written from Upper Rock, Wisconsin (find your bioregion/watershed)

Toward a Bioregional State:

Bioregional Letter #26

List of Additional Checks and Balances Required in the Bioregional State:
Overhauling Formal Democracy in the Era of Sustainability
with Four Types of Checks and Balances instead of only One

INTRODUCTION

Before explaining how there are four different types of checks and balances in the bioregional state-instead of the only one type that is in existing unsustainable states-it is important to have a short overview of why additional checks and balances are required.

First, sustainability is less a technological or economic management framework.

Sustainability is a political pressure that influences many organizational issues throughout social relations: from the formal state, to the sciences, to financial relations, to consumption. Sustainability is the democratization of state developmentalism, and the removal of imposed frameworks of risk and developmentalism that are engineered by corrupt democratic processes that jury-rig the state policy and state institutional arrangements to demote democratic feedback and to secure a clientelistic management structure that has been removed effectively from public oversight.

Sustainability as a democratic expression requires a democratic feedback into state developmentalism pressures. These pressures are always reflective to, influenced by, and in origin coming from the innate human-to-environmental geographically specific expression of politics. This means supporting and enfranchising particular geographies along with the peoples within them. People are effected by changes in the human health, ecology, and economic contexts of particular geographic areas. The goal is to have a sustainable state formal institutional framework that enfranchises a people's shared potential risks of pollution and the externalities of developmentalism that are shared by a people in a particular geographic space. This enfranchisement is a check and balance against state developmentalism, reflexively pressuring it towards a developmentalism that is representative instead of unrepresentative.

Moving from theory to practice, the most readily available framework that can be uniformly implemented and which is simultaneously capable of dealing with the geographic variation is the watershed. Watersheds, because they are catchments basins as well because they are ecological territories that express how the same people and species in a particular area do share the same imposed material risks through human health, ecological, and economic externalities, they serve as a tangible, material geographical jurisdiction of voter politics in any state-determining whether that state is organized for sustainability or otherwise.

What can we do when the state is organized to create environmental degradation and to basically destroy itself though the expanding sponsorship of externalities in human health, ecological relations, and economic relations-which are endemically interpenetrating in the same geographical spaces? What can we do when the state through its formal institutions ignores and curtails these geographically specific pressures on developmental issues and representation? We can formulate novel checks and balances in formal institutions that reflect the geographical politics of a particular area in order to moderate through democratic feedback a unsustainable state's developmentalist pressures on its population's health, its ecology, and its economics.

Since the state is a developmentalist expression across particular geographies and ecologies, it can either facilitate sustainability through allowing for these geographically specific political feedbacks against risk, or a state can facilitate environmental degradation and its subsequent human health, ecological, and economic externalities by leaving the geographic particularities of particular politics unaddressed. Since in all cases the state is more than a humanocentric organization and is instead a human-to-environmental relational expression stretched across a specific geography and multiple ecologies typically, the aim of sustainability is to formally recognize this geographical and ecological aspect of the state by providing political feedback that assures that formal policy and formal institutions represent particular ecologies and the people who live within them and who depend upon these particular areas and to assure that informal politics are capable of being reflected in the formal institutions of the state, instead of being gatekept and demoted. To ignore these human-to-environmental relationships in formal institutional frameworks means that the state developmentalism politics becomes "out of phase" to the actual political expressions in the world that are still geographically specific.

These human-to-environmental relationships are geographically and ecologically specific. There's nothing called an "abstract" human-to-environmental relationship: they are always specific. This leads certain specific areas and peoples to experience similar environmental risk issues in human health, ecology, and economics, pressuring a form of sustainability politics for environmental amelioration as democratic feedback against unrepresentative states that pressure environmental degradation against a particular geographic area's self-interest.

Any self-interest is always geographically specific. Environmental degradation is only an ignorance and lack of democratic feedback in state politics of geographic externalities, and/or an active demotion by the formal institutions of the state through the way they are organized to demote this innate feedback that would lead to environmental amelioration. To remove this ignorance, democratic feedback is required to enfranchise and jurisdictionally institutionalize the particularities of people's geographies within the state as feedback against unsustainable developmentalism. This is the sense of environmental proxy that is described in Bioregional Letter #25.
When the state's democratic feedback is "out of phase" to this innate environmental proxy pressure from people, then environmental degradation is institutionalized by any existing political feedback being formally demoted, divided, and conquered by formal institutions organized by an "out of sync" unsustainable state.

THE FOUR TYPES OF ADDITIONAL CHECKS AND BALANCES REQUIRED IN THE BIOREGIONAL STATE

More checks and balances are required in this context when the state is taking its developmentalism in unsustainable directions because formal institutions demote accurate geographically specific political feedback on the expanding and interrelated human health, ecological, and economic externalities that have a variegated and specific geography. All these checks and balances that follow are designed to enfranchise the innate undergirding geographic specificities of democratic feedback. On the contrary, the unsustainable state has imposed abstract institutions and an abstract individualist citizenship context which divided and conquered the geographic specific goals of democratic feedback from particular areas.

