Welcome to a Friday night edition of Progress Report.
What a crazy week! And we’ll review the most important headlines — both the ones you’ve heard about and the ones you haven’t — in a paid-subscriber only edition of the newsletter. We’ll be doing that every Sunday going forward, so it’s a great time to upgrade.
Tonight’s newsletter features my conversation with Alejandra Gomez, the executive director of Living United for Change in Arizona. Better known as LUCHA, the organization has since 2010 led the way in pushing back against right-wing fascism in Arizona, initially against Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s reign of terror against the state’s Latino community.
Their work has expanded to touch on a variety of issues, including the fight against data centers, which produced one of the nation’s largest victories: a three-year moratorium on the state’s generous tax breaks for building data centers, signed into the budget by Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs earlier this month.
You can’t overstate the size of this accomplishment: Arizona was the first state to offer tax breaks for data centers in 2013, expanded the incentive in 2016, and has become one of their leading destinations for this behemoths. As I discussed with Gomez, they were able to defeat the Big Tech lobby and pass the moratorium through a Republican-run legislature filled with extremists.
You can watch our conversation above to hear Gomez explain how they organized to pull it off, how the data center blowback points to a sea change in politics and the potential for a new coalition, and how they’re fighting ICE. If you’d rather read the transcript, it’s available for paid subscribers below.
