The Bioregional State as "Constitution, Version Two": Secession, Nullification, Federation: What is the Bioregional State's Position? (1 of 4)

"WE THE PEOPLE of the bioregions of the world, removing the burdens of unsustainability imposed on us by unrepresentative frameworks of government, science, finance, and consumption in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common social and ecological defense with the political inclusion of trading arrangements, promote the general Welfare within, and do ingrain ourselves and ongoingly direct our governments to move towards sustainability and away from tyranny of unsustainablity, to secure the Blessings of Sustainability and its Liberties to ourselves and our Posterity. We ordain and establish this Constitution of Sustainability..." [Toward a Bioregional State, Chapter 20: Model Constitution of Sustainability, p. 235]

"A Republic--if you can keep it." -- Benjamin Franklin, on being asked what kind of government the Continental Congress had created after they removed the Articles of Confederation.

States of the Union “should separate from our companions only when the sole alternatives left, are the dissolution of our Union with them, or submission to a government without limitation of powers....Between these two evils [of secession or submission to totalitarianism], when we must make a choice, there can be no hesitation.” --- Thomas Jefferson, letter to William B. Giles, Dec. 26, 1825. [It is your call whether these are the sole alternatives left--the bioregional state has other ideas.]

This is a four part post. Part One below.

Contents

I. The Acid Test of Self-Determination: Do You Really Have and Exercise Permanent Human Rights--and Related Environmental Rights--of Democratic Representation, Secession, Nullification, and Federation? Or not? Implied in Rights of Representation and Self-Determination are the rights of Secession, Nullification, and Federation as Natural Rights; it is a separate issue to choose whether to use them (addressed in Part Three).

II. Documenting 33 Systemic Constitutional Engineering Problems with the U.S. Constitution in Hindsight that Require Additional Checks and Balances, Based on What Corruptions Have Happened Repeatedly or Increasingly Over 200 Years. The U.S. Constitution must be 'bad DNA' for a republic because so much has gone wrong under it, and it has been unable to deal with systemic corruptions in various areas below. So additional checks and balances are required in the bioregional state as 'version two.'

III. Arguments For and Against Secession, and the Bioregional State's Middle Path

IV. Other Green and Libertarian Thought about Secession and Nullification and How it Compares and Critiques with the Bioregional State (particularly bioregionalist green Kirkpatrick Sale; particularly libertarian Ron Paul)

(In Part Four, more historical issues of secession are analyzed particularly from the bioregional green political spectrum or the libertarian spectrum. This section as well is illustrated with quotes from all major creators of the U.S. Constitution that believed that the Union was not an eternal god, and who believed that it was merely a human mechanism to serve human ends which could be corrupted, qualified in its acceptance, and certainly dispensable if it became a greater tyranny than those it was replacing in time. By Part Three, quotes demonstrate that nullification and secession (and another great 'nullification' built into the Constitution of private guns) were seen as innate rights and institutional checks and balance frameworks of the U.S. Constitution. To attempt to remove any of these was seen as a road to tyranny well into the 1830s.)

General Introduction to the Series: Ecological Reformation of the World, One Watershed at a Time

As noted in Toward a Bioregional State (2005), the U.S. is the running example I am most familiar with in constitutional issues, however, the point of the bioregional state is adaptations to all states worldwide for more formal sustainability and greater democratic checks and balances on degradative corruption:

"...what I am arguing is that these are general structural requirements for all states as they move towards sustainability, instead of talking only about the United States. The United States can be considered the running example in these letters though. Structurally, the state in general requires changing, instead of only a change on the level of political party ideas for instance. These bioregional letters propose how existing unsustainable states could be ‘made over’ into sustainable states: typically, a different topic is addressed in each letter. There are 26 bioregional letters—so far [in the book; and there are more throughout this blog]. State structures are far from the only aspect of importance, though they are a formal requirement. I am working on other issues beside the state [in this blog]—the institutional interactions between science, finance, and consumption are equally important in sustainability because the ‘state’ influences consumptive politics in these four issues."

1. The Acid Test of Democratic Self-Determination: Do You Really Have and Exercise Permanent Human Rights--and Related Environmental Rights--of Democratic Representation, Secession, Nullification, and Federation? Or not?

