The Anchorage Assembly could shift further to the left next year: Anchorage’s George Martinez, who worked in the administration of Mayor Ethan Berkowitz and once was a well-known figure in Occupy Wall Street protest movement in New York City, has announced he is running for the East Anchorage Assembly seat now occupied by Pete Petersen, who hits his term limit in 2023.
Martinez is a Brooklyn-raised rapper, emcee, rabid anti-capitalist, community organizer, and was once an avowed Occupy Wall Street-themed candidate for U.S. Congress in New York.
Martinez ran for Anchorage Mayor in 2021, receiving 3.5 percent of the vote. It was a warm-up for his 2023 cycle. He filed with the Alaska Public Offices Commission in March, and is raising money now for his campaign.
Martinez is also a program director for the Alaska Humanities Forum, where he works for far-left Assemblyman Kameron Perez-Verdia. Martinez served as special assistant to Berkowitz for economic development, youth development, education and diversity for four of the five and a half years that Berkowitz was in office.
The actual filing for the Assembly seat takes place next January, and the election is April 3, 2023. Other seats will also be up for election, depending on the result of local redistricting.
When Martinez ran for Congress, New York Magazine wrote, “But while OWS [Occupy Wall Street] has generally shunned electoral politics, considering the system flush with corporate cash and beyond repair for now, Brooklyn’s George Martinez, a cultural ambassador for the State Department, former district leader, and self-described ‘hip-hop diplomat,’ is giving it a real go, running under the Occupy banner for a seat in Congress. He promised Daily Intel: ‘We are absolutely in this to win this.'”
The publication reported, “That’s probably a bit of an oversell. But the 38-year-old, who also works as an adjunct political science professor at Pace University, really has been spending every day ‘street canvasing, flyering, and postering’ across the new 7th congressional district around Sunset Park to prep for the June 26 Democratic primary. After at least one would-be candidate’s false start, Martinez claims to be the first Occupy-affiliated candidate to make a congressional ballot without third party assistance, on a budget of just $5,000.”
Occupy Wall Street describes itself as “a leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants.”
