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Seattle’s ‘autonomous zone’ belongs to a grand tradition of utopian experiments

The year 2020 seems to be drawn straight from the plot of some discarded dystopian novel — a book that never got published because it sounded too far-fetched. Not only is there a pandemic to contend with, unemployment nearing levels last seen in the Great Depression, and nationwide protests against police brutality, but it’s all happening in the same year Americans are supposed to elect a president.

Amid the chaos and tear gas, some people see a chance to scrap everything and start over, a first step toward turning their visions for a better world into reality. In Seattle, protesters in one six-block stretch of Capitol Hill, a neighborhood near downtown, have created a community-run, police-free zone, recently renamed the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, CHOP. It’s a scene of masked crowds, vibrant signs and street art, a “no cop co-op” giving away food and supplies, and newly planted community gardens. In Minneapolis, volunteers turned a former Sheraton hotel into a “sanctuary” offering free food and hotel rooms — until they got evicted.

“We’re seeing a new resurgence of utopianism,” said Heather Alberro, an associate lecturer of politics at Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom who studies radical environmentalists and utopian thought.

Problems like climate change, the widening gap between the rich and everybody else, and racial inequality gives many the sense that they’re living through one giant unprecedented crisis. And these combined disasters create “the exact conditions that give rise to all sorts of expressions” of utopian thinking, Alberro said. From broad ideas like the Green New Deal — the climate-jobs-justice package popularized by New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — to Seattle’s “autonomous zone,” people are offering up new plans for how the world could operate. Whether they came from literature or real-life experiments, these idealistic efforts can spur wider cultural and political change, even if they falter.

A community garden in CHOP’s Cal Anderson Park. Grist / Kate Yoder

Based on President Donald Trump’s tweets about Seattle’s CHOP (or Fox News websites’ photoshopped coverage of the protest) you’d picture pure chaos, with buildings afire and protesters running amok. The reality was more like people sitting around in a park, screening movies like 13th, and making art. It’s a serious protest too, with crowds gathered for talks about racism and police brutality in front of an abandoned police precinct. The protesters’ demands include abolishing the Seattle Police Department, removing cops from schools, abolishing juvenile detention, and giving reparations to victims of police violence.

“The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone #CHAZ is not a lawless wasteland of anarchist insurrection — it is a peaceful expression of our community’s collective grief and their desire to build a better world,” Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan tweeted last week.

The protest zone goes by many names: Originally called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ, it was later rebranded as CHOP. The barricaded area, which spans from Cal Anderson Park into nearby streets, is part campground, part block party. Tourists wander through, snapping photos of the street art.

A week earlier, protests in Cal Anderson Park, sparked by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, were met by police officers spraying rubber bullets, mace, and tear gas. Then, last week, the police abandoned the area, and the protesters declared it their own, turning the “Seattle Police Department” into the “Seattle People Department” with a bit of spraypaint.

The CHAZ follows a long history of anti-capitalist experiments that reimagined the way the world was run. In 1871, the people of Paris, sick of oppression, rose up to take control of their city for a two-month stint. The Paris Commune canceled debt, suspended rent, and abolished the police, filling the streets with festivals. The French government soon quashed their experiment, massacring tens of thousands of Parisians in “The Bloody Week.” Even though it was short-lived, the Paris Commune inspired revolutionary movements for the next 150 years.

Protesters sleep in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan during Occupy Wall Street, 2011. Ramin Talaie / Corbis via Getty Images

In 2011, Occupy Wall Street protestors took over New York City’s Zuccotti Park for two months to highlight the problems of income inequality. Their encampment offered free food, lectures, books, and wide-ranging discussions. The radical movement ended up changing the way Americans talked, giving them a new vocabulary — the “99 percent” and “1 percent” — and its concerns about income inequality went on to mold the priorities of the Democratic Party.

Alberro compared Seattle’s CHOP to a community of 300 environmental activists in western France who set up camp at a site earmarked for a controversial new airport starting in 2008. One of many ZADs (zones à défendre) that have sprung up in France, the community ended up being not just a place to protest the airport, but to take a stand against what protesters saw as the underlying problems — capitalism, inequality, and environmental destruction. (The government ended up shelving plans for the airport in 2018). “The point of these autonomous zones is not only to create these micro exemplars of better worlds,” Alberro said, “but also to physically halt present forces of destruction” — whether that’s an airport or, in the case of Capitol Hill, how police treat black people.