If yes, you are sovereign. If not, and others repress these innate rights, you approach unchecked tyranny. And simply because you join something in the past, or are born into something your forebears join, fails to mean that anyone has delimited these permanent unblemished human rights.

This is a four part series about legal democratic representation procedures of secession, nullification, and federation rights in the bioregional state as options of free peoples anywhere. It is argued that representation if denied implies legal and legitimate rights of secession, nullification, and (re)federation. Thus representation implies having these rights as backup when various frameworks become tyrannous, as no one is required to remain in tyranny.

However, the related issue is whether making use of one or another of these rights are the only or best option. That second topic is saved for later. As Jefferson wrote late in life:

States of the Union “should separate from our companions only when the sole alternatives left, are the dissolution of our Union with them, or submission to a government without limitation of powers....Between these two evils [of secession or submission to totalitarianism], when we must make a choice, there can be no hesitation.” --- Thomas Jefferson, letter to William B. Giles, Dec. 26, 1825.

It is your call whether these are the sole alternatives left--and even the bioregional state has other ideas to discuss like the 'middle paths' of nullification and refederation.

However, as coming innately out of representation and self-determination rights, these three collective political (procedural) rights are 'the' criteria or sign that show either that peoples are free and capable of directing their own future in an open-ended and ongoing way, or, by their lack of being allowed to use them democratically, is a sign that peoples are ultimately under a tyrannical form of government. If they are denied the use of these innate rights, they are revealed to be only clientelistic serfs and slaves to novel versions of royalist or aristocratic feudal elites.

It matters little whether one thinks one is free though one is not and more accepting of such tyrannies, or aware that one is unfree and cowering in fear at the increasing repressions of others to deny you these innate rights. The issue is not your awareness or lack of awareness, or desire or lack of desire to use them. It is simply 'can you exercise these innate rights or not?'

So consider these three political actions as more than constitutional engineering principles. Consider these three as human rights of democratic representation which includes always ongoing open-futures of secession, nullification, and federation instead of others curtailing these options.

These are  additional universal human rights and universal environmental rights that peoples worldwide at all times have against both human tyranny and ecological tyranny. There is more about these three of secession, nullification, and federation as universal environmental rights in a moment. Though for a quick introduction, if you are denied the representative ability to remove yourself from a particular material use or bad environmental context that is forced upon you with choices of others denied or repressed, or you are denied any way to improve such a degradative and delimited context that damages your health, ecology and local economy, you lack human rights of representation and self-determination in material decisions, placing you equally under an ecological tyranny, and thus giving you rights of environmental secession (complete rejection of all imposed materials), environmental nullification (conditional rejection of some materials, and acceptance of others) and environmental federation (rights to reformulate wider organizational and market frameworks of greater sustainable choices of trade in better ecological materials).

As implied in Toward a Bioregional State, if we have irrevocable human rights as individuals and as political groups to form or to leave a working representative government, and if we all live in particular geographies that impinge upon us bodily for good or ill, we have further individual and collective rights to a government with a more 'representative' clean environmental influence for all.

The following will show the innate interactions of human rights and environmental rights as just extensions of human rights. Particularly, if these human and environmental rights are unachievable in tyrannous and/or corrupt governments that have removed these procedural rights, it is democratically legitimate to reassemble, reform, or withdrawal to create more sustainable arrangements--and democratically legitimate to resist the human tyrannical and ecologically tyrannical contexts that deny these rights. However, resistance without a bioregional plan to expand checks and balances and to maintain wider choices is just pointless and may only recreate an updated very repressive and delimiting situation.

This re-assemblage, reformation, or withdrawal would be legitimate only if it was a more democratic and representative developmental policy in a series of institutional participations where regions that currently suffer have greater say to correct the situation, and where that suffering to be corrected can be both human inequalities or environmental inequalities due to lack of representative options, social and material, denied and repressed.

We have the right to remove human political corruption and corruption's environmental shadow, environmental degradation, by creating better and more representative political and material dynamics that yield better ongoing developmental choices and political feedback against degradative policy.