To get the formal state in sync with its existing geography and its existing geographically relevant democratic feedback about human health, ecological relations, and economic sustainability, the formal state institutions require being "ecologized." This means both adjusting existing formal institutions and adding other formal institutional frameworks that provide the required checks and balances for sustainability.

This Bioregional Letter can be used as an index for all additional checks and balances that have been left out of Western democratic theory. This can be used as a summary as well as a research tool into exploring the Bioregional Letters as a whole. Existing Western democratic theory has ignored the innate human/environmental relationships that all states are dependent upon and are required to support to be sustainable instead of undermine. This has led to a very prescripted sense of what checks and balances are.

Want to know why we have environmental degradation?

Want to know why we have environmental degradation? Because there are at least 36 additional checks and balances required in the bioregional state to align the innate environmental proxy aspects of politics into feedback that is registered in state developmentalism.

FOUR TYPES OF CHECKS AND BALANCES IN THE BIOREGIONAL STATE;
ONLY ONE TYPE OF CHECK AND BALANCE IN UNSUSTAINABLE STATES

There are four types of checks and balances in the bioregional state to consider while reading. They are, without any particular order

(1) the more typical Western democratic theory issues that discuss "formal-to-formal" institutional checks and balances that are required for a sustainable bioregional state.

(2) Additionally in the bioregional state, three other levels of checks and balances are required: other "informal-to-informal" checks and balances entirely ignored in existing democratic theory that assure a competitive party context of informal factions is durable and kept in place formally.

(3) Furthermore, the other level of checks and balances required are the "informal-to-formal" checks and balances that keep particular informal election outcome issues from being allowed to influence and bias the formal frameworks in unrepresentative clientelistic ways. This means having a flexible formal framework that interacts with particular informal election outcomes to assure that the "informal to informal" checks and balances between parties are maintained in operation instead of demoted. This is seen in both formal institutional design issues as well as in a voting framework that makes sure that all parties are forced to compete for 100% of the electorate instead of being able to operate by excluding large numbers of the electorate because of the gatekeeping of the political agenda by party frameworks.

(4) The fourth check and balance framework is organized around consumptive issues: securing public consumer choices against an enforced corporate imposed consumption of singular items. Markets only work when there are state supported multiple choices. This can be related to issues as wide-ranging as food items to transportation infrastructures.

The overall point is to arrange checks and balances in such a way as to keep the formal infrastructure from being a clientelistic arrangement of private (informal) power frameworks-to keep the formal institutional frameworks public is to keep informal factional contention as an ongoing process. This facilitates the only means of achieving a working sustainable democracy.

Typically ignored in existing Western democratic theory in the issue of institutional design, factions are required in any democracy. The issue is securing durable contention between factions in the formal institutional framework instead of excluding them by the establishment of a particular informal hegemony that jury-rigs the formal institutions to unfairly demote other informal factions. In other words, formal institutions instead of facilitating sculpt and manipulate the organization of informal factions in socio-political relations. This power can be manipulated by certain informal factions in power to demote factions from arising organizationally and to demote their playing durable parts in politics.

A balance is required that keeps any one faction from manipulating the organization of factional contention. This results in a well organized voting procedure that flexes depending on election outcome to avoid any particular informal framework from hijacking formal institutional procedures for its private informal benefit to demote other informal challengers. This balance is the result of particular frameworks of voting that expand the informal factional contention to 100% of the electorate. Second, the formal institutional frameworks themselves are overhauled in the bioregional state.

All these principles underlie the recipe for the bioregional state-formal-to-formal 'classic' checks and balances; informal-to-informal party interactions checks and balances; formal-to-informal checks and balances; and consumptive checks and balances. All contribute to securing the working democracy of competing factions all of which compete for 100% of the electorate. Several of the listed checks and balances may be mentioned more than once to detail how the same feature has multiple issues (e.g., like formal-to-formal and formal-to-informal) These additional checks and balances, are, without any particular order:

1. Informal-to-formal and informal-to-informal checks and balances at the geographic basis of democracy: the CDI in the bioregional state. The CDI as discussed in Article One of the Constitution of Sustainability and Bioregional Letter #21 is a required check and balance for letting particular localisms formulate their own political agendas before being co-opted by nationalist parties. Thus it is an informal-to-formal issue since the CDI is a citizens recognition body outside of the state, and it is an added check and balance that is informal-to-informal: informal citizens recognition to informal political party clientelisms. Only when particular geographies are made aware of the geographic quality of their own politics in what is shared in the common human health, ecological, and economic externalities they want to see removed from their watershed or bioregion, can citizens effectively work within political parties as a representation tool.

