Open letter to Governor Andrew Cuomo on Puerto Rico

Dear Governor Andrew Cuomo:

As the only governor in our country who visited Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, five times no less, and organized direct relief efforts on the island, you have put yourself in a prime position to show the world how we can truly re-build economies, from the bottom-up.

While many holders of Puerto Rican debt, and investors in its economy, have put the island in full austerity mode, you are in a unique position to stem this budding catastrophe, which will choke off opportunities, result in unemployment and hurt the most vulnerable citizens once the inevitable reduction in government services takes place.

Your familiarity with many of the leading investors in Puerto Rico is a benefit to Puerto Ricans and the hundreds of thousands of other individuals, many of them New Yorkers, affected by Maria. And with a lack of leadership in Washington, there is quite literally no one else in the entire country, besides you, who is in a position to envision change, and has the relationships to effectuate that change. You have the ears of top Puerto Rican government officials, as well as the leading investors who expect more austerity measures in order to recuperate their losses.

Put simply: You have a golden opportunity to show the world that Puerto Rico can stimulate its economy without incurring additional debt or austerity measures.

But how do we go about doing this exactly? We can do this by helping Puerto Rico build resilient local economies, starting with implementing cooperative economies and helping them build locally sufficient communities.

How do you define a “resilient local economy?” Imagine if Puerto Rico’s economy did not have to rely on outside investors to buy their bonds and finance their public projects. This would be a resilient local economy.

But in the meantime, Puerto Rico is a victim of centrally-driven systems that extract value from their country, forcing them into limited options to finance their pubic programs. They don’t have a choice but to borrow to pay for their needs. The economic strings are pulled by financiers thousands of miles away. Not bottom-up from residents on the Island.

I am asking you to help reverse this vicious trend and cycle of debt. A successful example set forth in Puerto Rico will prove beneficial for all vulnerable communities, states, and nations around the world. As Governor of New York, you have the ability to set a different tone and lay the groundwork to change the failing economic paradigm.

The first step is to go into Puerto Rico with the world’s best experts and implementers of cooperative and sharing economies to identify the resources and needs in each neighborhood. The second step is to co-design local solutions to connect the community and enable them to cooperate based on localized and functional currencies. Due to scarcity of conventional money and currency, these experts must help create community-based currencies designed to match needs with local resources.

During the 1970s, a small town in Brazil called Conjunta Palmeira underwent (at a smaller scale) what Puerto Rico is going through now. Pushed out by external forces, an entire community of fisherman didn’t have access to capital, lacked basic infrastructure and relied entirely on other cities to survive. In 1989, with a donation from the French government, the Banco Palmas was established as the region’s community development bank and they launched the “Palmas”, a complementary local currency designed to keep money circulating inside their community, fueling local growth and even regional pride. This nonprofit, community-driven model proves that it is entirely possible to stimulate economic growth from the bottom-up regardless of the situation and poverty level of that community: http://www.institutobancopalmas.org

Here are some other examples of bottom-up, resilience economic models:

• In Columbia, the Huertas Familiares para Autoconsumo (Urban Family Gardens) was created to provide vulnerable families with better access to healthier food through a peer-to-peer learning structure where neighbors taught each other under a government supervised program to create vegetable gardens, creating the foundation of a self-sufficient ecosystem: https://www.flickr.com/photos/75113635@N06/6837474787
• When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba suffered and went into great economic depression and relied on farmer-to-farmer learning models to create one of the world’s most sustainable organic agricultures in the world, resulting in urban farms providing more than 70% of all fresh vegetables to their cities: https://www.ruaf.org/sites/default/files/Havana_1.PDF
• In Kenya, in just a few years, there are six cities that created their own hyper-local community currencies to “exchange goods and services and incubate new businesses, without relying on scarce national currency and volatile markets.”: https://www.grassrootseconomics.org

I hope you can help our brothers and sisters in Puerto Rico implement a long-term plan for a decentralized and locally resilient society that can be immune from global markets that are only extracting value from local communities. Perhaps Mahatma Gandhi best understood and recognized the importance of self-sufficient and resilient local economies based on a decentralized system:

Life will not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom. But it will be an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individual always ready to perish for the village, the latter ready to perish for the circle of villages, till at last the whole become one life composed of individuals, never aggressive in their arrogance but ever humble, sharing the majesty of the oceanic circle of which they are integral parts. Therefore, the outermost circumference will not wield power to crush the inner circle but will give strength to all within and derive its own strength from it.

Gandhi was a visionary that recognized the problems of centralized and hierarchical systems and fought until his last days for a world that prioritizes decentralized and self-sufficient villages.

Again, Governor Cuomo, you have a golden opportunity. That opportunity includes being remembered as the first and only American public official to help build a resilient local economy during a natural catastrophe.

Sincerely,

Ron Kim

Member of Assembly (D-Queens)