And implied by that, we have the right to achieve it even under conditions of such human and environmental tyranny, meaning, by abolishing such a tyrannous framework if it fails to yield democratically toward it. In Toward a Bioregional State's introduction:

"Typically these issues of environmentalism and formal democracy have been addressed as separate issues. Instead, my argument is that existing democratic theory and formal institutional design inherited from a humanocentric Enlightenment are irredeemably broken for sustainability issues and require many adjustments to make then ecologically and economically sound. This is done by merging our falsely separated concepts of democracy, environmentalism, and development as influenced by the same issue of formal institutions. Because of this, formal institutions have been built on a false premise in their overlooking of durable human-environmental relations. A second false premise about Enlightenment political theory is found in the past assumed separation between political institutional design and economics in issues of state developmentalism, regarding the regulatory degree that democratic people can check and balance against unrepresentative elite economic power in development strategies to minimize local externalities to human health, the ecology, and local economies, while as well aiding in formulation of developmental policy that is facilitative of local sustainability. So the points left out of Enlightenment democratic theory are:

(1) the empirically durable human-environmental contexts of all governmental arrangements,

(2) ideas about the state as an economic developmentalist organization,

(3) the issue of the innate geographical particularities of citizenship and political concern,

(4) ways to check and balance gatekeeping powers of informal political parties on the state, and

(5) that political power is more than the formal state—it is exercised in conjunction
with scientific, financial, and consumptive/economic organizational power as well.

Despite this, as Jefferson said above, be sure the extreme of secession is your only option in opposing tyranny. It's 'your call' whether we have reached such a point where secession is the only option in opposition to a human and environmental tyranny that stops us from moving more regularly and democratically toward sustainability in materials, in clean environments, and in removal of corrupt governments that have challenged even our basic human rights to life.

However, such a situation of human tyranny and environmental tyranny under existing democratic and market corruption is being debated more and more. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world:

For instance, in the U.S., in commodity/environmental issues, choice is denied. There is currently a forced medical purchase policy that is legal (without actually letting people choose the medicines that work in it--it is just state subsidization of a form of medicine that fails in its promises and thus has been increasingly rejected); there is a lack of choice in avoiding or even labeling genetically modified organisms; there is the pretension that oil or nuclear are required energy (non)choices while other clean choices are politically repressed.

In the U.S., in civic issues, there is currently permanent martial law with authorized 'targeted' military arrests of civilians without evidence, unlimited military jail without due process, the authorization of secret military trials (where torture is allowed to produce 'evidence'), and even ongoing state murder without any of the above arrest, trial, or presentation of evidence of crime. All of these Obama has instituted. What other countries claim these tyrannic systems besides the United States?

However, have we reached the point where secession is the 'sole' option? That is why other routes of nullification are being attempted in the United States post haste:

• as in many states currently rejecting these federal indefinite detentions like Texas and soon Michigan; 
• at least 14 other states rejecting forced reduction of medical choices disguised as a 'universal (sic) medical plan' (more like a non-universal that really fails the ones most in need--it only touches full time workers--and forces those people to buy it!), 
• and other states nullifying federal policy on marijuana criminalization 

However, does mere nullification get you where you want to go, or does it just leave suboptimal arrangements with accepted tyrannies elsewhere? I think it does. That is why I suggest rights to 're-federation'--which is really the right to peaceable Ecological Reformation explored at the link--instead of only exploring the negative right of nullification or secession even if they are innate human and environmental rights. These negative rights are your human rights that no country can deny legitimately, though you can build better positives.
 
THIS IS IMPORTANT: so despite these two interpretive issues--of whether we truly lack other options, or whether secession has good outcomes under current conditions (discussed in Part Three)--all three strategies of secession, nullification, and (re)federation are considered rights to be subject to constitutional forms of legal procedures in the bioregional state instead of all three of these rights left to the violent realm of invasion, repression, and civil war to achieve them.

That is one of the many flaws of the U.S. Constitution, arguably, that the bioregional state improves upon below--by formalizing these above rights in the Ecological Bill of Rights and the Constitution of Sustainability as rights and procedures that are normal parts of democratic representation instead of attempted by some tyrants to remove them.

