Launched to provide an information service connected with _Toward a Bioregional State, the book; the blog is the commentary, your questions and my answers, and news from around the world related to the issues of sustainability and unsustainability in a running muse on various issues of concern or inspiration.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Bioregional Videos: Savouring Europe, Severing the EU
"With the lemon added to the eggs, and then the cooking water of the [native only] greens, a distinctively Arcadian taste is created--a taste that has survived Italians, Turkish, Germans, and others--though will it hold out against foreign fast food? For the momoment, they seem to believe so...The Lucius Gorge, this easily defended natural bastion, became the center of Greek identity, preserver of its religion, and its dreams of freedom from the occupying Ottoman Turks [or now the European Union's Euro?]. Monasteries cut into rocks high above the valley still cling to the cliff....In the 19th century, these monasteries, in the face of Ottoman oppression illegally schooled young men, who became the founders of the modern Greek state." Now they grow local organic crops. "At this waterwheel, built around 1800, the wives of revolutionaries had their maize and wheat ground into flour."
Below is an interesting set of videos entitled "Savouring Europe" by Journeyman Pictures, produced in 2009. They are on the European movement for localization of commodities, taken against the European Union's ecologically and economically eroding drive for homogenization.
These films state clearly with detailed regional examples how cruelly and ecologically irrational is the current arrangement of the European Union. This was mentioned in a section of the last post on the huge putsch against local democratic voting worldwide, particularly in the European Union and how the megapowerful states like the U.K., the U.S. and the European Union are filled with vote fraud and unsustainable material pressures as a result. It was mentioned here as well, a post about unsustainable monocropping choices of agriculture.
This is the point of the book about the bioregional state--that corruption is environmental degradation. Only solving corruption and elite gatekeeping will get us to a bioregionally sustainable form of government.
Environmental sociologist Mark D. Whitaker is a comparative historical researcher on the politics of environmental degradation and sustainability. Toward A Bioregional State is his novel approach to development and to sustainability. He proposes that instead of sustainability being an issue of population scale, managerial economics, or technocratic planning, an overhaul of formal democratic institutions is required. This is because environmental degradation has more to do with the biased interactions of formal institutions and informal corruption. Because of corruption, we have environmental degradation. Current formal democratic institutions of states are forms of informal gatekeeping, and as such, intentionally maintain democracy as ecologically "out of sync". He argues that we are unable to reach sustainability without a host of additional ecological checks and balances. These ecological checks and balances would demote corrupt uses of formal institutions by removing capacities for gatekeeping against democratic feedback. Sustainability is a politics that is already here—only waiting to be formally organized.
Back to Savouring Europe.
Though there are 13 video segments, only 11 of them seem viewable to me. However, I put all 13 links below if you can see all of them.
In Europe, this localization or 'slow food' movement (a description is tucked into this post) has been coming about for a generation. It is occurring as a transnational, homeless, European technocrat class with loyalties to nothing except themselves--without elections, without referendums, without legality--blithely erode long term durable bioregionalism of humanity in Europe.
This corrupt EU project to destroy bioregionalism against rejected referendums to the contrary is attempting to pressure politically a material homogenization of all the commodity and regional identities of Europeans with their many cultures, foods, and folkways for the interests of only a tiny transnational political economic elite. The European Union is a corrupt aristocratic project instead of a multi-regional, representative, sustainable state.
I predict the EU will fail because it is an unsustainable project in its current version that rejects bioregionalism, the requirements of geographic voting, and ecological checks and balances. However, in the long interim learning process why the EU is bad currently, it will cause much damage to people's health, ecology, and economics before the EU fails.
That is what is so fascinating about these films: it balances well the coverage of the negative damage that the EU is doing to local health, ecology, and economy that is so bleedingly apparent, though the films additionally and beautifully interweave a positive message of how quiet, hungry, healthy, regional resistance is maintaining and even recovering older culinary traditions. This is a lever that can turn the world.
Why is the project of maintaining bioregional foodways important?
Without any particular order, first, it is because biodiversity of the human food varietal heritage of plants and animals fitted to particular regions is in danger, being politically pressured by other more consolidated choices that fit well nowhere and lead to degradation of health, ecology, and economy. Without this global larder of multi-regional knowledge for what fits in certain regions well, institutionally preserved by using and eating it daily, we will (and already are) living much risker lives with more crop failures and animal diseases. See the section "Seven Arguments Against Cloned Animals," here. At least you think, "I'm not eating cloned animals yet." However, if you live in the U.S. you are, or if you globally eat U.S. beef you are. Since 2008. The U.S. chose to hide the fact. Just search for "cloned U.S. beef" on the web:
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Cloned Beef Has Already Entered U.S. Food Supply, Even Before FDA Nod
29 Jul 2008 ... Cloned Beef Has Already Entered U.S. Food Supply, Even Before FDA Nod The major cattle cloning companies in the United States have admitted ...
www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_13913.cfm - Cached
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Dead cow carcasses "resurrected" to produce cloned beef
16 Aug 2010 ... (NaturalNews) We already know that cloned beef has entered the food supply both in the United States (http://www.naturalnews.com/023718_f. ...
www.naturalnews.com/029487_cloned_beef_DNA.html - Cached
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Dead Cows Cloned To Boost US Beef Production
12 Aug 2010 ... Some of the cattle cloned to boost food production in the US have been created from the cells of dead animals, according to a US cloning ...
www.huffingtonpost.com/.../dead-cows-cloned-to-boost_n_680448.html - Cached
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Cloned beef causing uproar in Britain traced to Wisconsin cow ...
14 Aug 2010 ... The world of cloning hasn't exactly been paradise for Wisconsin dairy ... have banned U.S. beef over fears related to growth hormones. ...
www.jsonline.com › News › Wisconsin - Cached
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U.S. beef is now being made from cloned cows? - Pioneer Living ...
16 Aug 2010 ... Pioneer Survivalist Blog has many survivalist topics for today preppers.
www.pioneerliving.net/.../4532522-u-s-beef-is-now-being-made-from-cloned-cows- - Cached
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BBC News - Cattle 'cloned from dead animals'
12 Aug 2010 ... Beef, pig and dairy farmers are all trying to establish whether cloning is an economic proposition. Two years ago, the US Food and Drug ...
www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10951108 - Cached - Add to iGoogle
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Cloned beef in Britain's food chain spreads alarm - Health ...
4 Aug 2010 ... Meat from the offspring of a cloned cow in the United States entered ... cow disease in the 1990s that saw British beef exports banned for a ...
www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38561984/.../health-cloning_and_stem_cells/ - Cached
"Cancerous Clones. It's what's for dinner."TM
Moreover, GMO crops fit nowhere except Monsanto's pocket, and there are well documented health dangers and well documented corruption that has been responsible for GMOs.
"On March 11 a new documentary was aired on French television - a documentary that Americans won’t ever see. The gigantic bio-tech corporation Monsanto is threatening to destroy the agricultural biodiversity which has served mankind for thousands of years."
"This lecture was created by combining the 6 pieces posted on YouTube by The Kick Them All Out Project. http://www.KickThemAllOut.com This project shows you how we can take back control of Congress from the special interests that control it now and put an end to things like GMO foods. This lecture by Jeffrey Smith, author of Seeds of Deception, summarizes the contents of his book, which explains the health dangers of genetically modified foods, and the industry cover-up."
