Jed brandt

Jed Brandt (b. Cleveland, Ohio) is an American communist. His writing, photography, design and artistic work has appeared in the Indypendent, and other publications. On March 1, 2010, Fox News television host Glenn Beck dedicated a segment to attacking Jed for a speech given at the Brecht Forum. Called a "neo-Maoist" by anarchists and a "bald communist" by Beck, Jed has never been shy about his beliefs.

Early Life

Growing up on a dirt road in the back-country hollers of McDowell County, West Virginia, Brandt's first memories were of coal miners on strike in the 1970s wave of wildcat labor unrest that brought national coal production to a halt. His father was a miner. His deceased mother, Gina Brandt-Fall was active in the Miner's Right To Strike Committee after she left Radcliffe College following student unrest. Gina taught him never to avoid a good fight, but to have the good sense to know one when he saw it. Jed's rapid-fire Appalachian twang stayed with him to adolescence.

Moving to Chicago and then New York's Greenwich Village, Jed was educated in the public schools of New York City and Chicago, moving often as a youth following his parents separation.

His first arrest was at age 12 in a direct action to disrupt Chicago's annual Armed Forces Day Parade, the start of what would be many run-ins with law enforement. Though Jed was arrested for political activities over a dozen times, and assorted youthful indiscretions, he was never convicted. Jed was a founder of Youth Against Apathy, a high-school network with communists, anarchists and bohemian youth from across Northern Illinois.

At age 15, he was tried on felony charges of aggravated battery (on a police officer) after "unarresting" his first love from a squad of riot police in front of Chicago's main military recruiting station on the eve of a threatened US invasion of Nicaragua. Hospitalized in the arrest with multiple contusions Though Jed's own lawyer was skeptical of his innocence, he was exonerated when the bite mark allegedly delivered by Jed on the arresting officer's hand did not match his slightly crooked teeth.

Jed was also briefly a member of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, where he burned an American flag of the steps of the Art Institute of Chicago, an act he said was in solidarity with all humanity and for "a world without borders."

When Jed found out that the parent organization of his youth group did not allow gay or lesbian members, he refused the invitation to party membership without disavowing his communist principles. It was then he learned that you could not sacrifice solidarity, dignity or love to an authoritarian vision of social change.

Working Life

Jed has worked a variety of jobs, starting with distribution of flyers for a fortune teller on Bleeker Street on Friday and Saturday nights at the age of 12. Dropping out of Stuyvesant High School at 14, he took a job posting advertising bills for an art and movie poster supply shop before his parents moved him back to Chicago to continue his schooling at Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, where Michelle Obama had graduated a few years before. At 16, Jed again left school. When his father announced that, since he had left school, rent was due at the beginning of the next month, he begin work (almost) immediately.

Starting as a laborer unloading trucks, he moved on to be a dish-washer, waiter, janitor, bar back, bouncer, model, dry-waller and bike messenger, he returned to New York at 20 with an interest in philosophy to save money and work his way through college. He was hired as the night secretary at a camera supply import firm in Borough Park, Brooklyn.

Jed studied philosophy and history at the City University of New York, Hunter College, with an emphasis on legal and social systems theory.

In 1995, the state government announced drastic cuts in support for higher education threatening to push thousands of students out of college and retrench the quality of the education offered. Jed became a leading member of the student movement, arguing that the focus of public anger should be Wall Street policies of neo-liberalism, not simply the Republican governor George Pataki.

On March 23, 1995, 15,000 high school and college students massed at City Hall where they faced 7,000 aggressive police who penned the students in and arrested scores, with several hospitalized. Following the students' agreed protocols that no electoral politicians would use the gathering for their own purposes, Jed personally escorted then-Manhattan Borough President and Democrat mayoral candidate Ruth Messinger from the stage saying "today we speak."

In the lead-up to the protests, Jed was hospitalized, and lost the use of his arm for a week, by the Manhattan North Taskforce of the NYPD after he has encouraged Hunter students blockading Lexington Avenue to disperse. No charges were filed when video of the incident showed that he had broken no laws. Jed did not take this case to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, as he said there was "no justice in their courts."

In 1996, Jed, along with student leaders from across the city, formed the Student Liberation Action Movement. He was the editor of the radical CUNY-wide tabloid Spheric, and then the Hunter College Envoy, founded by the editor of the National Guardian, James Aronson. Both newspapers received awards from the Campus Alternative Journalism Project for reporting, graphic design and hell-raising.

Jed withdrew from college to attend his mother as she was dying of breast cancer at the City of Hope hospice in Los Angeles. Following her death in the spring of 2001, Jed returned to New York. The attacks of September 11, which woke Jed and his lover only a few blocks from their Tribeca apartment in 2001, Jed returned to political activism and joined the newly-formed New York City Independent Media Center as a production manager and editor of the Indypedent, a "free paper for free people". The Indy grew to become the leading underground newspaper on the east coast, with circulation peaks over 100,000 copies during the 2004 Republican National Convention. Jed worked full-time that year to help prepare the city for Bush's arrival and issue what became a resounding rejection of George W. Bush agenda.

Following the New York City Transit Strike of 2005, Jed was hired as a Communications Specialist by the Transport Workers Union Local 100. He worked there until 2009, when disagreements over union policy resulted in his layoff.

Jed was a staff illustrator for Vibe Magazine, and he done publication design and reporting for LeftTurn, Political Affairs, Monthly Review online, and numerous other publications. His first investigative article was written at age 18 on the police torture case involving Chicago's then-Commander of Detectives John Burge, for the now-defunct Revolutionary Worker newspaper. Burge had served in the military police in both Korea and Vietnam, and on his returned allegedly applied the same torture techniques learned in the US Army to brutalize over 200 suspects, almost entirely African-American men.

Jed believes love will save they day, and is currently in Kathmandu, Nepal, reporting on the Himalayan revolution.

Jed is a member of the Kasama Project and advocate for the formation of a new communist movement with a global perspective. Jed is also an outspoken atheist. An only child, Jed has been engaged three times and never married.

External links

• Kasama Project