Prosperity for Rhode Island

An Open Letter to the Providence City Council

Greg Gerritt:   ProsperityForRI.org

Dear City Council,

More and better recycling is one of the more important efforts Providence has undertaken in recent years, one that will save the city considerable money and contribute to its further development.  Everyone is aware that the roll out of mandatory recycling has been a bit bumpy.  But the roll out of mandatory recycling has been a bit bumpy in every city.  But other cities stayed the course and the bumpiness went away in just a few weeks, as it will in Providence.

Rolling back mandatory recycling will be a huge waste of money and resources, setting back this effort by years, and will bring you nothing but shame.

I want to know why you waited until now to act?  All of you are astute politicians, and if you were paying attention you would have known that city efforts to publicize the program were a bit weak.  So where were you and your ward committees and block captains?  Why were you not organizing neighborhood meetings throughout October preparing your wards and neighborhoods for this change?  I see now that some council members are distributing recycling bins in the community, but why did you not do this in October?

The resolution to roll back recycling can only bring you shame.  You should vote it down.  And any council member who is not out this weekend with their ward committee distributing recycling bins ought to be ashamed of them self.

Sincerely,

Greg Gerritt

37 6th St

Providence RI 02906

401-331-0529

To the editor,  The front page of the November 10, 2009 Providence Journal has another headline on how poorly the RI economy is doing, now using the term Code Red to describe it.  Yes it is likely that the RI economy will continue to fall apart.   All the kings horses and all the kings men can not put Humpty Dumpty together again.

We get experts in government telling us what to do, we get professors at URI telling us what to do, we get think tanks telling us what to do.  But they fail, fail, fail.  The reason they fail is that the prescribed wisdom is to do whatever Wall St wants us to do and to appease the rich.  Lets be very clear.  Wall St looted the country, and doing what they want us to do will only get us looted again.  The prescriptions by the experts to appease the rich have been the standard potion for 50 years and they have been nothing but failure.

You can not fix the economy of Rhode Island from the top down.  It must be fixed from the bottom up.  If we are to fix the RI economy here is what we ought to do.  Recycle a lot more, and get to zero waste.  Compost everything that can be composted and use it to build soil fertility.  Grow more food.  Make our rivers fishable and swimmable, and return fish to abundance in them.  Eliminate the use of all fossil fuels, make sure every building is fossil fuel free and actually affordable, use mass transit instead of autos, and stop confusing the depletion of the natural world with income.  Using the medical industrial complex to grow the economy only makes healthcare more expensive and puts it out of reach of the poor.  Focus on primary care.

I doubt the so called leaders of RI are ready for such an endeavor, but I also know that if they stick with the usual prescriptions they will fail to revive our community.  If any of our leaders or candidates are ready to stop being stupid, they can find me at ProsperityForRI.org and I would be happy to help them develop an economic plan that will work.  They can also stop by and see me at the Buy Nothing Day Winter Coat Exchange on Nov 27 outside the State House.

Greg Gerritt

Today the headlines were all about how the RI economy is in the tubes and going down fast.  You are going to see prescription after prescription on cutting taxes, increasing competetiveness.  But what you will never see is the real prescription, which is get our ecology healthy and grow more food while reducing our carbon footprint.  Even when they get the idea of clean energy right it is still in the old model of MORE.  Let us intelligently shrink our economy and use that to move to prosperity.  greg gerritt