Second, why is the project of maintaining bioregional foodways important? it is because humans have become bioregional creatures over the recent millenia. We are from somewhere, a specific culinary and climatic somewhere in our genes. We are a bioregional species instead of an abstract human species. Our health is built into such regionalism, and our health in general decays without access to it. There is nothing called an abstract human being.
A book on our innate "bioregional diet" as important to resuscitate for our own health is Why Some Like it Hot: Food, Genes, and Cultural Diversity, by Gary Paul Nabhan
From Publishers Weekly
With 21st-century science promising better living through genetic engineering, and myriad diet fads claiming to be the answer to obesity and disease, this exploration of the coevolution of communities and their native foods couldn't be more timely. Ethnobiologist Nabhan (Coming Home to Eat) investigates the intricate web of culture, food and environment to show that even though 99.9% of the genetic makeup of all humans is identical, "each traditional cuisine has evolved to fit the inhabitants of a particular landscape or seascape over the last several millennia." Sardinians are genetically sensitive to fava beans, which can give them anemia but can also protect them from the malaria once epidemic in the region. Navajos are similarly sensitive to sage. [Other cultural regions--of food, genes, and culture over time--thus build animal fats into diets as why people some people are healthy on these diets and others less so.] In both cases, traditional knowledge allows safe interactions with these powerful medicine/poisons through cooking methods or food combinations. Nabhan questions the wisdom of genetic therapy, which "normalizes" the "bad" genes that can cause sickness but also enhance immunity. Most inspiring in this bioethnic detective story are Cretans, maintaining their health for centuries through traditional living, and Native Americans and Hawaiians, whose communities, devastated by diabetes, find an antidote by returning to their traditional foods, customs and agriculture. Mixing hard science with personal anecdotes, Nabhan convincingly argues that health comes from a genetically appropriate diet inextricably entwined with a healthy land and culture.
From Booklist:
Ethnobotanist and nutritional ecologist Nabhan continues the paradigm-altering investigation into the matrix of food, place, ethnicity, and well-being that he's been conducting in such influential books as Coming Home to Eat (2002). A leading voice in the slow-food movement and a thoroughly engaging guide, Nabhan now delineates the evolutionary dimension of newly recognized interactions among cuisine, culture, and genetics that inspired him to modify an old adage: "We are what our [recent regional instead of ancient paleolithic!] ancestors ate and drank." He teases out the evolutionary secrets of chili peppers and explains why some folks like them hot and others can't take the heat. Since it's easiest to see the hidden benefits of ethnic cuisines in isolated island societies, he travels to Sardinia, where, for centuries, fava beans have protected the populace from malaria, and to Hawaii, where natives have discovered that traditional yet neglected taro dishes control diabetes [in their genotypes best]. With millions [really the majority of the world, he writes] of people suffering from little-understood food-related maladies, Nabhan's revelations of the complexities of our [regionally] inherited interactions with food, the true significance of the healthful "synergies" of traditional ethnic cuisines, and the essentiality of both biodiversity and cultural diversity are as critical as they are fascinating.
Therefore, beware the industrial pressures and corrupt states that attempt to demote your 'bioregional diet' of traditional regional foods, many of them (not all!) high in saturated, animal fats for some regions. And beware the people who tell you "animal oils are bad" (depends on your regional genetics! and) because that was a multi-generational industrial agricultural advertising based on fear to sell more of what they could sell more cheaply: what have turned out to be dangerous "unsaturated vegetable oils" instead of healthy after all. Data you say? Ms. Fallon can explain this better: she describes the U.S. as the worst case of a powerfully corrupt industrial destruction of bioregional dietary standards, where diet and scientific knowledge was sculpted or perverted for industrial profit with the introduction of unhealthy versions of mono-cropped vegetable oils, replacing healthier versions of animal and vegetable oils. Keep that general theme of politicized "supply versus demand" in mind, and start Savouring Europe. And start savoring the world's regions everywhere.
(Season 1, Episode 1) January-March: Winter is ending, the land comes alive with new season potatoes and is ploughed for early spring crops. The grasslands cycle begins; cheese and beer making and organic farming respond to the weather on the rolling hills which descend to the Atlantic where tiny boats ply for shellfish.
(Season 1, Episode 2) In the hot June weather, starred chefs shout orders or create Zen like calm; artisan cheese makers and bakers, farmers and herdsmen supply the city from the surrounding hills. People use the vineyards and surrounding hills to celebrate wedding or just a get together.
(Season 1, Episode 3) Late spring but the Inns still produce stews reminiscent of the delicacy of France and the richness of Germany; their famous handmade chocolates roll off a small production line filled with surprises and stoic fishermen on horseback search the coast for grey shrimp against a backdrop of medieval cities glittering on working canals.
(Season 1, Episode 4) A dense forest produces mushroom, herb and fruit treasures; horse drawn ploughs and ancient cranky machines produce freshly milled buckwheat flour and just emerging from the aspic of communism, people celebrate their pagan past in a mid-summer eve filled with song and fire.
(Season 1, Episode 5) A huge grazing land alive with wild horses and cattle rounded up by cowboys; trout from the rivers and piles of red and orange paprika fill the kitchens of the inns and steaming goulash and thick sour cream are served in generous heaps.
(Season 1, Episode 6) The Carpathian Mountains, the wildest part of Europe where bears and wolves still roam, where ancient machines still plough the land and a local fruit brandy is toasted at the ritual pig killing. In a Counts kitchen woman create pastry and bread in surprising ways.
(Season 1, Episode 7) May and the early sun tickles the land. Donkey graze beneath an ancient monastery clinging to the cliffs above. In hill towns, cooking continues as it did in the 18th century -steaming lamb dishes informed by Ottoman and Venetian cuisines.
(Season 1, Episode 8) Autumn on the coast as the sea rises, oysters and salmon pulled fresh from Clew bay are cooked. Cool green landscape with stretches of potato farms and russet moors with their sheep herders roving the commons blend beyond the song and stout filled pubs.
(Season 1, Episode 9) Summer and boar and deer are provided to be smoked and cooked as treats; lake fish and eels are provided for the new Swedish chefs to demonstrate their take on traditions and people speak of their passing culture in the reflection of deep blue lakes.
(Season 1, Episode 10) Very early spring on this river run flat plane dotted with medieval villages and towns where craftsmen and women hold onto memories of rich pork dishes,moist dark breads and smoky beer and where an ancient miller still operates his wooden and iron machines.
(Season 1, Episode 11) Early autumn in the folds of a river valley where the grape vines are harvested and celebrated with food and dance in the villages; suckling lamb is baked in a wood oven and in the early morning the whole town turns out to witness the bulls which are challenged by the young bravos.
(Season 1, Episode 12) Spring, now well set in the Mediterranean as herbs and early vegetables unwrap themselves. Here are the best dried pasta makers in Italy. In the white towns and on the Gargano Peninsula, Easter is celebrated with a night illuminated by burning wooden cones.
(Season 1, Episode 13) Its almost Christmas so the olives are harvested and celebrated; monks make a rare sweet liquor; an extraordinary pastry is stretched to the size of a room; the vines are cared for and fishermen pull eels from the Atlantic to be made into a Christmas stew.