2. Rights of Self-Determination as Human Rights Imply Rights of Democratic Representation, Secession, Nullification, Re-Federation Extended into Material and Environmental Rights

So, to summarize the above related to this section, in our past political theories of democracy, human rights, and constitutional engineering principles, these are all tied into our previous (delimited) conceptions of human rights in which we claim for ourselves worldwide the right to 'self-determination.'

Yes, what does this mean though without ongoing permanent rights of secession, nullification, and reformation? Does 'self-determination' only mean you are allowed to do it once, and then that's it? And if it messes up, well, does that mean you have to live under a human and ecological tyranny? No. You never give up human rights to any government arrangement.

We mostly have failed to carry through with what to do in a situation where a past 'self-determined' arrangement has become very corrupt socially. Instead, many stew in various human tyrannies of varying degrees worldwide where their rights are eroded. Second, we mostly have failed to carry through when a past 'self-determined' market relationship of greater parity between suppliers, demand, and state politics has become very corrupt toward supply-side biases in corrupt state and only supply-side material interests against the consumer and the environment inter-scientifically--when such supply-sided human corruption of materials and market choices (in reducction of clean choices) means corruption environmentally/ecologically in terms of our bad health, and in terms of our corrupt economies as well.

Such human corruptions and gatekeepings against their correction always have degradative biophysical corruptions as their partner as what they are defending, since political corruption and supply-side bias removing material and market organizational choices is a major cause of protecting bad developmental degradation as well as a major cause stopping any democratic and wider market choices of feedback against it. Such human/material corruption's aim is to protect the ongoing arrangements of degradative arrangements that serve such corruptions and to repress any attempt at widening choices toward sustainability's cleaner options that already exist.

So do human rights of self-determination include "re"-self-determination? Do we have rights to do more than simply build--though rights to rebuild? Rights to join, as well as rights to abolish? And do we have rights to pick and to choose, to conditionally accept governments that deny us both a working democratic human representation and deny us a material representation in consumer's and citizen's desires for a clean environment?

Yes, I think these rights of secession, nullification, and federation are equally environmental rights, rights to sustainability implied by self-determination because self-determination starts with various levels of withdrawal from tyrannic situations instead of simply of joining. Self-determination starts with the ability to say 'no' to someone, whether in human politics democratically over unrepresentative policy or against a bad material and bad environmental situation that denies a wider assortment of already existing clean material choices.

So a right of self-determination is a human right of dismantling as well as creation, and it is a permanent irrevocable right under any situation. If you had the right before to do it, you still have it. You fail to give up all your rights simply by exercising one of them in the past, because they are an assortment of ongoing rights instead of part of a contractual obligation to forgo one of them when certain arrangements are constructed in the past. (However, whether it is better or worse to do so, and under what conditions, is discussed in part three.)

Using other terms than secession, nullification, and federation are three human rights of complete withdrawal, selective withdrawal, and rights of being included in something to which one is left out of representation though is still influenced by (in the latter, including rights of (re)formulating with equal partners a novel larger political collectivity.)

These human rights might be used simultaneously, i.e., like in using secession and re-federation simultaneously for instance across multiple areas instead of conceiving of them as autonomous or mutually contradictory rights; or in using environmental secession by rejecting external material impositions entirely or in environmental nullification by using this right selectively to ban only certain items or rules in a particular geography, etc. These are legitimate pressures for the succeeded and nullified groups that may make those policies they reject more representative to reform in the future as well, remember, instead of this being an eternal break.

Under conditions of democratic representation the human rights of secession, nullification, and (re)federation are three multiple and equally legitimate ways to address the contexts in which peoples find themselves that they dislike though see little other strategic chance of more 'regular' statutory redress of grievances via legal change, market choices denied, and electoral change.

In short, by implications of self-determination, all collective political and economic rights come into use legitimately: [1] whenever humanly tyrannical, environmentally degradative, repressive, and corrupt arrangements in which peoples are part of, are found so excessive that the regular (and preferred!) routes of choices of legal changes, market dynamics, or electoral changes have become voided; [2] and where these political arrangements themselves have become a human tyranny, a material tyranny (in enforced lack of choices), and/or interacting with both of these, an ecological tyranny (in enforced lack of clean environmental conditions when our options for these abound).


