If you’re a resident of the Rio Grande Valley, ask yourself this question: Would you rather have our federal government invest $125 million to fix our badly outdated levees, or is a better idea to spend over $1 billion to build a border wall?

At the present time, we have a federal government that is more than willing to spend over $1 billion for a border wall to keep Mexican immigrants out, or live under an illusion that it will do such a thing, but has little or no interest in bolstering Valley levees to protect us from catastrophic flooding.

Those of us old enough to remember the natural disaster that was Hurricane Beulah 40 years ago, know what catastrophic flooding can do. We remember how we were cut off from the outside world for days and weeks at a time, and the utter misery that a storm of that magnitude leaves behind in the way of great flooding.

And now four decades later, our region is really in no better shape to deal with a hurricane of the scope of Beulah, or as a recent Houston Chronicle article put it: “No region in Texas stands more at risk from the torments, and torrents, of hurricanes than the borderlands.”

And yet, the best our Congress can do is allocate less than $5 million for the task of rebuilding our levees when best estimates are that it will take $125 million to do the job. That’s a lot money, but it’s a lot less money than $1 billion to build a wall to keep the immigrant bashers happy. It’s also a lot less money than the $42 billion in additional money the Bush administration says it needs to add to the billions already being spent for the war in Iraq.

In the Valley alone, the feds will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build the 70-mile stretch of the border wall it is obligated to put up since our president and Congress passed a law mandating border fence construction. The fed’s eagerness to do so is shown in all of the mapping and surveying and planning they’ve already done to put up the wall along the edges of downtown Brownsville and UTB-TSC, and overlooking baseball fields and neighborhoods.

Wouldn’t it be something if the feds and Congress and the president had as much enthusiasm in mapping, surveying, and sending engineers to go about the urgent work of fixing our levees? For less than 15 percent of what the feds propose to spend on the border wall, we could get our levees fixed, and protect our families and homes from the sort of devastation some of us saw 40 years ago with Beulah.

Sadly, our government is more interested in rebuilding Iraq than in rebuilding New Orleans, or bolstering our levees to save our region from becomng another New Orleans if a category 4 or 5 hurricane were to come our way, as one did in 1967. It is also a federal government more interested in squandering our taxpayer dollars to build a wall of dubious effectiveness over shoring up our levees, the outcome of which is much more certain.

Think of this when you see the border wall going up with the billions of dollars it will take for that construction. The International Boundary and Water Commission estimates that flooding from a major hurricane will top Valley levees so badly and easily that at least a 38-mile vicinity in proximity to McAllen would be filled with floodwaters.

Oh well, at least there will be a wall up to keep the Mexicans out.

Think of the possibilities.

Now that the feds have announced where the vaunted border fence/wall is to be built, we can move forward as a community to make the necessary adjustments and celebrate the coming structure that will accent our border life.

First, give the new Brownsville high school to be built, (and along the Military Highway near the wall no less!), an appropriate mascot nickname. Chisme proposes the new high school adopt the name “Muros.” Yea, yea, I know that’s a rough translation to English, “the Walls.”
But now at football games, when fans put up those signs that say “D-Fence,” it would literally mean De-Fence.

Second, Chisme proposes a yearly border/fence float during the annual Charro Days parade, the big desfile on Saturday afternoon. It needs to be huge, the biggest sucker in the parade, and it ought to float down Elizabeth as one of the first, if not the first float of the Big Parade. Just for the sake of humor, and to show we’re good sports about the fence/wall, Chisme proposes having a couple of actors playing immigrants who can run around or climb over the fake wall, with another actor playing a U.S. federal agent popping out of no where for the inevitable arrest.
Crime doesn’t pay. The kids need to see that symbolism.

Third, rename the East Brownsville Little League at Lincoln Park. The wall/fence will rise like a giant on the levee over the diamonds of youth, so the league ought to be renamed something like the “Brownsville Fence & Wall Little League.” The kids can wear a cute wall/fence logo on their uniforms. A Border Patrol agent can throw out the first pitch of the season in front of the actual wall down to the playing fields below. It would be cool, no?

Fourth, promote the wall/fence as a tourist attraction. The Brownsville tourism hot-shots ought to be planning right now to hit the Republican Party’s national convention hard in 2008, when the elephant party nominates their presidential candidate. Here’s an instant-made marketing pitch: “Brownsville: On The Border By The Sea By The Wall.”