BioregionalStateTV: "The Sustainability Channel"
For more videos, see my assembled BioregionalStateTV. BioregionalStateTV has expanding links demonstrating very inspiring ideas that are already working against monocultures to institutionalize bioregionalism, varietal food durability, independence, and profit. BioregionalStateTV will have well-produced videos that detail how to move biophysically toward more "watershed-centric" arrangements of material sustainability.
[Update from June 2012: due to changes at Google.com, that Google Video's channel is inaccessible to the public. Over time I will move these films to my YouTube Channel, at TheBioregionalState: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheBioregionalState.]
On Trends and Questions of Individually "Voting From Abroad:" Instead Vote Watershed Abroad, Worldwide
("Yes, your vote is securely in our hands. Go ahead, you want to support this corrupt system, right?" A case of vote fraud by these men in white hats that had huge effects on U.S. history: the stolen election in Precinct 13 in 1948 in a small Texas town led to Senator, Vice President, and then President Johnson.)
What does the bioregional state think of individually "voting from abroad?" Vote Watershed Abroad. Individually voting from abroad is disastrous for representation and sustainability because of the degradative system that it supports and in how it erodes locality, and because of the insecurity of the vote in the hands of incumbents that gain by the process even though increasingly they find difficulty in getting together any support in their own country. If given the option of voting abroad, as an individual, it should be left unused, in abeyance, for the following rationales.
The Importance of the Geographic Quality of the Vote and Citizenship, Domestically or Abroad
To elaborate, what does the bioregional state think of "voting from abroad"? "Vote Watershed Abroad" in the bioregional state--home or abroad--because the watershed has a common representative, democratic basis of check and balance on the degradation of unrepresentative state elites abroad. Simply voting from abroad as an individual (instead of as a watershed bloc) into black boxes of increasing vote fraud and e-vote fraud in nationalist states is hardly an intelligent recipe for expanding representation or sustainability. Voting from abroad as an individual seems inspired intentionally to demote the unruly geographic vote feedback of its own state citizens who dislike the direction that many states worldwide are going: to make themselves less locally representative and far more civilly repressive. So voting abroad as an individual is a form of encouragement of this repressive policy at home, by demoting the proportional value of local regional politics and by how those states typically reject allowing you to vote in your local elections at home. Much (hardly all, data below) voting abroad 'squeezes' your abroad vote into only the very national politicians who have a hard time getting anyone to support them as they refuse to change their policies toward sustainability.
Instead 'vote watershed from abroad,' into other local watersheds at home. Enhance the value of the locality of your votes whether home or abroad, instead of merely voting as an individual into a fraudulent nationalist whirlpool of an abstract nationalist state. Simply doing the latter may make everything worse, civilly and environmentally.
And if you are without the political rights to do so, build them. Furthermore, utilize your vote in other ways-- economically, educationally, or financially--by what you support locally in where you are.
Voting Abroad Critically Analyzed
A majority of the world’s unsustainable state elites are keen to expand, so their citizens are told, their so-called democratic legitimacy by expanding voting privileges to those living outside the geographic jurisdiction of a home territorial state. Even Botswana is getting into the act.
"Mr. Theophilus Dowetin, International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), an inter-governmental organization which supports sustainable democracy worldwide, told the Ghana News Agency in an interview that 114 states and territories (as of March 2007, 115 as of 2010) [out of 203 states that means 56% of all states worldwide] had legal provisions which allowed their electors to vote from abroad. This figure includes five, which have legal provisions in place to allow external voting but, for different reasons, is yet to be implemented. These include well-established democracies along with the emerging or restored ones. He explained that 44 out of the 114 countries and territories with provisions for external voting applied it to only one type of election [limiting these voting rights of its citizens--typically for opposing local election participation, like the United Kingdom], but a number allow external voting for two or more types of election. In Africa, 28 countries have provisions for external vote. The Americas have 15, Asia 20, Europe 41 and Pacific 10. Mr Dowetin said the most common practice was to allow for two types of [nationally abstract] election [while rejecting local election participation]- most frequently presidential and parliamentary elections - which is practised in 22 countries. He explained that a little over 20 countries and territories used a combination of three types of elections or more."
There are at least three versions of this abroad voting that I see as trends: typically these added privileges are based on attempting to capture a large nationalist diaspora to shore up an unrepresentative politics at home. This shoring up of a degradative politics that is increasingly opposed at home is done by canny elites so they can continue their unrepresentative policies against local nationalist opposition. It can be done by three appeals: appealing to citizens at large, appeals only to state bureaucrats being given this right to vote (instead of its citizens, in the case of India currently!), appeals to military voting in the case of the (late great) United States as it expands unchecked e-vote fraud to throw elections to its unrepresentative Democratic or Republican incumbents as the local population increasingly rejects these parties. The Machiavellian United States particularly is keen in letting its massive ‘baseworld’ vote, ironically, while occupying other land’s illegally while they are unable to vote on the issue.
However, expand this principle. What IF the regular local people--the people beyond the military bases or beyond the transnational corporation’s compounds, had the rights to vote in the occupier’s country to provide feedback against unrepresentative decisions taken by that other country in THEIR land? This would go for unrepresentative development as well as military occupation.
So expand this principle. If you want to vote abroad, let everyone do it. Let all the people, all around the world's watersheds, vote in the 'home' state that influences their local watershed from abroad. Mentioned in the book, stop "extraction without representation."
Since only a handful of countries that have had external voting have rejected it after starting it, and since when they do apply it is typically to remove local participation in the process, it seems a global trend worth discussing for its bad implications in this lack of local representation that is enhanced with international voting.
Left undiscussed here, another trend that marginalizes the geographic quality of the vote is the large extent of work visas designed to grant only a form of indentured servitude without political rights or even economic rights to change jobs, demoting citizenship and common labor capacities to organize in a common geographic area. It is a work visa as 'feudalism,' similar to the abroad vote that in many cases only allows you to vote 'feudalistically' on unsecured nationalist levels under threat of vote fraud. Further 'feudal' about it is the fact that this 'squeeze' of additional votes from abroad is in common to only let bureaucrats vote, while denying it to everyone else: "Restricting external voting to diplomatic staff or to those employed by the government is a fairly common type of activity-related restriction: it is found, for example, in Bangladesh, Ireland, Israel, Laos, [India,] and Zimbabwe." So are they actually interested in "expanding the vote abroad" or only interested in expanding their incumbency while people reject their policies at home? I say the latter.
Obviously, the bioregional state book mentions how we can employ the idea of voting from abroad for its potential good implications as a form of unsustainability feeback by integrating those who experience the majority of externalities caused by another state though it's in their own country. Surely their feedback politics should be integrated in some manner this way. Since most pollution (hardly all), is waterborne, this feedback can be based on global watersheds throughout (across borders sometimes) all nationalist states of the world.
Though why do this? What kind of principles would be legitimate in this way? First, let's get a picture of the political world we are talking about. It is a more geographically real and stable world of politics than the artificial networks of voting rights being extended around the world.
This is a map of global watersheds, imaged as global ecoregions.
First, voting from these areas is the basis of political feedback against unsustainability. It is a "natural" ecological check and balance of people's ecological self-interest against delocalized elites that, when left unchecked, work for their own private interests of consumptive consolidation and expansion of externalities into the economy, the ecology, and your health.
