Seattle: Reportback / Flyer From the Demonstration against the Youth Jail, Biomass Incinerator, and Gentrification of Yesler Terrace.

PugetSoundAnarchists.org. July 9:

Report Back and Flyer From the Demonstration against the Youth Jail, Biomass Incinerator, and Gentrification of Yesler Terrace.

Today 50 people gathered outside the the Juvenile Detention Center at 12th and Alder making noise for the prisoners inside. Then the crowd moved on to Yesler Terrace to hear a few words about the impending demolition and gentrification of one of Seattle’s oldest public housing projects eventually continuing downtown to the King County Court house. A flyer with the following anarchist text was spread along the way.

Prison, Pollution, and Gentrification
Seattle’s gifts to the excluded, exploited and the bio-region.

The King County council plans to renovate and expand the juvenile detention center and court buildings at 12th and Alder. Seattle steam is planning to heat the new juvie with heat generated at the polluting downtown biomass incinerator. Yesler Terrace is public housing that is slated to be replaced with a mix of retail space and private and public housing, making way for those with more money (i.e. gentrification).

These three projects have in common that they are part of the city’s offensive on the excluded, exploited and on the very bio-region we live in. However lets be honest they are small concrete examples of a entire system that is built on imprisonment, exclusion, exploitation, and ecological devastation.

Some say to vote against the funding of the renovation of the juvie is the way to stop it, but isn’t this simply the role of the democratic dissident, who pleads for power to reform a system that should be overthrown and destroyed? The point is not to ask for politicians and capitalists to stop their projects, but to make them stop, through means that recognize our ability to think and act for ourselves and at the same time allow rebellion to spread. The State’s methods of reform do neither.

Stopping these plans and projects ourselves can be the beginning of a rejection of and rebellion against the entire system we live under, which makes stopping them worthwhile.