Don’t California My Oklahoma: How Seattle Socialists Are Nationalizing Groceries with Eminent Domain, Taxpayer Loot, and Communist-Style Central Planning
Washington State’s Grocery Grab – How HB 2313 Turns the Evergreen State into a Socialist Supermarket Nightmare
By Investigative Staff Writer, Marven Goodman
February 16, 2026 —Oklahoma City, OK. While Oklahomans are busy defending liberty in the Heartland, the loony Left Coast is cooking up a fresh batch of communism, straight from the Seattle socialist kitchen. House Bill 2313, prefiled by a gaggle of Democrat ideologues led by Rep. Darya Farivar of Seattle, isn’t some harmless “food desert” fix. It’s a blueprint for government to seize your corner store, slap taxpayers with the bill, and turn the Evergreen State into a Soviet-style supermarket nightmare.
This abomination doesn’t ban private grocers from closing due to the very policies Democrats created, rampant theft, crushing taxes, and regulatory strangulation. No, it ensures that when those policies drive businesses out, the state steps in to nationalize the sector. “Welcome to The People’s Republic of Safeway,” where your milk comes with a side of eminent domain.
The Bill’s Dark Heart
Eminent Domain, TIF, and Endless Taxpayer Subsidies
HB 2313 adds new sections to Washington’s RCW chapters 35.21 and 35A.21, authorizing cities and “code cities” to establish “publicly owned grocery stores” in any area they label as having a “food access gap” or “decline in food access.” The powers granted are straight out of a central planner’s wet dream:
Eminent Domain on Steroids: Cities can “take private property for public use” to grab land, buildings, or even thriving stores. Forget roads or schools—this bill declares a supermarket a “public improvement,” turning Kelo v. New London into a grocery aisle power grab.
Taxpayer-Funded Gravy Train: Local governments can beg the Department of Commerce for capital grants to cover everything from land acquisition to rehab, equipment, security, and those fancy 24/7 “food locker systems” (government-approved vending machines for the proles).
Tax Increment Financing Abuse: They can slap a TIF district on any neighborhood, freeze the tax base, and divert every dime of future property tax growth into the grocery commissar fund. This stealth tax hike robs schools, fire departments, and libraries to prop up the state’s retail empire.
Flexible Socialism: Stores can be run by city employees (union utopia), leased to hand-picked “private” cronies or nonprofits on sweetheart deals, or “cooperatively owned” with city land and subsidies, but with bureaucrats dictating hours and product lists. Contracts mandate “local produce” quotas and “food waste” metrics. Because nothing says efficiency like a cooperative board stacked with activists.
Land-Use Dictatorship: Rezone at will, force higher density around the stores, waive parking rules, and fast-track environmental reviews. All while cities file annual reports to the Department of Commerce on finances, “community access,” jobs, sales data, and how much kale was sourced locally.
The bill even amends the state’s TIF statute to explicitly list “publicly owned grocery stores” as eligible public improvements, legalizing the racket from day one.
As of today, HB 2313 remains stuck in the House Local Government Committee after a public hearing on January 27. But with a Democrat supermajority in Olympia, don’t bet against this abomination advancing. The Left Coast is all-in on bringing full-blown communism directly to the people of Seattle.
The Manufactured Crisis
Government Breaks It, Then “Fixes” It
Washington’s grocery woes aren’t a market failure, they’re a policy failure on steroids.In 2025, Kroger shuttered six Fred Meyer stores across the Puget Sound after years of bleeding red ink from theft and “regulatory pressures.” Seattle’s Lake City location became ground zero: shelves stripped bare by organized smash-and-grab rings, customers fleeing encampments, and a revolving-door justice system that treats retail theft like a victimless hobby.
Statewide, retail theft racks up $2.7–3 billion in losses annually. Washington ranks dead last in controlling it. Layer on the 2025 tax orgy, $9.4 billion, the largest in state history, including business surcharges, capital gains grabs, and service expansions. Businesses face sky-high minimum wages, mandates, and permitting hell. A 2026 survey showed 17% of Washington firms considering fleeing the state, up from 9%, with taxes as the top gripe.
“Food deserts”? Created by the very politicians who defunded police, hiked taxes, and blocked new stores. Closures in Seattle’s Lake City and South End Tacoma hit working-class neighborhoods hardest. Farivar and her 23 co-sponsors, mostly Seattle-area leftists, point to the Lake City Fred Meyer shutdown as justification. But their “solution” isn’t fixing crime or cutting red tape. It’s seizing property and declaring victory.
Lessons from the Graveyard of Government Grocery Stores
History is littered with the corpses of state-run supermarkets. They flop every single time.