Anything that erodes these ecoregions--and the political rights of people who live within them and represent them--is unsustainable. The main point of the bioregional state is to stop the erosion of locality politically and environmentally while organizing a larger representative and sustainable series of Ecological Reformation institutions as interlocking additions to state, educational, financial, and consumptive choices durable for the many different regional priorities of interactive requirements of sustainability worldwide. This is the bioregional state, part of the larger Ecological Reformation of institutions worldwide that is required for sustainability.
New Zealand has a nice arrangement that does preserve the geographic qualities of the vote by allowing all people in New Zealand (whether foreign citizens there tempoarily on work, or its own nationals abroad for temporary or long term stay) to vote:
"When there is no special or additional requirement linked to the circumstances or personal situation of the potential voter abroad, a guarantee of universal access can be assumed in the sense that external voting is accessible to all citizens whether, for example permanently or temporarily abroad. The most common and widespread requirement, although not the only one, is that of citizenship, although there are exceptions. New Zealand, for example, recognizes citizens of other countries as external electors if they are permanently resident in New Zealand: they do not need to be New Zealand citizens in order to qualify as external electors. From this perspective New Zealand would be considered the most inclusive [geographic, and sustainable voting] case."
However, voting from abroad for most countries means a very limited type of voting that has demoted the geographic quality of the vote: typically only to support nationalist elites with reduction of allowances for local voting. As more understand that nationalist elites, left or right, have entirely abandoned their nationalist peoples and are selling off their democratic or somewhat vaguely representative jurisdictions to corrupt international corporate elites or transnational military elites without clear national loyalties, without clear checks and balances against them, though with clear criminal intent (like NATO for instance), such transnational gatekeeping national elites are being challenged. They are being challenged increasingly on this developmental paradigm they subsidize despite it being environmentally degradative, economically self-destructive, health eroding, and biodiversity destroying in their states.
As challenges to this lack of representation, they feel painfully the lack of legitimacy as the dupes wise up. This lack of easy dupes to support either a corrupt left or corrupt right party elite framework makes it difficult to continue with a state developmentalism that serves only a tiny state-subsidized transnational elite.
So as elites get more unrepresentative in their national policy actions, they do something that seems strange. First, they refuse to change their policies to win elections, and second, they instead attempt to appeal to other people who are missing or ambivalent about political representation to shore up their corruption and degradation in practice. (This is historically how the vote rights were extended to bring in more of the ambivalent in British history in the 1800s. The people complaining were attempted to be masked out instead of listened to, in an attempt to demote or to diffuse the political power of those complaining. The British rigged the geographic quality of the vote as well, by refusing to let Labor and Tories vote for a common candidate from a particular region, so they drew districts to isolate them from each other. The British state divided its communities and its population, demoting the bio-geographic quality of the vote.)
Returning to the present attempt to mask the geographic qualities of the vote and the ecological self-interest of areas, the intentionally limited and poor organization of the abroad vote can only encourage ongoing unsustainability, as in its most common form aims intentionally to intentionally remove local election participation for abroad citizens. (The link is one example. I love how this is a case of curtailing of rights in the midst of claiming to extend them. That part is left unexplained, at that British Government website.)
However, voting from abroad can enhance nationalist local voting as a natural ecological check and balance against unrepresentative national elite groups when the local vote is preserved for abroad citizens. This seems rarely done.
For three bad examples of how abroad voting is really curtailing people's geographic rights in their own home countries, we look at Britain, the United States, and the strange bureaucracy called the European Union which (to update Voltaire's statement on the Holy Roman Empire) "is not European, not a Union, and not a state." It's just a currency and trade arrangement taking increasingly illegal moves by its transnational ruling class to expand its money power to destroy European vestigial democracy.
'Who the Hell You Think You Are?' Nigel Farage throws egg in Eurocrat faces November 2010 3:11
British politician and the leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) Nigel Farage has slammed EU bosses over European crisis. "It's even more serious than economics because if you rob people of their identity, if you rob them of their democracy, then all they are left with is nationalism and violence. I can only hope and pray that the Euro project is destroyed by the markets before that" - Farage said at the end of his speech.
In the United Kingdom, the Crown extends voting for those abroad who are citizens though with the undemocratic aim of constricting their rights by banning them from participating in local elections in the U.K. The "European Union" does the same, by encouraging Europeans living abroad to vote for its unrepresentative centralized framework alone, while it has historically done everything possible to deny Europeans the right to vote in local arrangements--which have rejected the European Union in many cases, and over many times. The U.S. will be discussed below.
In summary of the elite unrepresentative strategy principle (or lack of) in many current attempts at external voting from abroad, it is attempted to be legitimated as giving (a boost to) low legitimacy institutions like the United Kingdom (about 50% of the population hates its government and wants to immigrate) or the European Union. Therefore the United Kingdom’s main parties or the unrepresentative European Union are both desperate for some sucker’s support even as they snidely demote British and European rights to vote in local elections, from abroad.
Frankly, everyone seems 'abroad' in the EU as that entity is desperate for people to suspend disbelief that it really is some kind of real state instead of a monetary and policy dictatorship without democratic checks and balances inside it.
From 2005, the United States openly is attempting to create a common 'security perimeter' and shared military (or is that just shared militarism?), shared economics (or is that just a shared managerial monopoly economic and political class?), and a shared currency called the Amero, with Canada and Mexico.
With the main policies entirely continued in Obama, in the first five years of Bush's 'rule,' or misrule the destruction of geographic contiguity was high on his list. He dismantled the national economy intentionally (money for the Labor Department actually went to hosting conferences on how to ship jobs overseas), along with demoting the civil rights of the Constitution, eroding job security, (the attempt to) sell off big ports, consolidate a transnational media, create porous and unguarded borders, and perhaps attempted to crash the U.S. dollar (through revoking taxes, spending trillions on wars, and printing money to destroy the national economy intentionally), privatize the military to transnational entities like Halliburton and other transnational mercenaries with no competition contracts (with 50% of these in Iraq going to one company, Halliburton, now headquartered in Abu Dhabi).
A QUARTER TRILLION DOLLARS was wasted in Iraq in the first three years. $250,000,000,000 dollars. And in five years, as Bush and his minions steered his country intentionally onto the rocks, from 2001-2006 in the USA, "the declines in some manufacturing sectors have more in common with a country undergoing saturation bombing during war...
Communications equipment lost 43% workforce. Semiconductors/electronic components lost 37% workforce. Computers and electronic products lost 30% workforce. Electrical/appliances lost 25% workforce. Motor vehicles/parts lost 12% workforce. Furniture/products lost 17% of workforce. Apparel manufacturers lost almost 50% workforce. Employment in textile mills declined 43% Information sector lost 17% of its jobs Telecommunications lost 25% of its workforce. Wholesale and retail trade lost jobs. Bookkeeping employment shrank by 4%. Computer systems design lost 9% of its jobs.
During this five year period under Bush's policies (long before the global financial crash due to his design of unregulated crony banks), the US economy experienced a net job positions loss in goods producing activities--while (hello?) importing about 8 more people."
For those who want to step behind the U.S. media's own Iron Curtain, these seven links are for you. Otherwise, skip them and continue below.
