🎙️ Coffee & Cynicism: Buckmaster's Border Bonanza Brews Business Battles and Ballot Blunders
Small business salvation clashes with judicial election chaos on the airwaves
Based on the Buckmaster Show for 6/2/25, a daily radio show in Tucson, AZ, interviewing local newsmakers. Analysis and opinions are my own.
😽 Keepin’ It Simple Summary for Younger Readers
👧🏾✊🏾👦🏾
🏜️🏢 Tucson's economic development director shared that the city is attracting businesses by being more affordable than California and supporting small companies, especially those owned by Spanish-speaking entrepreneurs.
🇲🇽🗳️ Meanwhile, a border reporter criticized Mexico's confusing judicial elections with low voter turnout, noting they were still more democratic than politicians appointing judges like Trump does with his Cabinet.
💼🤝 The discussion highlighted how economic hope and political dysfunction coexist along the border, with one guest building bridges through business development, while the other exposed failures in drug policy and arms trafficking that benefit American corporations more than border communities. 📉🔫
🗝️ Takeaways
🏢 Tucson's new Small Business Center offers multilingual support for micro-enterprises with 2-10 employees
💰 City provides 30% cost savings over California plus strategic Southwest location advantages
🌐 Foreign trade zones deliver tax-free inventory storage for manufacturers and exporters
⚖️ Mexico's historic judicial elections achieved world-first democracy despite 13% turnout troubles
🚁 CIA drone surveillance raises sovereignty concerns while targeting fentanyl operations
💊 Border correspondent challenges War on Drugs orthodoxy, comparing to failed Prohibition policies
🔫 American arms manufacturers profit while politicians blame Mexico for cartel violence
🗳️ Electoral democracy beats appointive authoritarianism, even when messy and imperfect
🤝 Economic development works when prioritizing people over corporate welfare schemes
Buckmaster's Border Bonanza: Economic Development Dreams and Democratic Disasters
The Buckmaster Show served up a smorgasbord of Southwestern storytelling this Monday, June 2nd, featuring the kind of compelling conversations that make local radio a treasure trove of truth-telling.
Host Bill Buckmaster welcomed two guests who couldn't be more different in their approaches to regional realities: Barbara Coffee, Tucson's economic development dynamo, and Keith Rosenblum, our perpetually pessimistic but persistently perceptive border correspondent.
Barbara Coffee: Small Business Champion with Big Development Dreams
Barbara Coffee, Director of Economic Initiatives for the City of Tucson, brought her three decades of experience to bear on the burgeoning business landscape of our beloved desert metropolis. Her enthusiasm for economic development radiates like heat off summer asphalt, and for good reason – Tucson is positioning itself as a serious player in the Southwest's economic sweepstakes.
"We have a strong commitment to supporting small businesses. So actually, the mayor and council, a few years ago, put a stake in the ground and said, ‘we need boots on the ground.’ We need small business navigators," Coffee explained, describing the newly opened Tucson Small Business Center at 600 South Meier. This isn't just another ribbon-cutting photo op – it represents a genuine investment in the micro-enterprises that actually employ real people rather than venture capital vampires.
The center targets businesses with two to ten employees – you know, the places where everyone actually knows each other's names and nobody needs a corporate wellness consultant to explain basic human dignity.
"They have an accelerator or a program to help people take their side hustle to a formalized job, like becoming registered contractors, and helping them study for the exam. They're also offering these programs in their native languages. So being taught in Spanish, when many of these Spanish-speaking small business owners, that's the only language they speak."
Finally, government services that acknowledge the radical concept that not everyone speaks English as their first language. Revolutionary stuff, truly.
But Coffee's ambitions extend far beyond small-scale success stories. She's orchestrating Tucson's transformation into a logistics and manufacturing magnet, leveraging our strategic Southwest location.
"Our location in the southwest, I-10 and I-19, 60 minutes from the ports of entry at Nogales, that is absolutely a competitive advantage when you think about all the days of sunshine that we have... We don't have a lot of natural disasters, you know, tornadoes and hurricanes and things like that, that break down a lot of other communities."
The city has annexed over 2,300 acres along I-10 near Houghton, dubbed the H2K site, with plans for another massive 8,000-acre development south of the airport. "We just have, in the last couple of years, annexed over 2,300 acres, a site we call H2K, that runs along I-10 and near Houghton and alongside the UP rail corridor." Translation: we're converting state land into corporate playgrounds faster than you can say "gentrification."
Because nothing says "sustainable development" like paving over thousands of acres of desert, but hey, at least we're being honest about prioritizing profit over preservation.