In Kansas City, Missouri, taxpayers poured $18–29 million into a “community” Sun Fresh Market. It closed in 2025 with empty shelves, theft running wild, and 70% customer loss. Crime and mismanagement did it in.
Tiny Baldwin, Florida, bought its only grocery after it shuttered. Lasted under five years before bankruptcy. Erie and St. Paul, Kansas, bought failing stores, Erie had to lease to private operators after bleeding cash; St. Paul limped along only because it dodged real competition.
Chicago’s Mayor Brandon Johnson pushed a municipal grocery scheme in 2025. It died after feasibility studies revealed massive losses, no innovation, and political meddling. Overseas? Soviet bread lines, Venezuelan empty shelves, Cuban rationing, all proved that central planning can’t stock a fridge without shortages.
Private grocers scrape by on 1–2% margins. Government stores? Union wages, political hiring, zero profit motive, and “equity” mandates like local produce quotas. Losses? Backstopped by you, the taxpayer.
Crony Socialism and the Property Rights Atrocity
This isn’t public service, it’s crony socialism on parade. Eminent domain for a grocery? Post-Kelo abuses in Washington just got supercharged. TIF diverts revenue from essential services to enrich connected developers and nonprofits. “Third-party” operators get subsidized rents and regulatory waivers while honest competitors get the shaft.From a limited-government view, HB 2313 tramples every principle: private property (an echo of the Fifth Amendment), free enterprise, and fiscal sanity. It grows government into retail, then mandates what you buy and when.
The Ideologues Behind the Curtain
Communism Comes to Aisle #3
Farivar and her crew aren’t hiding it. This is the “public option” for food, a foot in the door to control supply chains, prices, and choices. They tout military commissaries and tribal stores as “successes,” conveniently ignoring those are small-scale, federally funded monopolies, not scalable to urban America.
Real solutions? Enforce the law. Slash taxes. Deregulate. Let entrepreneurs fill the gaps. But that doesn’t expand the administrative state.
A Warning for Oklahoma
Government Waste, Fraud, and the Most Expensive “Fix” Money Can Buy
Oklahomans, take note. This is what happens when one-party rule meets utopian fantasies. Blue states are the laboratories of leftism, and HB 2313 is the next Frankenstein’s monster.
While Washington nationalizes groceries, Oklahoma stares down State Question 832—the $15 minimum wage initiative on the June 16, 2026, ballot. It would jack the wage from $7.25 to $12 in 2027, $13.50 in 2028, and $15 in 2029, with automatic inflation hikes after. If $15 an hour is so good, why not make it $1,000 an hour and let’s all live the high life? Same economic illiteracy: ignore incentives, ignore reality, and watch shelves empty and businesses flee.And if you think this madness stays on the Left Coast, look no further than right here in Oklahoma City, the very Heartland we’re supposed to be protecting.
In the northeast part of town, around NE 36th and Lincoln, a so-called “food desert” after decades of government neglect, soft-on-crime policies, and high taxes that drove real grocers away, the city spent millions of your taxpayer dollars to “fix” what it helped break.
They imposed a 180-day moratorium (later extended) on new dollar stores to bully the market. Then they rolled out the red carpet of corporate welfare: $3.5–4.4 million in Tax Increment Financing, $4–8.5 million in federal New Markets Tax Credits, land swaps, and other layered subsidies that covered 60–70% of the $11–12 million cost for a new Homeland store that finally opened in 2021.
This was the most expensive, bloated, bureaucratic solution imaginable to a problem government itself created. High crime (including retail theft), sky-high local sales taxes (8.5–9.5%+), and decades of red tape made the area toxic for private investment. So what did OKC do? Let the government break the market, then “fix” it by throwing other people’s money at a politically connected chain, while residents still pay $3 more for basics like milk and bread because the economics still don’t pencil out without the handout.
It’s the same failed playbook as HB 2313: government creates the crisis through bad policy, then rides in as the savior with your wallet. Waste, fraud, and abuse at its finest, proving that even in red Oklahoma, the big-government temptation is alive and well.
Don’t California my Oklahoma
These socialist experiments don’t create prosperity, they redistribute poverty. Higher wages on paper mean fewer jobs, higher prices, and more government “fixes” like publicly owned stores to “solve” the problems they caused.
HB 2313 isn’t about food access. It’s about power. It’s about punishing success and rewarding failure. It’s about turning the land of the free into the home of the handout.
I still remember small-town Oklahoma, where many local grocery stores were owned and operated by small family businesses, no subsidies, no eminent domain, just hard work and free enterprise.
The Sooner Sentinel has long warned: Big Government doesn’t solve problems; it becomes the problem. This bill in Olympia needs to die. Else, we get to watch the commissars come to shut down your corner store next.
Sooner Sentinel: Defending Liberty in the American Heartland.