[1] newswire article reporting global 20.May.2006 19:33 Bush's Real Goal - Dissolve America Into NAU, the (Nazi) North American Union Fourth Reich author: recap What they are using in North America regarding fake 9-11 "justifications": "President Bush is pursuing a globalist agenda to create a North American Union, effectively erasing our borders with both Mexico and Canada. This was the hidden agenda behind the Bush administration's true open borders policy....North American Union plan, which Vincente Fox has every reason to presume President Bush is still following [since Bush and Fox decided upon it together, in person, in 2005], calls for...only border...around the North American Union -- not between any...countries....Discovering connections like this between the CFR recommendations and Bush administration policy gives credence to the argument that President Bush favors amnesty and open borders, as he originally said. Moreover, President Bush most likely continues to consider groups such as the Minuteman Project to be "vigilantes,"....Why doesn't President Bush just tell the truth? His secret agenda is to dissolve the United States of America into the North American Union. The administration has no intent to secure the border, or to enforce rigorously existing immigration laws....The perspective of the CFR report allows us to see President Bush's speech to the nation as nothing more than public relations posturing and window dressing. No wonder President Vincente Fox called President Bush in a panic after the speech. How could the President go back on his word to Mexico by actually securing our border? Not to worry, President Bush reassured President Fox. The National Guard on the border were only temporary, meant to last only as long until the public forgets about the issue,....[and a continental NATO military is occupying the whole North American continent with the next state terror strike they orchestrate and allow to happen?] http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2006/05/339726.shtml
[2] Title: CFR Plan to Eliminate US-Mex.-Canada Borders, to sync w/post 9-11 NORTHCOM/NATO occupation Author: repost Date: 2004.11.17 09:48 Description: There has been a great deal of very aristocratic, corporate, and military integrating going on internationally post 9-11 to destroy all democratic feedback against their transnational corporate regime in three major states of North America: US, Canada, and Mexico. See all three links for the continuities. I would have chosen this to go under "forest defense" and "energy & nuclear" categories as well, so read for that. COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS: "A tri-national task force, chaired by former [Canadian] Liberal Party deputy prime minister John Manley, with the full backing of all three [unrepresentative state corporatist] governments, is plotting the roadmap for this new, bolder alliance meant to compete with the European Union. [so they say...there is always someone else to blame for their desire to removing any local democratic feedback to the corporate elites...] William Weld [from a deep political Bonesmen family], former governor of Massachusetts and Pedro Aspe, former Mexican finance minister, join Manley on the panel that reports directly to the Council on Foreign Relations." "The "NAFTA-plus" plan has also been referred to as "deep integration." Skeptics see it as a plan to eliminate national sovereignty and erode the American concept of representative government accountable to the people under the framework of the Constitution. Discussions so far indicate that Canada, under the new agreement, would immediately drop its own national defense and sign on to dependence of the U.S. strategic missile defense initiative. Canada would also make its vast lumber resources available to the U.S. degradative corporations, and Mexican markets and provide more open access and destruction of environmental laws with regard to these northern neighbors' oil, natural gas and hydro-electric power resources, further impoverishing Mexico. KISSINGER APPEARS HERE: "Other members of the task force include: Canadian Finance Minister Michael Wilson and Nelson Cunningham of Henry Kissinger's consulting firm, Kissinger McLarty Associates." http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/11/303653.shtml
[3] Title: U.S. invaded by Mex.,Canada, Dutch, German, Russian: Bush using sponsored foreign invasion of the U.S. as a "legal exception" to Posse Commutatus Act... Author: northcom quoter Date: 2005.09.18 06:35 Description: "Hey, no one told us international NATO military guys at Northcom we can't use foreign troops to invade--to get around the American Posse Commutatus ban against domestic troops...." Actually, Northcom has a well placed list of exceptions on the Northcom.mil website, already planned out: here's a list of already set up "exceptions" they mention to the Posse Commutatus Act. Expect these "exceptions" to be utilized by Northcom--or invented--as a context for further internationalized martial law in the U.S.A. "as the HAARP turns." However, Americans are well within their rights to conduct immediate citizens arrests of major Northcom figures, and these military figures get two years jail automatically: Section 1385 of Title 18, United States Code (USC), states: "Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both." Since Congress DID NOT authorize this action--the only way it could fathomably occur--and it doesn't fit in their legal exceptions mentioned below we are to conclude fairly that Northcom's actions after Hurricane Katrina are a breach of the Posse Commutatus Act as well as a treasonous act combined, and we may conduct citizens arrest of major Northcom figures RIGHT NOW. Who wants to organize the PR for that? http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/09/325083.shtml
[6] [After U.S. stood down in organizing against Hurricane Katrina,] U.S. invaded by Mexican, Canadian, Dutch, German, Russian troops--by invitation: exceptions to Posse Commutatus Act... http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/09/325083.shtml
[7] Rigged USA Elections Exposed (Recorded at Ohio Legislative Session on Vote Fraud in 2006 I believe) 11:58
Computer Programmer Clint Curtis testifies that Tom Feeney (Speaker of the House of Florida at the time [and close Bush family friend], currently US Representative...) tried to pay him to rig election vote counts [in Florida]. Curtis mentions on oath that he wrote "a prototype" program to rig the vote in 2000.
So, you want to encourage this country's unrepresentative elites?
What many of these United States examples have in common is an institutional strategy to demote the geographic worth of the vote, the economy, and the military as a representative institution in some ways--and that geographic removal of oversight is unsustainable.
Thus, only ‘voting locally from abroad’ is the way to enhance a check and balance on unrepresentative national elites.
What Else To Do?
[1] I would recommend allowing participation in localelections from abroad as well
[2] allowing all foreign nationalists who are permanent residents (whether they are home or abroad) to vote
[3] or allowing those with work visas in a foreign country to have election rights in that country or when they are out of the country as well (similar to New Zealand).
[4] I would voluntarily reject voting in national elections from abroad on principle currently unless those national elections come from specific geographic bailiwicks like Representatives or Senators,
[5] as well as encouraging the growing of whole watershed voting frameworks from abroad via institutions such as these.
Vote Fraud and Individual Votes From Abroad: Parallel Degradative Forces
However, our second main theme is unverified voting particularly e-voting is another bad context in league with this elite pressure for abstract individualized conceptions of citizenship attempting to mask the required geographic qualities of the vote and its real world, lived feedback.
This is perhaps because many nationalist elites nowadays prefer to rig their elections when their policies are rejected instead of actually trying to win an election by being representative and sustainable in their geographies--despite how easy it would be to win such an election on such a platform since the majority worldwide wants to vote green.
Since many countries are promoting e-voting in the same moment as demoting geographic voting and promoting placeless international voting, there are two bad levels (placelessness and fraud, intertwined) being introduced into world voting now.
It's as if criminal U.S. President Johnson is hovering over us all now worldwide.
Quoting from Toward a Bioregional State:
"Convicted Felons, ‘Shadowy Financiers’ Own Companies Counting Votes," Mad Cow Morning News (November 15 2004): "An investigation into the surprisingly sordid history of America’s election services industry has revealed that executives and owners of the two largest companies, ES&S and Sequoia Pacific, have been convicted of bribery and suborning public officials in more than a dozen states....Investigating the ownership of the two companies that together dominate the American elections industry reveals evidence of routine and systemic bribery of public officials, not just here but overseas (the recent Prime Minister of Ireland, to give just one example.)"