3. These Abstract Human Rights and Abstract Environmental Rights Imply We Have Specific Geographic Rights as Well

Another way of thinking about this is to classify two kinds of additional human universal rights seen in the extended Ecological Bill of Rights, featured in the Constitution of Sustainability.

The first additions are more universal individual human rights--the rights of legal individuals and their individually chosen assemblages of abstract contractual, collective, or voluntary groups to form, including common civil protections against institutional discrimination. These additional abstract human rights include abstract environmental rights to clean water, air, and materials--ergo, including common civil protections against an institution's environmental discrimination.

Increasingly, many countries of the world are ever-greater forms of institutional discrimination and environmental discrimination as the aspects of representation are shallowed, aspects of clean market choices are removed and bad dirty ones protected from critique or removal as a consequence, and environments themselves become toxic or destroyed or exclusively reserved in their cleanness for a tiny elite against everyone else.

So there are these other individual and civic rights that are abstract human-environmental rights of individuals that have been neglected in the past formulations of human rights, rights to avoid institutional discrimination.

However, the second additions are equally universal human rights with environmental rights implications so they might be the same as the above. However, this second group of human rights are rights not of abstract individuals or abstract invented temporary contractual collectivities like institutions. They are permanent human rights of geographic representation. Put another way, the further implications of human rights as environmental-human rights means we have bioregional rights--rights of collective political action in certain cultural-regionalized democratic forms (whether sub-departments of states or just cultural regions)--rights to permanently secede, to nullify, or to re-federate into an arrangement that is better suited toward our ecological self-interests against any current ecological tyrannies.

Permanent human, environmental, and bioregional rights are hardly given up simply when forming a temporary accomodative collectivity or institutional arrangement.

In short, if we have human rights as individuals and collectivities, we have environmental rights by implication of being bodily human and by always living in particular areas. And if we have environmental rights, by implication many of these human-environmental rights are geographic rights, so, we have permanent bioregional rights of representation, secession, nullification, and federation.

Some may argue that the abstract human rights and abstract environmental rights are more important than the bioregional rights. Others may argue in the inverse. My studied opinion of 3,000 years of history is that historically humanity had bioregional rights first, and over time developed the latter more abstract human and environmental rights because of attempts to reconcile the conflicts and the lack of different bioregional areas abilities to work on conflict resolution together. Sometimes this was mixed with direct conquest that voided such regional ways, however, not in all cases. Thus both are equally important. In other words, contrary to Bookchin's romanticism, the larger human and environmental aspects are an important part of the human and environmental heritage of attempts at conflict resolution, even if they are in many cases incomplete and have been sources of corruption, lack of representation, and degradation for being so incomplete. In a cruel paradox, it is the repeating history of unrepresentative versions of state-led environmental degradation and repeated destruction of bioregional areas that has created attempts at defining bioregional rights against the state, as well as with others defining wider abstract civil states and abstract human identities (itself a major useful invention in inventions of ethical systems particularly for instance) even if identified against bioregional identifications. However, even if identified as against bioregional identifications, these abstract inventions came out of various experiences of bioregional suffering instead of wholly removed from it.

It is the aim of the bioregional state to help provide that "more perfect union" between different bioregional areas that has been lacking in human history, the lack of which has caused a great deal of suffering from unrepresentative versions of institutionalized jurisdictions across multiple regions, instead of being more optimally organized as greater representative versions, both civilly and materially, within a "polytopia" of bioregions in mind. "Polytopia" means an arrangement that recognizes multiple real regions of life and affirms their tangible reality politically, legally, culturally, and materially in the plural while serving as a check and balance against any singular artificial ideological attempts to impress a singular placeless ideal upon all places (a 'utopia'--a place that exists no where) upon all the many real 'somewheres' that would tends to create dystopias when such singular utopian frameworks are enforced on all.

What are some examples of the requirements or priorities of having larger and smaller jurisdictions?

