AND WHO ELECTED RUSTEBERG OR GONZALEZ TO REPRESENT US?

By Juan Montoya

Almost unnoticed in the local coverage of the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development Jay Williams to Brownsville, was the fact that the city's residents and commission was represented by none other than United Brownsville's CEO Mike Gonzalez.

Gonzalez was featured in the local coverage of the Brownsville Herald  mouthing the United Brownsville mantra that we love maquiladoras, and that the city and the region will peg its future to this runaway industries and put all its economic development eggs in that dubious basket.

How it was that United Brownsville – which has received an Economic Development Association’s $300,000 grant to " analyze the supply chains within the Brownsville and Matamoros areas ahead of setting up a binational manufacturing zone along the border whereby factories in Mexico can work directly with their U.S. counterparts along the supply chain to cut overhead and better integrate the regional manufacturing industry" – usurped the normal functions of elected government and their economic development entities to push the United Brownsville-IBC President Fred Rusteberg-Carlos Marin maquiladora agenda is an alarming new development.

United Brownsville is a domestic nonprofit corporation whose Coordinating Board is made up of three non-elected members. They are Rusteberg, former UTB President Juliet Garcia and UTB vice-president Irv Downing. This self-styled "coordinating board" directs how the pie is cut using – not their money – but the money they have managed to hoodwink elected bodies and other publicly-funded entities to form over $25,000 "membership" to be part of United Brownsville.
These entities – as we have pointed out before – are: the City of Brownsville, the Greater Brownsville Incentives Corporation (GBIC), the Brownsville Independent School District, the Brownsville Navigation District, the Brownsville Public Utilities Board, the Brownsville Community Improvement Corporation (BCIC) and the University of Texas-Brownsville/Texas Southmost College."
Since 2009, this group and their willingly co-opted public officials have gone to the public-treasury well to strong-arm eight public entities for their $25,000 "annual membership" payment.
From 2009 to 2012 the public had shelled out $810,000. That doesn't include the $200,00 from 2013 and the $200,000 to be collected for 2014.  All told, the taxpayers of Brownsville will have shelled out $1,210,000 to United Brownsville for the privilege of having a troika accountable to no one "implement" their dubious "plan.

You cannot fire Rusteberg, Garcia or Downing. Ultimately, this trio and their supportive players on the board of United Brownsville that includes a select number of hand-picked, like-minded social climbers who are members of the city commission, the port, PUB, the university and college, and the economic development entities. The aim is for this cadre of players to decide how they want the area to develop and to move the public assets to achieve their goals. Being astute (and scheming) business types, it is not surprising that the direction the area's assets are being moved will ultimately profit them and their friends.

How they got one of the second-in-command honchos of the U.S. Department of Commerce to shell out a few bucks to advance the idea of offshore corporations benefiting the border is a measure of how thorough and diligent they have gone about their task.

Who benefits from taking U.S. and other industries offshore? Do American workers benefit by the exportation of jobs to northern Mexico? 

No. It is people like Sergio Arguelles and his FINSA, a maquiladora industrial park in Matamoros that stand to clean up on the scheme. It is also people like Marin and Gonzalez who stand to profit from the "setting up a binational manufacturing zone along the border whereby factories in Mexico can work directly with their U.S. counterparts along the supply chain to cut overhead and better integrate the regional manufacturing industry."

How Williams could say that the $300,000 grant to United Brownsville’s so it could "capitalize on the prevalence of maquiladoras in Tamaulipas on the other side of Texas’ Mexican border was a 'perfect' illustration” of Obama’s message about supporting U.S. manufacturing companies, flies in the face of the president's call for rewarding U.S. companies who return to this country.

The United Brownsville scheme to weasel its way into representing the interests of this area and bind it thoroughly to the maquiladora wagon and assure everyone that it was a United Brownsville coup is nowhere more evident that in its press release posted on its website.

Under the picture credit on the photo above (Photo: left to right – Asst. Sec. Williams, Mike Gonzalez – United Brownsville, Fred Martinez – Carling Technologies), the story said that Williams "traveled to Brownsville, Texas to participate in a roundtable discussion with United Brownsville Executive Director Mike Gonzalez and other regional business and community leaders...at Carling Technologies located at 3734 International Blvd, Brownsville, Texas."

“The President stressed the importance of modernized trade authority to support American jobs, boost U.S exports, and promote economic growth and stability. EDA is committed to supporting U.S. manufacturing companies to help them grow and succeed in the global marketplace, and our investment in United Brownsville strengthens its supply chain strategy to meet global demand and spur economic growth in the U.S. -Mexico border.”

Almost lost in the flighty rhetoric is the fact that – contrary to the Obama administration's efforts to lure back American manufactures from their offshore sites and bring the jobs back to this country – United Brownsville is actually encouraging them to stay there so they can sweep the crumbs of their manufacturing process.

Williams mouthed the United Brownsville creed that the money "will identify opportunities and challenges in creating the clusters as well as develop strategies to use supply chains with products manufactured locally in the project region...this project will ultimately encourage trade and export in the U.S. border region, which will help make the region more competitive."

Hey fellas, the reason those maquiladoras are in northern Mexico isn't because of the lovely climate, proximity to the sea, the quaint culture, or theuniqueness of poverty-wracked South Texas. They're here because they want cheap labor, the cheaper the better. If local workers on the U.S. side can't compete on a salary level with the drones in the maquilas, why they can always leave and go elsewhere. It's a free country, right?

That is, ultimately, what maquiladoras (offshore manufacturers) have done to South Texas. Just about everyone in Brownsville and the Rio Grande Valley knows of someone's son or daughter who struggled to push themselves through school and couldn't find a job here because of the artificially low wages and who had to leave home to find better opportunities.

The fact that United Brownsville is using this community's funds to push to continue this nefarious cycle of warped economic development that benefits Rusteberg's banks and Marin's buddies across the Rio Grande  is nothing short of obscene.