our communities, and it has for decades and decades. So it’s really about taking a shift in the mindset. And I think our community is asking for that change. Our district voted in favor of Measure J, which was a county measure to defund the LA Sheriff's department. Our district voted in favor of George Gascon to be our DA, someone who’s fighting to end mass incarceration. So I think the community is ready for this change. And Brad Sherman has never been the guy to fight for these progressive policies, no matter what he says. The fact that he’s only gotten two bills passed in his 24 years in office speaks volumes to where his loyalties actually lay. And we already talked about where his corporate donors come from, less than 1% of his campaign contributions are small dollar donors, the rest are corporations and lobbyists. So it’s no surprise that we’re not seeing him fight for us in Congress.
And I think on the issue that’s most on the minds of our voters here, which is around housing and homelessness, Brad is literally the guy who can do something about that crisis. Meanwhile, we have 5 unhoused neighbors die per day in our city. Black Angelinos are 8% of our city population but 34% of our unhoused. We’re seeing the city of LA pump more and more money into criminalizing homelessness, and we’re not seeing anyone at the federal level talking about this issue. Talking about the fact that chronic underfunding of housing at the federal level undergirds why we’re seeing all of these issues trickle down to the local level, where we’ve had a ban on new federal funding for public housing for over 25 years. Over the course of the past decade, 5 out of the 8 top HUD programs for housing have lost funding when adjusted for inflation. So it’s no wonder then that we have over 66,000 homeless in LA county. We need to invest in permanent supportive housing, we need to end criminalization of homelessness and address the public health crisis that it is, and respond to it with empathy and care and services — not handcuffs. And that begins with changing policy and funding at the federal level.
RIFT: You’re very policy-focused. I want to get to some of the policies you have on your website in a moment, but first, there are all these candidates like yourself in the greater LA area — you talked about Kenneth Mejia a minute ago — who are running for local, state and national office and who are doing it on these progressive platforms that are trying to address these issues that are ubiquitous in LA. To do that you kind of have to be an activist candidate. You have to be present in the community, you have to be a part of the protest culture there. I have seen you do that, I remember seeing you protesting with Angelica Duenas…
SA: About the Sun Valley gas leak. And that’s in her district, right next door.
RIFT: And just recently you were at the March for Melyda Corado in Los Angeles. So you definitely have to be somebody who is present in community activism, present with the deep community organizing. I want you to describe that. What has that experience been for you and your campaign? How have you made those connections with the people in your district that are interested in this sort of change?
SA: Yeah, I mean that’s what co-governance is all about, right? Where it’s the community voices and priorities that are dictating the policies our representatives are fighting for. I’m humbled to be a part of the West Valley People’s alliance, which is a fantastic progressive advocacy organization here in the West Valley that fights for housing justice and racial justice for our unhoused neighbors. They lead the largest unhoused outreach network across the entire West Valley, reaching between 400 and 450 unhoused neighbors each week through their sister organization West Valley Homes YES. And nearly every Sunday I join them with our unhoused neighbors to provide essential services; everything from food to cold water during the summer months, tents and tarps, harm reduction supplies. Our campaign made an initial purchase of around $5000 worth of naloxone and fentanyl test strips for our unhoused neighbors, after we learned that we’ve seen a pretty alarming increase of opioid overdose deaths among our unhoused neighbors here in LA as a result of COVID. So the idea of mutual aid for us is, one, we need to do this work, we have to take care of our community. But also kind of stepping back and looking at the larger picture. Mutual aid is there because our government has failed to serve the people. And so the people are stepping in to take care of our neighbors, take care of our family members, and take care of our communities. But I also envision a world where we have governments that are actually providing the necessary services all of our community members need to survive and thrive. There is no reason beyond political cowardice and corporate greed that the wealthiest nation in the history of the world can’t guarantee these fundamental human rights.
There is no reason beyond political cowardice and corporate greed that the wealthiest nation in the history of the world can’t guarantee these fundamental human rights.
And so for us, this work that we’re doing is super, super important. Again though, it’s recognizing that we need policy change. Because it’s policies that impact the pollution in your air. It’s policies that impact where your water is coming from, the amount of student debt you have, the cost of your college tuition, the cost of your healthcare coverage, your ability to unionize and collectively bargain. And so really bringing awareness to what those policies look like, and working with our communities to develop those policies, that’s really the centerpiece of our campaign.
And building a new political coalition of young people, people of color, immigrants, that are sick and tired of the status quo, and who are doing the work each and every day in their own communities to bring forth these structural reforms we know we need and we know we could achieve if we simply had representatives fighting with us in mind. I’m sad to say we don’t have that now, but I really am excited for what’s gonna come in 2022. Because regardless of what happens, we are going to see a sea change in the political discourse here in Los Angeles. There are so many amazing progressives running up and down the ballot. From Kenneth Mejia to Albert Corado to Yasmine Pomeroy, Bryant Odega. And then for state assembly we have Fatima Iqbal-Zubair, we have Pilar Schiavo. We have so many amazing folks running. That’s what gives me hope. You know, that we have community organizers and community leaders that are stepping up and saying ‘enough is enough, let’s change this system, let’s take power back in the hands of the people and deliver for our communities’.
