The Rug Has Been Pulled on Arizona
The rug has been pulled on Arizona. We are seeing the first wave of damage.
The budget bill of 2025 cut SNAP benefits. Now the state is months behind on giving them back to people who never should have lost them. Grocery prices are sky high. So many people are helping their neighbors who lost SNAP—rather than watch them starve—that some local governments are running out of money. Why? Because those governments don't charge sales tax on groceries. Without that tax money, they can't pay for basic services. At the same time, local shops and restaurants are laying people off and closing down. Nobody has extra money to spend. This sudden loss of federal help could cause an economic death spiral in rural Arizona.
We need to bring our economy back to our communities. Back to the people here in Arizona. Then we can decide what gets built, who it's for, and where the profits go.
It's becoming more and more clear that no one is coming to save us. There are no kind billionaires. There are no powerful people who care about us. Even the jobs they offer are drying up. And the pay keeps getting worse.
We have to adapt to the new order they are forcing on us.
The President's new budget cuts everything we depend on. Everything except his ugly, endless war with Iran and his cruel, showy attacks on immigrants through ICE. Now we see the truth. If Congress won't stop him, there is no rule that matters. The President can take our tax money and spend it on foreign wars, his own pet projects, police actions that serve him, and corporate welfare full of corruption. If Congress goes along with it, no one will bother to stop him.
The whole system is like a tower of blocks. Corporate vandals and their puppets in government have been pulling out blocks for years. Now the tower is wobbling. It's about to fall.
But it's not just that they took our federal money. It's also that most of the profits from our towns are leaving. They go to faraway corporations. Meanwhile, rich people are buying up our land and our buildings. They trade them back and forth like toys. We pay the price.
The money we make with our own hands goes to Wall Street sharks. It goes to Silicon Valley landlords who don't care about us. It goes to "pirate equity" firms that strip everything for parts. Then they use that money for whatever they want. It sure isn't our well-being.
Working people are barely getting by on scraps. And lately, we're not even getting that.
But there is another way. One we build.
As your state senator, I want to move our economy back to local communities. Back to where you live. Using private action and state help together. So that the people who live here control the money, and the money helps the people who live here.
Our incomes are stuck. Inflation is out of control. We need to take our economy back. We need to build our own systems. Systems that don't rely on a federal government that doesn't care. Systems that compete because they are good, not because they have a government-backed monopoly.
That's what I want to do with the Digital New Deal and the ARICC community cooperative program. These programs build networks of worker-owned businesses. Businesses that lift up their communities. Businesses that build stable, secure lives for the people doing the work.
The Digital New Deal also includes:
New job training programs
Protections for your civil rights
Updates to our antitrust laws (so big companies can't crush small ones)
Stockpiles of key supplies so Arizona can survive market shocks
Safeguards our water supplies from destructive industrial usage and overdevelopment.
Here's what ARICC does first. It creates a credit union. That credit union's only job is to lend money to worker-owned co-ops. Those co-ops fill the gaps in poor communities. They use sliding scale pricing—the poorest pay less, but the co-op still makes enough to keep going.
ARICC gets its power from two places. Private investments. And state contracts to provide social services. That money goes into worker-owned co-ops that make the things we need to live. Food. Care. Housing. Basics.
These co-ops give working Arizonans a way to invest in their own communities. And protect that money. Through smart, careful investment in real things. While also building a secure retirement.
The faster Arizonans move their retirement accounts and investments to ARICC, the faster these co-ops can open. And the faster you will feel relief.
We need to get ready for a dangerous possibility. A day when the federal government acts more like a colonizing empire than part of a democratic republic. If that day comes, we will have our own systems. Local systems. Depoliticized systems. They will protect us from the strong-arm tactics of federally backed corporations. And they will give people purpose—work that helps their community and builds their own security.
I know there will be a gap. After we pass the Digital New Deal and ARICC, it will take time for things to get better. During that gap, I will fight to move state money to poverty relief right now. And I will fight to remove the Republican roadblocks that keep Arizona from raising the taxes we need to have a working state.
But in the meantime, we have to reach out to our neighbors. We have to stop the hateful, angry talk that tears us apart. We have to look each other in the eye and promise: I will not watch you starve. I will not watch you get thrown outside. Not while a cruel system blames us for its own greed. Not while the market fails to give us a life with dignity.
The market is not a force of nature. It is not a god. It is a machine made by people. And we are not its slaves. We do not have to take whatever raw deal it throws at us.
We can change ourselves. We can change our neighborhoods. We can change our towns. And as we build momentum, we can change the world.