Well, for material issues, more bioregional rights are required as the priority. This is the 'bionationalization,' a regionalized decentralized jurisdictional priority in a 'grass roots command economy,' a Commodity Ecology's jurisdiction over a region's material arrangements and not the wider abstract public that is denied centralized material nationalizations since that can lead to corruption and more degradation not the removal of it). As the working definition of the bioregional state notes:

Bioregional democracy (or the Bioregional State) is a set of electoral reforms*, green constitutional engineering additions**, and larger Ecological Reformation like commodity reforms*** designed to force the political process in a democracy to better represent majority concerns about the economy, the body, and environmental concerns (e.g., water quality), toward developmental paths that are locally prioritized and tailored to different areas for their own specific interests of sustainability and durability. This movement is variously called bioregional democracy, watershed cooperation, or bioregional representation, or one of various other similar names--all of which denote democratic control of a natural commons [2] and local jurisdictional dominance in any economic developmental path decisions--while not removing more generalized civil rights protections and other conflict resolutions of a larger national state.

However, for general civil rights, larger frameworks are the priority. As said in Toward a Bioregional State,

"In a nutshell I see the bioregional state as keeping the social and legal centralized around [universal] human rights discourses and keeping the economics decentralized. That to me is a bioregionalist green perspective on “what is to be done.” It embraces what I feel has been the best of “modernism” and democratic frameworks of nation-states while rejecting what has been the worst: it’s support for subsidizes for privatized centralized corporations [and corrupted so called 'nationalizations' only creating more degadation as a private monopoly handed to them by the state if the wider more abstract state is given supreme authority over material issues. So in the bioregional state, to the contrary, the supreme power and jurisdictional priority in material issues is the region instead of the larger state.]

"Thus, the larger state is to keep the “hobgoblin of little minds” from setting up comfortable patriarchal or ethnic regimes simply because in practice “that is the way we do it locally.” I’m sure you have heard that before, as a circular argument. I feel that for social discriminations of inequalities (which I am defining as gender, ethnic, sexuality, handicap status, age discrimination, religious discrimination, etc.) that the national state has been [more] progressive [and more ethical than than regions]...against parochial social localisms that have maintained gender, ethnic, sexual, handicap, age, and religious discriminations. Structure has been available to appeal to, to force the hand against unresponsive local governments embedded in particular social practices that are discriminatory or environmentally degradative [i.e., when "downstream" regions have extended "upstream rights" into another region if the upstream one pollutes the downstream.]. These social localisms unfortunately get placed into part of many people’s idea of ‘decentralization.’ At least that has been my experience. “Localism” is treated as a religion—a uniform reactionary knee-jerk solution to everything. I am arguing that we should be selective in what we consider legitimate on the local level and legitimate on the state/national level, instead of painting everything with a broad brush. [Having both levels gives people more checks and balances on corrupt power wherever it appears, regionally or federally.] Typically, because in unsustainable fascist contexts (or corporate-state contexts for a more appropriate phrase), a social localism/patriarchy/ethnic regime is just fine with consolidated state economics that demote human rights and demote sustainability, while expanding environmental degradation with social inequalities." (p. 213-14)

4. Formalizing these Permanent Human-Environmental Rights as Permanent Legal Procedures: Example Quotes About Secession in the Constitution of Sustainability

In the Constitution of Sustainability, the bioregional state regulates the right of secession as well as the regulation of federated inclusion once more if groups change their minds or if they are subject to repressive trades without representation (like in the U.S. dominating their countries from the outside--the people living there can petition to be included as well in the U.S. in other words). Issues of 'bionationalization' (in Commodity Ecology, really a 'bioregional nationalization' or a  'decentralizing nationalization right'--instead of only rights of centralizing nationalization that for materials are removed as causing further environmental degradation and corruption instead of part of any solution of it) are forms of selective bioregional nullification in bad imposed materials as well.

Leaving these issues of secession and nullification out of the legal rubric has encouraged violence to decide the issue on all sides.

Therefore, the bioregional state in the Constitution of Sustainability wants to regulate the processes of secession, nullification, and refederation (petition to inclusion in the Constitution itself)--as part of an ongoing realistic flexibility about all human alliances as temporary and conditional to serve their masters, their creators, instead of such temporary human institutional creations ever being allowed to be treated as gods and permanent forms of tyranny used by some to enslave others.