Coffee's competitive analysis reveals Tucson's trump card against California: "We are definitely a lower cost environment for business, about 30% across the board when we think about comparison to California. And yet we're as close as you can get without going in." The semiconductor surge in Phoenix is creating supply chain spillover effects, making "Tucson is a household name in Taiwan, for example. And that's because of the work that's happening with semiconductor and the expansion of TSMC."
Her explanation of foreign trade zones illuminated how global commerce flows through our desert crossroads:
"The foreign trade zone is basically an inventory tax abatement incentive so that companies that are here in the U.S. could bring in raw product, and that product would be able to sit without taxes associated with it for up to a year. And then it's used in their process and their manufacturing, and it's converted into something that ultimately they export."
Ah yes, tax incentives for multinational corporations – because clearly what working families need is more breaks for businesses that can afford armies of tax attorneys while regular folks struggle to pay property taxes.
When Buckmaster pressed about comprehensive considerations for relocating companies, Coffee acknowledged:
"They look at the quality of life in a community. They look at healthcare amenities. They look at lots of things that would make for a ripe environment for their workforce, something that is attractive to people they may have to recruit, but also to the longevity of the people that they hire and have on board."
Keith Rosenblum: Border Correspondent with No Patience for Political Pantomimes
Enter Keith Rosenblum, stage left, with his characteristic combination of cynicism and clarity. Our border correspondent arrived armed with devastating analysis of Mexico's recent judicial elections – the world's first attempt at electing all judges by popular vote. His verdict? An unmitigated disaster dressed up as democratic progress.
"I believe it was a huge waste of time, money, and is nothing more or less than the consolidation of the judiciary into the unified power of the Morena Party," Rosenblum declared, pulling no punches about what he considers Lopez Obrador's authoritarian legacy. "13% of the electorate voted in it... No one could understand it. It was all done in the name of a pueblo."
Now hold on, Keith. While 13% turnout is admittedly pathetic, let's not pretend that appointive systems are paragons of democratic virtue. Have you seen Trump's Cabinet lately? Every single nominee is a MAGA cultist chosen for loyalty over competence. At least Mexican voters got ballots instead of backroom deals. Sure, the process was messier than a Tijuana street taco stand, but democracy is inherently messy – that's what separates it from authoritarianism.
Rosenblum compared the absurdity to Woody Allen's "Bananas," where "a crazed Latin American dictator declare the language of San Marcos officially now to be Swedish. You can see the goofiness of this whole thing and you have to, you have to have a sense of humor to be able to assimilate it."
Because apparently elected judges are more absurd than lifetime appointments by partisan politicians. The irony is thicker than Arizona humidity in August.
The Mexican legislature's rubber-stamp compliance drew particular scorn: "They would have changed the national language of Mexico to Swedish if they'd had the opportunity or President Lopez Obrador had said to do it."
Fair point about legislative subservience, though one wonders if Keith has noticed the Republican Party's complete capitulation to Trump's every whim. Glass houses, stones, and all that.
When discussing the Trump administration's escalating tensions with Mexican officials, including sanctions against Baja California's governor, Rosenblum exhibited his libertarian streak: "What we've been doing is telling them, you know what, you are a threat to the US, your ideology or somehow we determine that you know your pro-Palestinian your anti-Semitic which all these things to me are bizarre because I don't I don't see it at all."
Nothing says "America First" like sanctioning foreign officials based on ideological purity tests that would make McCarthy blush.
His analysis of U.S.-Mexico security cooperation proved equally skeptical. Regarding CIA drone flights and fentanyl lab detection, Rosenblum observed: "I'd be shocked that you can't put a fentanyl lab in a basement somewhere and I last last I knew about drones are great but will they be able to detect a lab in a basement."
More fundamentally, he argued: "I think that fentanyl has just become a rallying cry. I think that there's no reason we want to try to interdict fentanyl at all. What we want to have is a US population that understands its danger and a US population that can go pick up some Narcan."
Imagine that – treating addiction as a public health crisis rather than a military operation. Revolutionary thinking from someone who apparently remembers when harm reduction wasn't considered radical leftist propaganda.
Rosenblum's comparison to Prohibition proved particularly pointed: "That's a habit issue that the US has. All we're going to do if we did it any interdiction at all is to make the prices higher for people that are already going to do something... We learned that lesson faster, taxed alcohol and we were done with it and we haven't learned that."
Most provocatively, he dismissed Mexico's seizure of 10,000+ firearms as meaningless theater: "Well, they can highlight the seizure of a million firearms. There's not the context that we need there. So again, it's a profitable business and guess who make profits from that business? Those are us. Those are our arms makers."
How dare he suggest that American weapons manufacturers might bear some responsibility for arming cartels? Next he'll be claiming that pharmaceutical companies contributed to the opioid crisis.