I talk about this increasingly transnational, de-territorialized, unrepresentative elite-run state based on vote fraud for its developmental implications toward further environmental degradation against local representative checks and balances. and how to get around it, at length here.
For another specific example in France, as Wayne Madsen wrote, the runoff demographics weren't there for Sarkozy's win as President of France in 2007. Only Sarkozy supported unverifiable e-vote machines for France which were widely utilized and it was this government that is introducing abstract individualized voting from abroad as well--though these very same fraud creating vote machines:
"ES&S's I-Votronic machines were used in both elections across France. Only Sarkozy's party was supportive of the machines, with all the other political parties calling for a moratorium on their use. Turnout in the French election was 85 percent. [This government is now attempting to expand e-vote internationally, which seems to prove the point above.] With large turnouts historically favoring the left in France, the exit polling and actual polling were at odds with the turnout -- an indication of massive election fraud....As with the U.S. and Mexican presidential elections, the polls are being artificially fixed to reflect the upcoming skewed exit polls, a major component of the neo-cons' main contrivance to maintain political control -- 'election engineering.'"
That was France in 2007. Germany, with a strong (though fading) Green Party presence and multiple party, localized, democracy in general, in 2009 removed all its electronic vote machines because they were [and remain] a formal invitation to fraud. They were a fraudulent way that the whole 2007 Mexican election was rigged against pro-localist candidate Obrador in the last Mexican Presidential election as well (more).
As Madsen continues, he talks about this global vote fraud against organized localism:
"Similar polling irregularities were experienced in recent elections in Scotland, Wales, and England [in 2007]. In Scotland, 100,000 ballots, thought to mostly be cast for the pro-independence Scottish National Party, were declared "spoiled" in Scotland's election. [And the increasingly fraudulent U.K. government in this way loves the international ‘vote from abroad’ as well as expectedly has removed the right of the abroad British citizen to vote in local elections: they are only allowed to vote for the one’s removing their local representation!] That "glitch" cost the Scottish Nationalists a larger majority in the Scottish Parliament. Irregularities in Wales and England similarly affected larger margins for Welsh and Cornish nationalists. As the Bretons and Corsicans will soon discover with Sarkozy, regional nationalism [or participative bioregional localism in a larger framework] is anathema to the globalist neo-con agenda, particularly the international bankers who want strong centralized control and minimal devolution of power to local and regional governments. The electoral malfeasance of neo-cons in manipulating elections in France, Britain, Canada, the United States, Italy, Australia, Peru, Costa Rica, Mexico, and other countries will remain a problem until the people...seize control...of the media, the voting and vote counting process, and the opinion polling mechanisms."
I suggest elsewhere they create two autonomous local institutions worldwide--a civic democratic institution and a commodity ecology (one for cultural representation of locality and one for material representation of locality)--and then work to reorganize their state's district drawing for elections, basing them on watersheds.
Watersheds are a metric for preserving the geographic quality of the vote and for competitive elections. As I wrote elsewhere:
"The first debate is over districting; yet, no one has offered how to avoid districting that is partisan gerrymandering. Many accuse parties involved with "district reform" as merely scheming to elect more partisan incumbents by "pre-rigging" elections with creative line drawing.
This fails to create a competitive election and merely divides opposition artificially into separate districts or stuffs ballots (residences) of one party's supporters in one district. A real electoral reform of districts would draw them in a nonpartisan manner.
The public can be assured of this by making stable watersheds as the mandated form of electoral districting. Watersheds are biophysically real lines separating different drainage basins (water catchments). Drainage basins concentrate more than water.
Since much pollution risk is waterborne, watersheds represent areas where common environmental risk experiences exist. Therefore, watershed election districts should be the durable form of environmental risk feedback into state politics.
As a publicly desired neutral, nonpartisan way of drawing election boundaries, it has positive effects on party competition by removing gerrymandering to create truly representative parties. Parties should compete to represent the people's interests, not simply win by default because of gerrymandering."
Therefore, a watershed based voting from anywhere, abroad or domestically, seems a sounder manner of voting than simply extending it to a small elite minority diaspora of preferential voters in another country. Let whole watersheds in other countries vote in another country, based on the principle that if the manipulation of their political economies come from elsewhere, the whole area can get organized and deserves to provide the political feedback to the source of the degradation in the other state, by the people in the local area (abroad) who experience it as caused by another state’s politics.
Instead, in the bioregional state, it is the local elections that should be enhanced in their ecological checks and balances because only this ecological self-interest is against such crony elite degradative uses of national states.
Stop supporting the gatekeeping of unrepresentative nationalist elites leading us globally toward environmental degradation.
Voting for their ongoing degradative policies, from abroad no less, is hardly a solution. Voting locally against them as a bloc from abroad is a solution.
So how can this be organized? In many ways such as this through the Commodity Ecology and the Civic Democratic Institution, worldwide.
Where We Have Been So Far
In summary, currently, there are two poor assumptions concerning voting from abroad: there is the danger that it remains only an individualist conception of citizenship rights instead of geographic representation as being maintained as predominant. Geographic aspects of voting are important to maintain:
"...[A] people's self-interest is geographically specific and protective of a particular geography, as mentioned above. Citizen feedback is always in and from particular geographic spaces and human-environmental contexts. To create the additional checks and balances for an ecologically sound developmentalism is merely to latch onto and facilitate an already-existing affirmative feedback from watersheds/bioregions that is ignored though waiting to be formally organized. This is done by aligning political feedback as closely as possible to a direct feedback from particular geographically specific areas into the state. My first suggestion is through watershed based vote districting." [p. xix, Toward a Bioregional State]
This first danger of this voting from abroad is connected to the second, that merely expanding voting from abroad as a form of abstract individual privilege outside a territorial state encourages even greater corruption of the vote in the transfer of the totals than there is presently. Instead the multiple geographic qualities of the vote are required even more as a check and balance feedback against this unsustainability developmental policy of unrepresentative elites.
Thus, individualized voting from abroad only for a nationalist election contributes only toward unrepresentative development within the state itself instead of alleviating it. Voting For Sustainable Development by Integrating the Externalized in the Current Economic Arrangement to Moderate It
Next, what principle justify such watershed based extensions, extensions of the vote to a whole geographic area, in an abroad vote? The main rationale is an equal geographic political feedback against unrepresentative trade policies that destroy the areas in other states and their peoples while those people's have little say in the matter directly as externalies mount in their health, the destruction of their ecology and the demotion of their local economy that is all interrelated.
Trade feedback externalities are part of politics, regardless of what state they are in (or outside of) in practice. Therefore, voting from abroad as a watershed group is required to maintain the geographic representation of different watersheds based on trade networks and global externalities created by them, whether inside or outside a country.
It's the only feedback possible to allow watersheds to vote in other nation's elections, since those 'foreign peoples' (so called) are intimately connected to another state's political economy in very perverse ways. Certainly, it would help to solve "The Perkins Dilemma" below:
Economic Hitmen 2:08
An animated interview of John Perkins, author of 'HoodWinked' and 'Confessions Of An Economic Hitman', copyright of the audio belongs to John Perkins.
Thus, so far 'voting from abroad' for the same consolidated politicians that are unrepresentative seems more like an attempt to make elections less representative and more gatekept and clientelistic against the required geographic feedback of the vote, making politics more corrupt and degradative.