A bike rides past a farm in “la Zad,” a utopian community protesting an airport in Western France. LOIC VENANCE / AFP via Getty Images

Seattle has a lengthy history of occupations and political demonstrations tracing back to the Seattle General Strike in the early 1900s. The Civil Rights era brought sit-ins and marches. Indigenous protesters occupied an old military fort in 1970 and negotiated with the city to get 20 acres of Discovery Park. Two years later, activists occupied an abandoned elementary school in Beacon Hill, demanding that it be turned into a community center (now El Centro de la Raza).

And it might not be a coincidence that the new protest zone appeared on the West Coast, often portrayed in literature as an “ideal place” to set up utopian communities, Alberro said. For instance, the book Ecotopia, published in 1975 by Ernest Callenbach, depicted a green society — complete with high-speed magnetic-levitation trains! — formed when northern California, Oregon, and Washington seceded from the United States. The book went on to become a cult novel, influencing the environmental movement’s focus on local food, public transportation, and renewable energy.

Ecotopia isn’t exactly an ideal parallel for the current wave of protests, as its utopia was white. Callenbach envisioned a segregated society where black people opted to live in the less affluent “Soul City.” Still, it’s apparent that some of its other messages live on. Alberro has talked to many “radical” environmental protesters for her research, and most of them haven’t read any of the green utopian books she asks about. But they repeat some of the ideas and phrases from that literature nearly “word for word” when describing the changes they want to see in the world.

Though Seattle’s protest zone is focused on racial oppression, not environmental destruction, Alberro sees a similar impulse behind all these projects. “Many activists would argue that it’s all part of the same struggle,” she said, arguing that people can’t successfully take on environmental issues without addressing racism and other socioeconomic problems. “There seems to be a cultural atmosphere that molds these different movements, even though they often don’t come into contact with one another.”

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Seattle’s ‘autonomous zone’ belongs to a grand tradition of utopian experiments

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Susan Rice Did Nothing Wrong, Part the Millionth

Mother Jones

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I missed this a couple of days ago, but Nancy LeTourneau alerts me to a recent CNN report about Susan Rice’s requests to “unmask” the names of individuals in intelligence reports that she received when she was Obama’s National Security Advisor. This was all part of the great Devin Nunes fiasco, where he went to the White House to read the reports, came back to Capitol Hill to hold a press conference, and then rushed back to the White House to tell President Trump all about it. But there’s no there there:

After a review of the same intelligence reports brought to light by House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers and aides have so far found no evidence that Obama administration officials did anything unusual or illegal….Over the last week, several members and staff of the House and Senate intelligence committees have reviewed intelligence reports related to those requests at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.

One congressional intelligence source described the requests made by Rice as “normal and appropriate” for officials who serve in that role to the president.

Fine. Susan Rice did nothing wrong. It’s not as if we didn’t know that already, but it’s nice to see it confirmed. Rice must be getting really tired of being a handy Republican punching bag.

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Susan Rice Did Nothing Wrong, Part the Millionth

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The EPA’s Choice Has Never Been Clearer

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The EPA’s Choice Has Never Been Clearer

Posted 17 July 2015 in

National

When the EPA asked for comments on its proposed rule that would significantly alter the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), people across the country raised their voices in hearings, at rallies, and online. From governors to farmers, from senators to factory workers, from entrepreneurs to farmers, the message has been resoundingly clear: The RFS is working for Rural America.

On Capitol Hill last week, lawmakers joined with hundreds of renewable fuel supporters to make sure Washington heard the message that’s coming from America’s heartland.

Last month in Kansas City, governors, industry leaders, farmers and students showed up in force to let the EPA know that the RFS is creating jobs and providing opportunities in rural communities.

And online, nearly 200,000 men and women from across the United States have signed our petition to tell the EPA to stand up to Big Oil and get the Renewable Fuel Standard back on track.

The EPA has two choices.