Building a wall/fence to keep Mexicans out is issue #1 with the right-wing GOP faithful, so Chisme guesses they can’t wait to journey down to see the wall of their dreams. It will be sort of like the Japanese tourists flocking to Egypt to photograph and go ga-ga over the pyramids.

 Chisme can hear it now from the GOP tourists flocking to Brownsville: “Look Mildred, it’s the border wall to keep out all  those dirty Mexicans.”

“Ain’t it pretty, Fred? It looks even better in person than when we see it on Fox News.”

And fifth, think of the economic surge this thing is going to give our community! My gosh, the concrete, framing, asphalt, brick, and trucking companies are going to have a field day. Good for them! And the immigrant workers that are building houses and roads are going to have new opportunities as well. If they can put up a new house in three months, just imagine how fast they can build a border wall.

Yes, I know, the border mayors and officialdom van a llorar now that the big, bad feds are going to go through with the wall that the Republicans want built. Ni modo, gang. Think positive. The best is yet to come.

Put your brain around this fact: The recent Democratic presidential debate on Univision drew almost as many viewers as the much vaunted YouTube prez debate on CNN. A USA Today story reports that 2.2 million viewers tuned into the Univision debate, which compares to the 2.5 million viewership of the CNN debate.

This fact presents many interesting dynamics. One, contrary to the stereotypes and bashing of Latinos that has become common fare on right-wing talk radio and cable television, many Hispanics are interested in American political life and issues. Second, the Democratic presidential candidates and their organizations, and political professionals in general, have to be intrigued by the vast different in age demographics of the two debates. The average age of the Univision viewer of the recent prez debate was 36. The CNN viewer, meanwhile, is much older. In fact, the average age for English-language prez debates is 61.

Now, it has been much reported that Latinos are this nation’s fastest-growing demographic, and about the same can be said in the growth this group will see as a percentage of the American electorate. Hispanics make up 8 percent of the nation’s electorate right now, but the Wall Street Journal reports it will grow to 20 percent by 2020 - and one-quarter of the total U.S. population will be Hispanic by 2050.

With those kind of projected numbers, it makes perfect sense, no, for all of the current Republican presidential candidates - save John McCain - to snub Univision and any notion of participating in that network’s prez debate for GOPers. One, the debate would have been conducted in English with Spanish translations, a major no-no with the GOP’s many right-wing gueritos who tie bilingualism to anarchy and moral decay. Two, alleged tough guy prez candidates like Giulani and big Fred Thompson apparently don’t have the guts to stand up to some tough questioning from a panel of Hispanic journalists, not to mention a wimpy sort like Mitt Romney.

It was interesting to see Dem candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama squirm a bit during the Univision debate, as they tried to explain why they voted for the border fence measure, a vote that runs counter to their supposed love and kisses for the Hispanic community. But at least they showed up, as did all of the Dem prez candidates. The same can’t be said for the GOP presidential wanna-be/weenies, with the exception of McCain, who unlike his counterparts has actually demonstrated toughness in his life in surviving  the ordeal of being a prisoner of war during the Vietnam conflict.

Republicans were getting somewhere nationally with Latinos as shown by the fact that the GOP’s presidential vote more than doubled from 1996 to 2004. Pero ahora? Forget it. Recent polls show that less than 20 percent of America’s Latinos now identify themselves as Republicans. Leave it to the conservative editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to explain why, as it did in its weekend issue of Sept. 15.

“Tone matters in politics, and getting people to vote for you is easier when you’re not likening them to Islamic terrorists, or implying that Latino men are hard-wired for gang-banging,” The Journal’s Sept. 15 editorial stated. “Some conservatives insist that it’s only the illegal aliens who have earned their wrath, but when the target of scorn is the mother or brother or cousin of someone here lawfully, that becomes a difference without much of a political distinction.”

Yep, Republicans are learning how to lose elections in one Lou Dobbs lesson, as The Journal put it. It looks the GOP deserves what appears to be coming its way. Que lastima, verdad? It’s hard to believe that it was only three years ago when the GOP prez candidate, (George W), outspent his Democratic opponent, (John Kerry), by $2 million in Spanish-language TV ads. But why spend that kind of money to attract the votes of terrorists and gang bangers?  

Silvestre Reyes served as the U.S. Border Patrol’s sector chief in the Rio Grande Valley for eight years in the 1980s before moving to El Paso to take the same post there. A native of El Paso, and a Vietnam War combat veteran, Reyes is now a congressman and the chairman of the House Intellegence Committee.