The Contradictions of Contemporary Border Life
This episode perfectly encapsulated the schizophrenic nature of Southwestern politics. Coffee's optimistic development vision offers genuine hope for economic diversification and community empowerment, particularly her commitment to multilingual small business support and strategic land use planning. Her approach acknowledges that sustainable growth requires investing in people, not just infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Rosenblum's unflinching analysis of political failures on both sides of the border provides necessary reality checks about institutional dysfunction and manufactured crises. His willingness to call out American hypocrisy while critiquing Mexican authoritarianism demonstrates the kind of intellectual honesty our political discourse desperately needs.
It's almost like complex problems require nuanced solutions rather than bumper sticker slogans and Twitter feuds.
The juxtaposition feels fitting for our fractured times – one guest building bridges through economic opportunity while another exposes the fault lines in cross-border governance. Coffee represents the possibility of capitalism with a conscience, while Rosenblum embodies the journalist's sacred duty to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
Both perspectives deserve serious consideration as we navigate an increasingly complex regional landscape where economic opportunity and political stability intersect in ways that affect every aspect of daily life – from housing costs to cross-border family visits to the simple question of whether democracy can survive late-stage capitalism.
Because apparently asking whether our economic and political systems actually serve human needs makes you either a communist or a terrorist, depending on which cable news network you watch.
A Note of Hope and Action
Despite the challenges outlined by both guests, reasons for optimism remain. Coffee's small business center proves that government can function when it focuses on serving people rather than corporate donors. Rosenblum's clear-eyed analysis demonstrates that independent journalism still exists, even if it requires hunting through local radio shows to find it.
The real hope lies in engaged citizens who refuse to accept manufactured crises as inevitable. Support local journalism like Three Sonorans that prioritizes truth over traffic, community over clicks. Subscribe to our Substack to keep this kind of analysis coming – because democracy dies in darkness, but it's resurrected through informed participation.
Contact your representatives about supporting small business development that prioritizes workers over tax breaks for corporations. Advocate for drug policy reform that treats addiction as a health issue rather than a criminal one. Demand transparency in arms sales and foreign policy decisions that affect our border communities.
Most importantly, remember that cynicism without action is just privileged despair. Hope without struggle is just wishful thinking.
What Do You Think?
How do we balance legitimate economic development with environmental sustainability and social equity? Tucson's growth trajectory promises jobs and investment, but are we just recreating the same extractive capitalism that created our current crises?
Should Mexico's judicial election experiment serve as a cautionary tale about populist democracy, or does it represent legitimate reform of a corrupt system? When existing institutions are already broken, does popular accountability matter more than professional expertise?
Is the "War on Drugs" finally dying, or are we just rebranding the same failed policies with new technology and bigger budgets? How do we move from punishment to prevention without admitting that decades of policy were fundamentally wrong?
Drop your thoughts in the comments below – because democracy is a conversation, not a monologue. And unlike our elected officials, we're actually interested in what you have to say.
Quotes
Barbara Coffee on business incentives: "We are definitely a lower cost environment for business, about 30% across the board when we think about comparison to California"
Keith Rosenblum on Mexico's elections: "I believe it was a huge waste of time, money, and is nothing more or less than the consolidation of the judiciary into the unified power of the Morena Party"
Rosenblum on fentanyl policy: "I think that fentanyl has just become a rallying cry. I think that there's no reason we want to try to interdict fentanyl at all"
Rosenblum on arms trafficking: "They can highlight the seizure of a million firearms... it's a profitable business and guess who make profits from that business? Those are us. Those are our arms makers"
Coffee on multilingual services: "They're doing these programs in their native languages too. So being taught in Spanish, when many of these Spanish-speaking small business owners, that's the only language they speak"
People Mentioned
Bill Buckmaster - Radio host, asks probing questions about economic development and border issues
Barbara Coffee - Director of Economic Initiatives, City of Tucson; 30 years experience including bringing Raiders to Las Vegas
Keith Rosenblum - Border correspondent, former Arizona Republic and Daily Star reporter, worked for Rep. Jim Kolbe
Jim Kolbe - Former US Representative (served "almost a quarter of a century"); quoted by Rosenblum: "those rights don't come back. Once they're gone, they don't come back"
Lopez Obrador - Former Mexican President; Rosenblum called his judicial reform legacy a "power grab"
Claudia Sheinbaum - Current Mexican President, described as "anointed" by Lopez Obrador
Marcello Ebrard - Mexican Secretary of Commerce, called "a very decent guy and a very sharp guy"
Luis Carlos Ugaldi - Mexican political commentator compared to "Tom Friedman or George Will," documented voting difficulties
Max Boot - Washington Post columnist whose drone warfare essay Rosenblum recommended as "must read"
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