On the contrary, voting from abroad in the bioregional state would have a geographic aspect instead of only an individual aspect because externalities are experienced as a form of politics anywhere and deserve to be directed toward the source of the damage: the other state.
For instance, since much of Africa is trade externalized and experiences externalities from other groups destroying its landscape, materials, and agriculture in a form of development that is regressive, then many Africans in watersheds destroyed deserve to vote (from abroad) in European countries, in the United States, and increasingly in South Korea, and Japan. Why? Well these are the countries that are buying up Africa and befouling it (with their own corrupt native elite supporting it), so Africans deserve to vote in the countries that are shaping their destiny from abroad.
Map of World Land Grab in 2000-2007
(Click for larger version)
This is only land ownership by foreigners in the country. If the deal in Madagascar does go through finally, then the people in many of Madagascar's watersheds deserve to be politically represented in South Korea via watershed inclusions based on how dominant the trade, extraction, or externalities are in certain regional areas.
Furthermore, below, these are the things Africans ship to other areas of the world. It shows how dominated many of 'their' African countries are by other political economies. Surely, some type of representation of Africans in Europe, the United States, and some countries of Asia is merely fair--and incredibly just--as far as human feedback goes, which will be sustainable feedback as well.
World Bank Data on African Trade
Political interest is innately an ecological self-interest, and can be integrated into voting from abroad into other local areas themselves. It is mostly the delocalized elites that are alienated from this ecological self-interest instead of workers, peasants and others, and their unrepresentative, unecological hegemony on policy leads to their ongoing destruction, taking the legitimacy of the whole framework with them instead of strengthening their hegemony. That is why most of the already illegitimate national elites are moving toward open militarized forms of rule and simply ruling people with terror instead of with legitimacy.
In the book, I offer a more durable framework. As I said, "I offer how unsustainable states can be made over piece by piece into sustainable states that support durable localized consumption and fair trade, now." (p. xii)
For other quotes from the book on these themes:
"Within the Constitution of Sustainability [Chapter 20 in Toward a Bioregional State] is a process of how existing unsustainable formal frameworks can be adapted to sustainability, for unsustainable States around the world. These sections describe how entry in the Constitution of Sustainability is possible for such States wishing to join the Union or claim their rights under the Union as politically and consumptively externalized trade colonies. These trade colonies experience “extraction without representation.” At present, they are socio-financially manipulated from afar by other States, and denied political feedback into these unsustainable relationships. It is demoting that difference, a difference that facilitates the unsustainability of trade relationships, that this addresses." (p. 223)
Additionally, for locality representation, another version of international voting is obviously secession. Even though I consider succession as an unoptimal outcome for all involved, it is still best to have a clear, formal principle of succession as the end result of a right of geographic voting, the most extreme geographic voting, instead of letting the externalities context be manipulated by both sides that leads to war which tends to leave the local area bereft of even what little they had and were complaining about in the first place, instead of war or autonomy improving their situation. Sometimes when autonomy is achieved, the economic situation can be worse instead of better as well.
So the principle of external, geographic bases of voting means feedback through adherence and/or escape--the latter a pragmatically required trump card for jurisdictional vetoes from localities to really mean something if they can trump the larger potentially degradative state by exit rights. Thus there is a justice argument in secession for environmental, economic, and health rationales--though there are better rationales to stay and make the relationship better.
On the Question of Secession as a Geographic Right--though as Part of a Larger Feedback System as More Geographically Optimal
Either way, only carrying this to the limit, in rights of secession, gives local regions equal power in jurisdictional deals with the larger delocalized state elite groups attempting to clientelize them from afar. An equal local jurisdictional power to the nationalist state is a check and balance on elite degradative misuse of power: it can encourage those external delocalized elite groups to moderate their bad developmental decisions in such local areas to keep the trade regular and sustainable in all senses of the world, humanly and environmentally. As said in the book,
"Section 8. Existing States may secede, by following a Constitutionally mandated procedure. Secession is voted on by the Congress and by all bordering States’ legislatures. These votes of the Congress of the bordering States are to occur within a year of each other, or the procedure of succession lapses. [If other states refuse a vote, this is unable to stop the issue by procedural default. Instead, it occurs automatically. Thus the voting requirements of all involve aim to create a context to craft a potentially workable situation whether it is real secession or integration under novel political terms. Either way, a more regularized arrangement is created--which keeps delocalized elites (historically like the Machiavellian 'Real Abraham Lincoln') from attempting to force war upon others to get his way.] Criteria for succession are based on degree of consanguinity in trade relationships of the State [or external non-contiguous watershed] with the rest of the [contiguous watershed based] Union. Succession when such trade relationships are very thin or only one-sided are grounds for legal separation. However, one sided trade relationships are grounds for admission as well, particularly if the Union of Sustainable States, through competitive disadvantage, is a trade partner of an external State that it places in an inferior position by trading with its competitors of a certain item elsewhere. The design of putting consumptive competitors in the same framework of Union is to provide feedback against the playing of one State group against another by the politics of one State, without those States in question having a political voice as a group, or set, within the Union in question. The consumptive infrastructure is the basis for political inclusions, just as it is the basis for political exclusions when it is absent." (p. 255)
A nested bioregional jurisdiction of different levels of jurisdictional vetoes is based on noting that people have natural rights to oppose pollution or regressive developmentalism politically ‘in’ their own jurisdictions even though comes from other places where they are denied voice.
In the bioregional state, this geographic principle of politics as environmentally virtuous feedback is applied to juridical frameworks as well:
"[A]ll courts shall be in a geographic hierarchy where the higher courts are in the downstream areas, thus giving them higher appellate context that can represent cases that effect the full brunt of any human health, ecological, or economic externalities—that a more geographically biased upstream located court may be ignoring. Only through appreciating that there is a geography, a geographic flow, and a geographic bioaccumulation to pollution--involved in how geographies procedurally bring court cases shows that since pollution goes downstream typically--court frameworks of hierarchy of jurisdiction shall be arranged accordingly to put the power of the courts in the appropriate downstream locations with downstream jurisdiction on their upstream watersheds instead of being absconded and isolated upstream while making judgments about inflicting pollution on other areas downstream. This is why higher courts shall be a downstream jurisdiction, and follow the issue of watershed jurisdictions similar to the voting district frameworks discussed elsewhere, though in a bioaccumulative sense of jurisdiction. The same shall apply within particular states as for federal frameworks. It seems to me there should be at least 22 (including Hawai’i) separate Federal Court jurisdictions arranged in this manner [given the 22 major watershed divisions across the United States..."
See a recent example of how to keep criminals from rigging the courts in this way: related to BP wanting to rig court case jurisdiction in its oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
Picture this...Virtue Versus Virtual
Picture the world’s hydrology as the world's natural, virtuous, political jurisdictions. The flows of water innately are the flows of virtue, votes, and juridical decisions. This removes pollution biophysically (and removes corruption, politically)--though only this will occur with the institutional changes of the bioregional state that make localities' jurisdictions built from real biophysical boundaries (instead of corrupt, abstract, meaningless line drawings to protect incumbents instead of to protect the public). The bioregional state maintains geographic qualities: of voting, of judicial decisions, and of other politics, virtue, and knowledge instead of demoting them.