However, in this way a 'union' can be maintained even if its particular members may pop in and out over the decades or centuries--maintained by hardly accepting complete subservience as a condition of entry since people as individuals, as contractual collectivities, and as geographies have legal conditions of blameless exit when the relationships cease to serve them, as much as blameless reentry later when the deal is better for them.

The bioregional state mentions formal rights to secession in several places.

One of these is conditions under which secession doesn't occur: when a state merely is unsustainable:

Section 6.
States that are within the Union and have lapsed in their Sustainable frameworks of government, science, finance, and consumption, are denied any Federal funding, though Federal taxation frameworks remain in force and the States in question are still considered part of the Union. In other words, changes of local frameworks of governance, science, finance, or consumption in a State, toward unsustainability, are to be without the interpretation that this State is attempting to pressure default secession. Actions toward unsustainability governmentally, scientifically, financially, or consumptively are grounds for suspension of Congressional voting of delegates sent from the State—though representation and transfers of Representatives and Senators from that State to the Congress are to be allowed regardless. The delegates from the State simply lack voting abilities in the Congress under this context. The Congress shall vote within the current session, or upcoming session if the Congress is adjourned during the moves toward unsustainable in the State in question, on whether to deny federal financing to the State in the event of unsustainable directions in its governmental, scientific, financial, or consumptive structure.

Another one of these mentions regularizes secession as a right, which is better than leaving it to encourage violent conflict:

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. Criteria for succession are based on degree of consanguinity in trade relationships of the State with the rest of the 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.

Another mention regularizes states or bioregions being part of multiple federations if that is in their best interest:

Section 9.
States may be represented in as many Unions as they so desire, concurrently. The Union of Sustainable States is unable to deny States from making alliances or political representation with other Unions. All representation is to overlap. What is beneficial for a particular geographic State is beneficial for the Union. The States themselves can vote on inclusions in other areas based on their local interest, and Congress is unable to stop them from doing so. Congress only has the power of admitting or allowing succession. Once within the Union, there is only one route of succession, mentioned in the above section.

[However, this fails to mean there is only this option: there is still nullification or "conditional withdrawal" of some aspects of the federated union, which is part of Amendment Ten, in the Original Bill of Rights. It was the opinion of many (mentioned later in part three, that state-based nullification of selected non-Constitutional legislation was part of the original constitutional engineering of the U.S. Constitution.)]

Another mention regularizes petitions and conditions to join as much conditions and means to secede as the issue:

20. formal-to-formal checks and balances: [this is conceived of as] facilitating [a] formal procedural way...to avoid external imperialist wars [of integration without representation, of 'banana republics' for instance, beholden to states outside of them, without their populations having any voting rights of representation in that other state] and [to] avoid internal civil wars [by regularizing secession]: first, granting public referendums on external entry of states into the Constitution of Sustainability when under duress (“duress” here, referring to when their state government refuses to adapt their formal institutional frameworks [toward sustainability or greater representation], an appeal can be lodged to the Constitution of Sustainability for diplomatic pressure on the unsustainable external state, in the name of its people) [or it can file and has rights to become a federated state of the other state in question as well]; second, inversely, procedures for peaceable secession in Constitution of Sustainability are formalized (See Constitution of Sustainability).

5. The Bioregional State on Secession and Federal Power

What is the bioregional state's opinion on secession and federated power?

I would add that when any government breaks a Constitutional contract and breaks the Ecological Contract, it encourages secession, nullification and refederation to be taken seriously since these rights were never given up as they are inalienable rights.

So blaming the victim (the states or particular bioregions in the states) for federal or state malfeasance ignores the issue of federal or state tyrannies that have encouraged it. It is over simplistic to simply blame the states for wanting to secede or to nullify something without addressing what it is about the wider conditional federated (not eternal unitary) union that they feel is becoming tyrannical and undesired and corrupted to their human and environmental interests.

To say that secession thus is not a right, I suggest you reread the U.S. Declaration of Independence, which is a declaration of secession from the British Empire, after attempts of partial nullfication were attempted in good faith before.

