Political Media Review

November 14, 2011, Jeremy Brecher delivered a talk at the CUNY Graduate Center entitled, “What the 99-Percenters Learn from the History of Social Movements.” Marina Sitrin, a friend who’s organizing links the global justice movement with Occupy Wall Street (OWS), had sent out an invitation. I was not able to attend the reading so I decided to pick up the book instead. A few weeks later I would meet Brecher on December 17th on the three month anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement. He was standing outside the makeshift library for the movement as we prepared to donate copies of the work Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America, a group-edited project written in third person dedicated to the short history of the movement. The author stood there with a smile on his face, the same smile as the back of his book jacket. He had spent the night at Zuccotti Park in the fall of 2011, just as he had hung out at the post-King Civil Rights Freedom City in the muddy flat of the capital four decades prior. “[T]he movement never took off,” mused Brecher in his new book. “But I loved to visit the freedom city encampment, and I’ve often felt that someday we’d be back” (p. 56).

What is most interesting about John Asimakopoulos’s Revolt! is its intended audience.

Thursday, September 22, 2011, I headed out by bike to ride up to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where my buddy Ron and I planned to attend the book party for Stephen Duncombe and Max Tremblay’s new work, White Riot, a collection of first-person writing, lyrics, letters to zines, and analyses of punk history on issues of racial identity.

Invoking Elegua to open the musical floodgates, d’bi young wastes no time in unleashing bold soul sonic vibrations that ripple through the body and mind, swiftly but surely navigating the resulting rapids to carry us along on the raging (as in outrageous and outraged) river of her creativity.

After reading Islands of Resistance: Pirate Radio in Canada, all I wanted to do was become a pirate. Not the kind that steals in a capitalist bent to become rich at the expense of others. I want to appropriate what is already mine: the public airways and broadcast what corporate media despise most—defiant free-form radio

If white supremacy was an illness afflicting America, Black disenfranchisement would be that cough that never goes away. Resonant, persistent, rattling to the bones and always that with which the sufferer writes off with excuses of other causes.

The gradual creep of the gay liberation movement toward assimilation dates back to the mid-1970’s. Yet, so does the critique of the process. Debate about the limitations of a gay agenda organized around marriage, military service and increasingly punitive hate crimes laws dominated the SexPanic! meetings in the late 1990’s in New York.