There can be virtuous delocalized elites, they just have to be representative of multiple ecological self-interests. Moreover, local groups can be unvirtuous as well if they destroy their own self-interest this way as well, so a larger recourse of ecological check and balance is in in the interest of the local watershed as well. In power and clientelism, there is nothing innately bad about them in principle, only when they are unrepresentative, gatekeeping, extortive, or manipulative when they are bad and unsustainable.
Both levels of checks and balance are required for sustainability to check against an extreme reliance on watersheds or nationalist states. They are checks and balances on each other, developmentally.
"How does this deal with bioregionalism? Presently, nothing is further from bioregionalism than [the attempt to remove the geographic qualities of the state, whether] these ungeographic gerrymandered districts [electoral or judicial], because they set up a situation where virtuous environmental issues--that are geographic--are unable to politically be transferred to the state because they are split across a political process that is monopolized by collusive gerrymandering of majoritarian parties, each interested in only their own districting versions of a one party state, an identical strategy regardless of whether it is a Democratic or Republican one party state district.
"Republicans who are concerned for their health or the health of their children, who ask why there is so much sickness, so much childhood cancer--are spurned in these districts.
"Democrats who are concerned about their children as well, thinking the Democrats are more ‘of the people’ are spurned as well. [Obama is just the "Black Bush."]
"As long as the bailiwicks are set up to be mutually uncompetitive monopolies for interests of these two parties, instead of bailiwicks organized to make geographically competitive elections for voters and organized to reflect the geography of pollution and social risk, environmental degradation and human health degradation will expand.
"Environmental politics [requires] a state feedback that is ecological[;] [it] requires a geographic politics instead of simply a political/ideological politics. A particular locality requires geographic representation before a party selectively represents it ideologically. Districts are required to facilitate this political expression that is already there: it is only divided by ideological appeals and decennial adjustments of districts that presently only facilitate one party state ideals of clientelism to nationalist parties, regardless of whether they be Democratic or Republican Parties.
"Instead, districts should be competitive mechanisms."
"Moreover, districts should be facilitating environmental feedback from geographically specific citizens against environmental degradation instead of simply seen as mechanisms for creating an uncompetitive and corrupting one party state on the level of districts--which is how the United States is mostly organized. [That is the point of origin of politics: environmental feedback for representation or delocalized elite attempts to mask it by their disbursements and consumptive or ideological mystification to follow elites hardly representative at all, in a system bound to fail as it gets worse, as externalities build.]
"It [environmental degradation] is this way because of the presently "un-geographic" formal structure of the state. The more the formal structure of the state is designed to maintain informal and un-geographic clientelist relationships, the more all political feedback can be monopolized and gatekept, and the more there is environmental degradation (and human health degradation and economic externalities) because the state fails to get this geographic feedback. This feedback exists though it is filtered out of the un-geographic majoritarian party bailiwicks that are only designed to 'return' parties instead of make them representative or competitive.
"Since the state is a developmental process (e.g., the policy power of the state, the infrastructure, the laws around consumption and its organization, the land tenure issues, the laws around finance, the taxation perks or lack thereof ), then the whole built environment and laws around consumption and waste get tailored as a degradative developmental process without this geographic feedback to the state.
"Instead, any 'voter' feedback is tailored to support the environmental degradative process through gerrymandered un-geographic bailiwicks, which leads to further environmental degradation. Any environmental amelioration pressures against pollution or the institutionalization of risk is gatekept by the ‘two parties’ that intentionally drop the ball, because they can.
"Because with the way their private bailiwicks are organized, they split environmentalist concern in the voters across Democratic and Republican engineered categories of districts that are innately uncompetitive, when environmentalism is a geographic polity issue that cuts across party lines, gender lines, ethnic lines, economic lines, every line.
"Fully 80% or more of the United States supports strengthening environmental laws, even among those who typically vote Republican or Democrat. If environmental degradation, institutionalization of risk, and waste streams are all geographic, we require of course geographic districts in states for Congress as well as within particular states for their state legislatures.
"Otherwise, risk assessment through the politics and “voting” (i.e., gerrymandered districts, actually) of the state will entirely be biased toward institutionalizing more and more risk, and more and more environmental degradation, since citizen feedback is guillotined by un-geographic bailiwicks—instead of used to turn developmental processes of the state towards more humane (and environmentally aware) paths.
This un-geographic bailiwick abets environmental degradation and impairs human health, because the formal state relies on informal parties as political feedback. However, when informal parties give themselves the power to selectively design their own uncompetitive polities, like they do in the United States, the state is built from informal politics of exclusion that keeps changing to maintain exclusion, instead of ever having stable geographic politics of inclusion. The Democrats and the Republicans keep changing the rules to maintain their lack of representation, to maintain low voter turnout, and to maintain environmental degradation--because it suits them both. None of them want to actually be representative.
"They only want to be the representative, which is a different issue altogether, and which has a strategy based on exclusion and district bailiwick 'updating' to maintain their shoe-in candidate. Bioregionalism is a state formation issue, a state creation issue. It seems to me that typically bioregionalism so far lacks a way to extrapolate a politics wider than the bioregion itself. By analyzing in each state, the differences between the bioregion and the congressional bailiwicks (or the counties, or the state bailiwicks), you can see why and explain why certain politics ‘dies’ as it is filtered through a very clientelistic, ungeographic, and unrepresentative party monopoly that demotes geographic politics of inclusion. Plus, this can offer a means to make democracy more competitive, as well as a means to actually enfranchise politics of environmental degradation and human health by removing ungeographic clientelistic monopolies of either party. This is a way to do so.
"The United States is so hideously degradative, even to its own people with such high and expanding cancer rates--38% for women; 41% for males. It was ‘only’ 25% in the 1960s, for each gender group. Plus there is declining fertility. Major swaths of the world’s species are dying off as we speak, many of them because of ecological destruction and/or bioaccumulative pollution that do sexual and hormonal damage. Such bioaccumulation issues are affecting. Brain cancer has become the predominant killer afflicting tiny children in just a few years, expanding from nothing. The brain is mostly a fatty organ, and much bioaccumulative pollution gets stored by the body in fatty tissues.
"In terms of human health, ecological health, and economic health, the majoritarian parties are killing us, by being unable to address these issues of environmental degradation and health concerns that are geographic, instead of demographic.
"Look at a map of the congressional districts. Environmental polities are entirely removed from the architecture of the state, presently. Is it any wonder that Green party-ism or any other third partyism finds itself drawing the short straw when the game is rigged geographically (to demote geography)? And it is any wonder that the vampires drew the long straws, because they drew the map of uncompetitive districts among themselves privately? The environmental feedback that does exist is splintered by their local level clientelism that makes the unitary bailiwick of environmental degradation and the desire to alleviate its suffering through political challenges, intentionally divided on federal level as majoritarian party fingers extending from the capitals of the states or from Washington, D. C., in the case of Congressional districts, only see the districts in their own interest instead of in the public interest. Organize the watershed. Draw maps." (p. 12-16)
A very down to earth* kind of guy. I'm an environmental sociologist interested in establishing material and organizational sustainability worldwide. I'm always looking for interesting materials/technologies, inspiring ideas, or institutional examples of sustainability to inspire others to recognize their choices now. To be fatalistic about an unsustainable world is a sign of a captive mind, given all our options.
*(If "earth" is defined in a planetary sense, concerning comparative historical knowledge and interest in the past 10,000 years or so anywhere...) See both blogs.