However unfortunately, despite having these deep eternal rights of secession, nullification and refederation, they are currently treated as rather inchoate. Why? It is due to lack of use and even lack of familiarity with use that some people think they lack these rights, while others romanticize that using them will always result in a better situation. For the latter group, they feel that once they secede, they surmise that suddenly their smaller, regional world will be entirely full of harmony, equanimity, love, and sustainable fecundity. However, it will fail to start immediately like that. Instead, if you really want something toward this bioregionality vision, you can start different regional institutions now, and worry about secession while you prepare the ground for greater cultural and material widening of choices. Before secession, you might might ponder limited nullification of some issues to whet your appetite for more if further is desired, as well trying it for the throwing of the gauntlet against an unrepresentative federal arrangement that you are innately challenging to change and reform while remaining loyal.

However, even though it is your inalienable human and environmental right to choose the more extreme secession, and even though arguments for and against it are given in part three, it will be a smoother transition to what you want regardless of whether you choose secession or nullification later if you start an Ecological Reformation started now.


Conclusion of Part One

Only a more legally and procedurally regularized secession, nullification and refederation/inclusion arrangement assures a check and balance on any federal false claims to ultimate supremacy. Only this regularized secession/inclusion stresses that any union is about a peer group of members instead of only about any larger legal fictions they organize as having any complete, ultimate, or permanent authority over them. The larger system hardly becomes an unquestionable god and the members hardly become permanent slaves simply by joining together since human and environmental rights are inalienable.

Both local secession and federal uber-supremacy are extremes, as Jefferson argued. Both may be evil in their own ways. Both may be good. One may be evil and one may be good at different times, requiring both. However, like Jefferson the bioregional state considers secession a right for both states and for bioregional areas within states as a check and balance on federal power and on state power just as the bioregional state considers non-member regional petition to inclusion a right under certain trade conditions of "external trade domination without representation."

On the other hand, for the federal level, the bioregional state fails to consider the federal government's claims of supremacy as having any legal basis for a complete dominance--because any federal government is only one small part of a federated system instead of an autonomous realm of authority in all cases trumping others with hubristic dreams of doctrines of infallibility and godlike status dreamed up by the most psychopathic of humans. Don't tolerate institutions that encourage psychopathic clientelisms. These claims of autonomous authority are dictatorships under Orwellian names. (Obama's minions call it the "unitary (sic) executive" continuing what Bush's minions called it--even though such a doctrine doesn't exist in a federal system where the executive is only one branch out of three.)

However, the same goes for the regions: bioregions are hardly infallible as well or have godlike status. As I said: both may be evil in their own ways. Both may be good. One may be evil and one may be good at different times, requiring we humans operate best when we have political choices--access to larger and smaller jurisdictions as checks and balances on each other when one goes rogue. Don't create a smaller system that escapes wider delimited choices by only creating a smaller delimited version of the same.


So the bioregional state would encourage [1] either group federated secession, or [2] wider federal reformation on all levels (if reforms are possible of course which amounts to the same issue), or [3] regardless, toward an Ecological Reformation of major cultural and material institutions outside the federal or state level before tackling these issues.

The bioregional state is that middle path between two potential totalitarian systems. On the one hand, the bioregional state is a check and balance against potentially unchecked totalitarian regionalism. Ask Black Americans or any ethnic minorities if they want to 'regionalize with you' to remove the short 40 year origin of the first common civil rights ever given to them in the history of this very racially stratified region of the world for 500 years.

On the other hand, the bioregional state is a check and balance on potentially totalitarian states, by providing us more choices of checks and balances on all power instead of removing all powers to the region alone. Regardless, a statement on human rights of representation and self-determination as inalienable rights imply that permanent rights to secession, nullification, and refederation exist. They simply require being put into place procedurally into any "Constitution, version two."

Next, since so much corruption has been created within the United States, certainly the U.S. Constitution has some share of the blame for being unable to "keep the republic." So if the current U.S. Constitution has demonstrated it is a flawed document by missing some key elements of corruption that insinuated into it over 250 years, what are the specific problems identified? And what solutions are offered for each?

Currently, 33 different systemic problems with the U.S. Constitution have been identified based on what specific formal corruptions have been allowed to happen in practice. This is addressed to a candid world in Part Two, coming soon.


Coming soon: part two...