RIFT: Let’s talk policy then. On your platform you have these big-ticket progressive policies — things that we heard about in the previous presidential cycle. I’m talking about Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, immigration reform, education reform. And I think also, a response to COVID. Even if we are on the waning edge of the pandemic, I suspect there are still things that need to be addressed in the long term. So talk about where you stand on those kinds of policies. If you get elected, what are you really focusing on in your first term?
SA: Absolutely, I see the intersectionality of our issues. So what that looks like — you brought up COVID-19 — I would say that while we’re at roughly a 50% vaccination rate nationwide, we still have this Delta variant that is spreading through our unvaccinated communities, and we still have the socioeconomic fallout of this crisis. With the eviction moratorium that was just extended for another couple of months, as that expires we still have hundreds of thousands of community members here in LA that are on the verge of being evicted, that are behind on their rent and utility payments. We have millions of people nationwide that are behind on rent and utility payments. We have to address this head-on, and there are multiple ways that we can do it. I am a big supporter of the bill from representative Ilhan Omar, the Rent and Mortgage Cancellation Act, which would cancel rent and mortgage payments going back to the beginning of the pandemic and also provide aid to small-time landlords that rely on that income from tenants to survive. So it really kind of makes whole all sectors of the community.
Biden has the authority now to trigger single payer under the Affordable Care Act. He has that executive authority; it was authorized by Congress during a pandemic to provide that coverage. And we’re not seeing him exercise that authority.
We need to provide services to our community members to be able to weather this incredible crisis. And seeing at the federal level now, with the reconciliation package that’s being discussed in the Senate and the House, that we’re going to have Medicare coverage for dental, vision and hearing, I’m happy to see that. But again it goes back to incremental changes, tinkering around the edges. We still saw Congress and the Biden administration provide a $34 billion bailout for insurance companies in the American Rescue Plan. Why couldn’t we put that money towards single payer and make that transition? Biden has the authority now to trigger single payer under the Affordable Care Act. He has that executive authority; it was authorized by Congress during a pandemic to provide that coverage. And we’re not seeing him exercise that authority.
What would be the biggest working class and middle class tax cut in US history? Cancel all 1.8 trillion in student loan debt. I mean we’re talking about countless young people who can’t buy a home, who can’t start a business, who can’t start a family because of crippling student loan debt. So we have to engage in those necessary practices of canceling that debt and providing that relief to the American people. So all these things work in tandem, they do not operate in silos. By addressing one end of the issue, by providing dental coverage, hearing coverage, that's great — but let’s take this moment during a time when millions of Americans are hurting, where we’re coming out of a devastating pandemic, let’s really reflect on who we are as a country, and where we want to be, and really put our money where our mouth is, and really work towards uplifting and empowering people and ending poverty. Poverty is absolutely a policy choice. For all these reasons, when I get elected it’s gonna be hitting the ground running.
Where is the outrage within our communities? The outrage is there but I also believe that people are so disenchanted by our political system, and I can’t hold that against them. For so long our system has worked against the people, has oppressed the people. Based on your zipcode, based on the color of your skin, based on who you are, what your religious background is, what your ethnic background is. And so I understand how disenchanted our communities are, but the fact remains that we have this moment, and we have to capitalize on this moment to work together to create the country we know we can create if we have the right people in power fighting with and for our communities. That’s why it’s so important to be civically engaged, and to get out there in communities, to join protests, to lead rallies, to organize for change in our communities. That’s why mutual aid is so important, because it’s doing that work.
For all these reasons, what I feel like hitting the ground running looks like is being able to champion those bold structural reforms.
RIFT: So what I’m hearing here is that the way that you’re approaching policy in your campaign, the way that you’re both perceiving it on your end but also expressing your vision of change to the voters in your district, is in a very intersectional way. You’re trying to see the ways that these issues interact and intersect, and trying to develop an approach based on that framework.
You’re talking about these two competing emotions among voters, particularly in your district but I’m sure all around the state, of outrage, but also disenchantment. So when we’re talking about these progressive policies, what’s the response you get from the community? Is it a difficult sell?
SA: No, not at all. There is incredible energy and excitement around the policies we’re fighting for. Because these are the policies that our communities care about. Again, this is a district that is D+18 that Bernie won during the presidential primary. Our communities want to see representatives really advocating for single payer, really advocating for housing as a human right. It’s been incredible to see the outpouring of support from our community.
We know it’s the issues that matter to voters. And based on our conversations, we know that the issues we’re fighting for are the ones that are most in the minds of our voters. And that’s what is gonna carry us to victory.