Here’s what Reyes has to say about the construction of a so-called border fence stretching hundreds of miles: “This (fence) proposal is ludicrous,” Reyes told USA Today in its Sept. 17 edition. “When people talk about fencing the border, it’s amazing that they don’t have a concept about what it takes to do it.”

What Reyes refers to is that it may cost $8.3 million a mile in annual maintenance costs to keep 700 miles of border fencing up by 2016. That’s how many miles of fencing the Congress and President Bush approved late last year as a Republican-controlled Congress scurried to pass an immigration restrictionist bill to rally their base for the mid-term elections.

It didn’t work. Republicans still lost control of both the House and Senate, and now those of us on the border will likely have to put up with the mess and eyesore of a border fence. It’s not that Reyes opposes all border fencing. He believes it can be effective in smaller stretches when combined with additional border security. But the fencing on the scale that Congress approved,  Reyes says is “expensive and a waste of taxpayer’s money.”

Congress approved $1.2 billion to begin construction of the 700 miles of fencing, but it would cost vastly more money than that total to finish construction, and then maintain it in the years to come. When maintenance is figured in, the Congressional Research Service says it will cost upwards of $70 million per mile over the next 25 years.

Would it be worth it, or would maintaining such a fence at that cost be what one California National Guard spokesman called “a bottomless pit” in the USA Today article. The border fence of the scale pitched by the immigration restrictionists is a fantasy this country can ill afford. But some version of it is coming. It’s the law, folks, as hard as that is to fanthom and believe.

Luis Gonzalez got word back as soon as the historic moment arrived.
“Monterrey,” Gonzalez said into his cell phone, “Transportes Olympic has landed.”
There was jubiliation and whoops of joy back at Transportes headquarters in Nuevo Leon. Gonzalez had just hauled a 20,000-pound shipment of steel from Monterrey to Charlotte, N.C.
It was touch and go. First, Gonzalez and his company had to deal with the cable news crazies.
“The Mexicans are coming! The Mexicans are coming!” warned Lou Dobbs, of CNN, a Paul Revere of our times, who warns Americans of all things Mexican on a daily basis.
Then, the Teamsters equated Mexican truck drivers to the likes of terrorists and drug pushers.
“Does anybody know how all the drugs are coming into America?” asked James Hoffa, the president of the Teamsters union. “They’re going to be coming into trucks pretty soon.”
I guess those drugs Hoffa is talking about aren’t coming in via Canadian trucks.
Trucks from Canada have full access to U.S. roads, and that’s been the case for several years now. You may have heard. A little agreement called the North American Free Trade Agreement passed in the early 1990s and says that trucks from the U.S, Canada, and Mexico will have full access to each other’s highways.
The U.S. and Canada thing got worked out, but no go for the Mexican trucks. President Clinton tried to get `em in, pero nada, and President Bush has been trying for seven years, but it’s easier to roll Army tanks through Iraq than to get a Mexican truck on I-35 past Laredo.
Things got even tougher when the whole immigration thing got whipped up in the U.S. You see, illegal immigrants from Guanajuato and a Mexican truck from Monterrey are the same thing. They’re both Mexican, and they’re both an attack on American sovereignity, according to a press release from The World Is Flat/Let’s Build A Fence Around the U.S., a coalition of anti-immigrant groups and conservative talk show hosts.
Somehow, don’t ask me how, Luis Gonzalez got his Mexican truck into the American heartland. Un milagro, I’d say. All he had to do was endure a more than two hour inspection from U.S. authorities, learn some English, and comply with a maze of regulations and requirements. Not only that, but the U.S. Department of Transportation thoroughly investigated the company which employs Gonzalez, Transportes Olympic, and found they had no crashes or trucks taken out of service for failure to meet safety guidelines.

Sorry, Transportes, not good enough. You might take jobs from a Teamster or be part of a conspiracy the World Is Flat group is warning us about, the one about building a super NAFTA highway through the heart of America, tearing the nation in two and ceding land back to Mexico, or something like that, if I got that evil plot right.

Anyway, don’t worry America. Just this week, the Senate joined the House of Representatives in dumping a pilot program to gradually allow Mexican trucks on U.S. roads. I guess 17 years after NAFTA passed the fools have to study it some more. But you know what? You can look at those trucks up-and-down, sideways, and turn `em over, and sabes que? They’re still Mexican trucks.