Choosing the oil industry would mean more imported oil from hostile foreign regions, more pollution and spills, and fewer American jobs. It would also mean protecting the oil monopoly on our fuel supply and even higher gas prices.

Choosing America’s rural economies and innovation would mean supporting over 852,000 American jobs, primarily in rural communities that are just getting back on their feet, and creating thousands of new, permanent American jobs. It would mean keeping a promise to investors in advanced biofuels — the world’s cleanest motor fuels — instead of sending that investment to China.

The choice is clear. The people have spoken. EPA, the RFS is working for rural America. Support a strong Renewable Fuel Standard.

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The EPA’s Choice Has Never Been Clearer

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Tea Partiers Ignore Michele Bachmann’s Call for Rally Against "Amnesty"

Mother Jones

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On November 20, minutes after President Barack Obama delivered a speech explaining his executive action on immigration reform that would protect millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) took to Fox News and called on tea partiers everywhere to come to Washington to protest.

Bachmann, the head of the House tea party caucus who is retiring from Congress in weeks, implored the audience to help her fight the “amnesty.” She urged them to “melt the phone lines” to congressional lawmakers. And she declared she would be leading a protest on Capitol Hill. “I’m calling on your viewers to come to DC on Wednesday, December 3, at high noon on the west steps of the Capitol,” she proclaimed. “We need to have a rally, and we need to go visit our senators and visit our congressman, because nothing frightens a congressman like the whites of his constituents’ eyes…We need the viewers to come and help us.”

The next day, the Tea Party Patriots, one of the largest remaining tea party groups, sent out an urgent survey to its members. The email, signed by cofounder Jenny Beth Martin, said the group—which has worked closely with Bachmann in the past to organize other rallies at the Capitol—was trying to determine whether such a rally would be a good use of its resources. The email asked these “patriots” to indicate whether they would respond to Bachmann and come to Washington to protest the president’s actions on immigration. Apparently, the answer was no. The Tea Party Patriots did not sign up for this ride.

With the tea party not heeding Bachmann’s call, her “high noon” rally was downgraded to…a press conference. So on Wednesday, Bachmann appeared on the Capitol steps—joined by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa)—and spoke to a passel of cameras and about 40 protesters. Here’s a picture of the crowd:

Stephanie Mencimer

What happened to her big protest? Bachmann’s office did not respond to a request for comment. A TPP spokesman said in an email that the “gathering in Washington is not a Tea Party Patriots event per se, but we are fully in favor of it and have encouraged our supporters in the area to come out if they can.”

The lackluster response to Bachmann’s high-noon call is a far cry from five years ago, when the congresswoman made a similar appeal on Fox for a protest against Obamacare. She asked for tea partiers to hit Capitol Hill and tell legislators “don’t you dare take away my health care.” And the fledgling tea party movement responded enthusiastically. The Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity dispatched dozens buses full of activists—29 just from New Jersey. FreedomWorks, then headed by former House majority leader Dick Armey, organized more. Glenn Beck promoted the event. Thousands of people showed up, as did the entire GOP House leadership. The momentum generated from that rally helped the GOP in the 2010 midterm elections.

Bachmann, after a failed run for the White House, is spending her last days on the Hill writing listicles for BuzzFeed. And even before her final day as a congresswoman, Bachmann, with this non-rally, seems a has-been.

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Tea Partiers Ignore Michele Bachmann’s Call for Rally Against "Amnesty"

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Sen. Feinstein: The CIA Scandal Began Because the Agency Misled Congress About Torture

Mother Jones

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chair of the Senate intelligence committee, kicked off a Washington kerfuffle with significant constitutional implications when she took to the Senate floor on Tuesday to accuse the CIA of spying on her committee’s investigation into its controversial interrogation and detention program. As pro-CIA partisans and the agency’s overseers on Capitol Hill squared off for a DC turf battle—with finger-pointing in both directions—lost in the hubbub was a basic and troubling fact: Feinstein had contended that this all began because, years ago, the spies of Langley had severely misled the legislators responsible for overseeing the intelligence agencies.

At the start of her speech, Feinstein laid out the back story, and her account is a tale of a major CIA abuse. The CIA’s detention and interrogation (a.k.a. torture) program began in 2002. For its first four years, the CIA only told the chairman and vice-chairman of the Senate intelligence committee about the program, keeping the rest of the panel in the dark. In September 2006, hours before President George W. Bush was to disclose the program to the public, then CIA Director Michael Hayden informed the rest of the committee. This piece of history shows the limits of congressional oversight. If only two members of the committee were informed, it meant that the panel could not provide full oversight of this program. But keeping secrets from legislators—even members of the intelligence committee—is not that unusual, and the story gets worse.

In December 2007, the New York Times reported that the CIA had destroyed two videotapes of the CIA’s interrogation (or torture) sessions. After this disclosure, Hayden told the Senate intelligence committee that eradicating the videos was not as worrisome as it seemed. According to Feinstein, he noted that CIA cables had detailed the interrogations and detention conditions and were “a more than adequate representation” of what had happened. He offered Sen. Jay Rockefeller, who was then chairing the committee, the opportunity to review these thousands of cables. Rockefeller dispatched two staffers to peruse these records.

It took the pair about a year to sift through all the material and produce a report for the intelligence committee. That report, Feinstein noted, was “chilling.” The review, she said, showed that the “interrogations and the conditions of confinement at the CIA detention sites were far different and far more harsh than the way the CIA had described them to us.”

That is, the CIA had misled the Capitol Hill watchdogs.

After reading the staff report, Feinstein, now chairing the committee, and Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), then the senior Republican on the committee, decided a far more expansive investigation was called for. On March 5, 2009, the committee voted 14 to 1 to initiate a full-fledged review of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.

It is that inquiry that has caused the recent fuss, with Feinstein claiming that the CIA (possibly illegally) penetrated computers used by committee investigators and removed documents indicating a CIA internal review of this program had concluded it was poorly managed, went too far, and did not produce decent intelligence. The committee’s more comprehensive review eventually produced a 6,300-page report slamming CIA that has yet to be made public, despite Feinstein pushing the CIA to declassify it.

So while this week’s focus is on whether the CIA improperly—or illegally—spied on the folks who have the constitutional obligation to monitor CIA actions in order to ensure the agency acts appropriately and within US law, Feinstein’s big reveal also presented a highly troubling charge: The CIA lied to Congress about what might be its most controversial program in decades. This in and of itself should be big news.

At the conclusion of her speech, Feinstein, referring to the present controversy, said, “How this will be resolved will show whether the intelligence committee can be effective in monitoring and investigating our nation’s intelligence activities or whether our work can be thwarted by those we oversee.” That is true. And if there cannot be effective oversight of intelligence operations, then the foundation of the national security state is in question. Yet Feinstein’s remarks provide evidence that oversight was not working prior to the current face-off. If the CIA did not tell the Senate intelligence committee the truth about its interrogation and detention program, much more needs to be resolved than whether the spies hacked the gumshoes of Capitol Hill.

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Sen. Feinstein: The CIA Scandal Began Because the Agency Misled Congress About Torture

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The Renewable Fuel Choice

The Renewable Fuel Choice

Posted 7 February 2013 in

National

Do you want to have a choice when it comes to fueling up your car? To have the option of using fuel that is cleaner, renewable and often, cheaper? If you are like the majority of Americans in this new poll, you do – 64% of people said they supported the RFS requirement that renewable fuel be incorporated into our nation’s fuel supply.

It’s too bad that some on Capitol Hill don’t agree with these Americans, and are, in fact, working counter to our best interests by trying to change the RFS. Attacks against the RFS ignore the reality that Americans want choice and they want alternatives to oil.

The companies of Fuels America are meanwhile working to create those alternatives; Congress must protect the RFS to ensure that Americans can have access to the clean fuels being developed.

To see the cellulosic industry at work you need merely look at the raft of companies that completed building facilities or started production in recent months. These include Abengoa, KiOR and INEOS Bio, to name a few. Meanwhile, DuPont, POET and others are preparing for new cellulosic ethanol projects in the months and years to come.

Those are just a handful of the projects planned or underway. Check out our infographic for an overview of more cellulosic innovation cropping up around the country and visit E2’s new website, Fueling Growth, for a map of more than 80 advanced renewable fuel projects.

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The Renewable Fuel Choice

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