Here’s the kicker. The steel Gonzalez hauled to North Carolina is going to be used to build a Baptist church. A church! Holy cow. They better inspect that steel again. It might have drugs in it, or maybe an immigrant who will want to work.

The memorials to our veterans can be found throughout our region, including a wall of names in front of the Hidalgo County Courthouse in Edinburg, and the new and elegant memorial here in Brownsville by the library on Central.
Every war takes its soldiers, be they those who volunteered, or whom in previous eras were drafted or called to action in service of their country. The present war in Iraq is no different. The Rio Grande Valley has now lost over 12 of its young men and women to this war, which has now lingered over four years.

They came from our communities. Edinburg, Brownsville, Los Fresnos, Harlingen, Weslaco, Pharr and McAllen, to name some of the Valley communities that these soldiers called home. We all know this sort of service is nothing new for our region. Beginning most especially with World War II, the Valley has sent its sons and daughters to foreign lands to represent this country in its Armed Forces.

Now, with the war in Iraq, this nation needs to ask how much longer and when can some of our troops begin to come home from what looks to be an intractable war. The will of the American people is clear. A USA Today Gallup Poll taken in recent days says 60 percent of Americans support the notion of setting a timetable to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq.

It is a reasonable notion. The American people in the main are reasonable people. They know you cannot pull over 100,000 troops out of a foreign country in a matter days or months. It will take 12 to 18 months, at a minimum, the experts say to do such a thing. But it must be done.
The American people have clearly lost confidence in this president and his administration to effectively manage this war.

A New York Times/CBS Poll out today, (Monday, Sept. 10), reports than only 5 percent of Americans believe or trust the Bush administration can successfully resolve the war in Iraq. Five percent, that’s not a misprint. And then there’s the independent reviews, such as the one put out by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, (GAO), which states that the Iraqi government has failed to meet even a bare majority of its benchmarks for success to resolve what has turned into a civil war.

Listen to this voice: “Gen. David Petraeus will present his report on Iraq this week, but it will be written by the White House and other political leaders. I hope the (media) will present the truth about Iraqi government falling apart, the Shiites and Sunnis slaughtering each other, and our military strained beyond the breaking point. Let’s demand the truth this time!”

Is this the voice of a liberal, a partisan Democrat in Congress? No, it’s a letter published Sunday in the San Antonio Express-News that was written and sent by retired Lt. Col. James Berbiglia, who lives in nearby Helotes. Retired Lt. Col Berbiglia is frustrated, as are many Americans, that the will of the vast majority of the people in this nation is being subverted by a president and willing Republicans who put saving face over a failed policy above the the wishes of their countrymen and women.

The people of our region, like the rest of this country, want out of this quagmire, putting the safety and well-being of our troops above the political agenda and attempted legacy building of this president and like-minded Republicans.

The blogosphere had a field day with a recent Herald article about the Census Bureau ranking Brownsville as the nation’s poorest city. This bit of news hardly comes a shocking development. For years now, different government studies have shown Brownsville, the Rio Grande Valley as a whole, and U.S. communities along the border as being among the poorest in nation.

The reasons are historic, somewhat endemic, and certainly complicated. It’s easy to bash whomever happens to be mayor, or on the city commisson, but that’s hardly a complete answer, or fair for that matter. And just as povery has persisted in our communities, it would also be accurate to report that median household incomes have risen, as has job growth, along with booms in the housing and retail sectors in cities like Brownsville, McAllen and Laredo.

Part of what has hindered the border historically has been the lack of development in higher educational facilities. It has only been in more recent times that UT-Brownsville, UT-Pan American and Texas A&M Inernational in Laredo have begun to establish themselves as more complete higher educational institutions. Well-developed colleges and universities are job generators and economic development engines that raise the income levels of local residents and attract business and industry.

And as bad as things may look according to recent numbers, it use to be a whole lot worse. Some of the acerbic commentators to The Herald story about Brownsville’s poverty ranking were likely not born, or are too young to recall what economic life was like around here in the 1980s and into the 1990s. After devastating Mexican peso devaluations in the early 1980s, Brownsville’s economy cratered for the rest of that decade.

Unemployment soared. There was no housing or retail development to speak of. The confidence and spirit of the city plummeted, and it took years for Brownsville to get back at least some of its mojo. Brownsville’s rapid retail development on its northern corridor and all of the new rooftops that have gone up in new neighborhoods would indicate some economic vitality out there.

Hey, it’s tough all over. The city of Buffalo in upstate New York has lost half of its population over the last two decades. Let me say that again. Buffalo, once a booming manufacturing and business center, has lost half of its population as the Rust Belt has withered. And so while immigration and the people it brings here are always easy to bash and sterotype, they do help to provide an edge of vitality and energy a place like Buffalo would dearly love to have.

So, yes, Brownsville and the Valley are still poor by measures of per captia income and percentage of local residents living below the government’s poverty line. There’s still a long way to go in making this place and region a more prosperous place to live. But it’s not all bad. It could be the 1980s all over again.

What is it about Brownsville’s politics that local officialdom so often has trouble finding middle ground on contentious issues? Granted, that’s become a problem in our national politicial life as well, but it has existed in Brownsville for a good 20 years, at least.

City Hall politics falls into factions, bringing all sorts of friction. The characters change, the years roll by, but the factions re-emerge in some fashion or form. The MO is always the same: You’re either with me or against me. That’s the signature feel to city politics here.

It wears people out. Former mayors Ignacio `Nacho’ Garza and Eddie Trevino, both bright men with impressive educational training and backgrounds, had enough after one term. In the void, flaky sort of politicians step forward. Current Mayor Pat Ahumada and city Commissioner Charlie Atkinson fit that bill and description. It’s hard to figure these guys out because they seem to be on a frequency few others can find on their radio dials.

Ahumada is in love with his ideas and pet projects, but seems to have little interest in hearing what others have to say. Atkinson seems ill informed on a number of issues and comes up with statements and thoughts that are so far a field that perhaps folks should start refering to him as Commissioner Moon Beam.

Classic example of all the above is the City Commission’s recent decision to turn down a request from Valley Baptist Medical System to seek financing that would provide much-needed improvements in a number of essential medical services. Valley Baptist operates as a non-profit medical system, and as such, asked the city to authorize a local health facilities corporation to issue $94 million in bonds that would lead to the renovation and expansion of operating rooms, services for newborns and their mothers, and improving surgical patient units.

Valley Baptist would rank as one of this region’s more respected business operations, and their commitment to the Valley in terms of investment and charity contributions is right up there as among the best in our area. Since purchasing the former Brownsville Medical Center a few years back, the Harlingen-based Valley Baptist has spent millions to upgrade services and facilities at their Brownsville facility.

It’s hard to say if the city should have granted approval to Valley Baptist’s request. It appears from this viewpoint that it would have been wise to do so given Valley Baptist’s track record in improving medical services and facilities in this region. The competition and bad will in the medical community influenced the City Commission’s 3-2 vote to turn down Valley Baptist’s request, (Ahumada abstained and Commissioner Ricardo Longoria was imagining Brownsville at a workshop and was not present).

Other medical interests pressured the City Commission to turn down Valley Baptist, saying the city shouldn’t get involved in local competition among medical interests. That’s a rather dubious claim when pegged to the need for improved medical services, but it was the same rationale heard when a number of Valley doctors adamently opposed establishing a medical school in the Valley, (the much vaunted RHAC, which is in Harlingen).

Be that what it may, Atkinson came up with some beauties at the commission meeting where the Valley Baptist matter was discussed. One, Atkinson was not aware that Valley Baptist paid local taxes when in fact they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in property taxes. He also asked why Harlingen didn’t issue the bonds for the improvement of medical facilities in Brownsville. Uh, well, maybe it has something to do with the hospital in question being located in Brownsville.

Then it was revealed at the meeting that Atkinson had previously spoken with Valley Baptist staff in seeing if they would offer up an ambulance to the city in return for voting yes on their request. Atkinson said he just “threw it out there” in reference to his quid pro quo offer to Valley Baptist. Strange, no? Reminds Chisme of that REM song of the 1990s: “What’s The Frequency Kenneth?”

Ahumada, meanwhile, the guy who’s suppose to lead the commisson in finding consensus on tough issues, took a pass on voting on the Valley Baptist request even though he agreed with it “in principle,” whatever that means.

Too bad Longoria wasn’t around and was too busy imagining what Brownsville needed in providing a better community for its residents. How about better medical facilities? Oh, yea, that’s right. That got voted down. Imagine that.