2. informal-to-informal checks and balances amongst majoritarian political parties and third/fourth party contexts. To have party competition, means having majoritarian parties and minority parties positionally supported in a check and balance with each other. If majoritarian parties arrange the laws and institutions in such a way that minority parties disappear from the body politic, (Bioregional Letter #10), then informal majority parties have a monopoly of the informal means of addressing the state. As a monopoly, they have the informal power to gatekeep against political pressures instead of being pressured to reflect them. If people stop voting, it is little concern to a monopoly context party system because they are based on incumbency security instead of representation anyway. Only if majority and third/fourth parties are both secured in formal institutional relations can democracy or sustainability occur. Only when majority and third/fourth parties are both secured in formal institutional relations do majority parties ever feel politically pressured to be representative. Third/fourth parties are an integral way democracy works. Without durable third/fourth parties, democracy is a dead letter and a monopoly gatekeeping framework based on incumbency and clientelism and low voter totals is the result. Citizens require party competition. This means the checks and balances that are required to secure a competitive party framework are as follows
a. keep any party from designing their own district: move towards watershed representation frameworks that provide a feedback that is unco-opted by any particular ideology, and which represent material risk concerns of people with many different ideologies who live in the same place because they all share the same geographic experiences of human health, ecology, and economic externalities.
b. Proportional representation in the Electoral College, where the Electors are selected for the presidential vote through the state wide demographic spread of voters political affiliations. This is more in tune with what the Founding Father's had in mind with the Electoral Congress: that particular states (instead of particular parties) elect the president. Thus, to enfranchise the geography of particular states requires a proportional representation framework reflecting the variegation in a particular state for the selection of Electors for the Electoral College. (Constitution of Sustainability, Bioregional Letter #20, Bioregional Letters, 1-3)
c. Voting frameworks of proportional representation with a majoritarian allotment: Only in this particular voting framework are parties compelled to compete for 100% of the vote, and are third/fourth minority parties compelled to fight majority parties to check and balance against them. Anything else leads to lowered voter rolls. (Bioregional Letter #9, #14)
d. Strategies of achievement: through IRV and independent districting arrangements for watersheds as Trojan Horse (Bioregional Letter #11-13, #17, #23)

3. formal-to-formal and informal-to-formal checks and balances: jurisdictional checks and balances between parties gerrymandering their own selection tool for incumbency, avoiding gerrymandered districts using watersheds as districts.

4. informal-to-formal checks and balances between strategies of voting and their political outcomes in majoritarian or multiple of in the voting frameworks; checks and balances in the voting strategies to assure 100% outcomes in elections. (Bioregional Letter #9-#11)

5. informal-to-formal checks and balances between the different formal institutional biases in parliamentarianism and presidentialism and how they interact with different party outcome demographics in the legislature: depending on election outcomes the formal institution is a presidentialist or a parliamentarian framework. With high voter approval for a candidate above 50%, a presidentialism framework. With only a plurality win, this is deserving of a less powerful post because of the less backing that the people as a whole have in the candidate, giving them a parliamentarian position with less power for the executive. The people have demonstrated this lesser trust with their lower approval, and for more power of the legislative over him to check and balance against them. For both of Clinton's terms, and for Bush's "term" (for lack of another term for what he is doing in the Presidency when the Supreme Court legalized the stoppage of the voting, in a state where upwards of 150,000 people had been disenfranchised beforehand) all past three terms of the United States Chief Executive would be parliamentarian leaderships, with the legislative having the ability to throw them out with a vote of no-confidence, allowing for the stetting up of novel elections for the Chief Executive position. (Discussed in the Constitution of Sustainability, Bioregional Letter #20.)

6. informal-to-formal checks and balances between unicameral and bicameralism: depending on the party demographics, a check and balance on majority party power in a bicameral context; and a check and balance on multiple minority parties in a unicameral context. This is similar to the above issue about the switching presidentialism and parliamentarianism because both have formal institutional flaws that allow unrepresentative groups, simply because of a static cameralism or static executive creates a context to coup larger powers than the electorate had specifically shown to be wanting to give them. (Discussed in the Constitution of Sustainability, Bioregional Letter #20.)

7. formal-to-formal and informal-to-informal checks and balances between proportional representation frameworks of voting and majoritarian frameworks of voting: A proportional representation with a majoritarian allotment clause is the only voting framework that keeps out the flaws of both pure types of formal voting which institutionalize biased overall strategies of party creation and durability. Only proportional representation with a majoritarian allotment keeps parties interacting and keep the strategies of parties from solidifying and thus gatekeeping the formal mechanisms of the vote. Since there are both benefits and flaws with both majoritarian frameworks of voting and proportional representation, a framework of voting is used to assure that all parties have incentive to enfranchise and seek out 100% of the voting public in their informal competitions with each other. Only proportional representation with a majoritarian allotment avoids the flaws of straight proportional representation and straight majoritarianism simultaneously. (Bioregional Letter #9-#11)

8. formal-to-formal checks and balances: there is a check and balance between localized watershed voting and full state voting, as seen in how the House of Representatives shall be based on watershed frameworks of voting while the Senate is based on full state bailiwick frameworks of voting. Both cameral elections utilize the proportional representation with majoritarian allotment framework of voting. This assures that there is a check and balance between particular formal frameworks of representation, where there are formally candidates that exclusively represent particular watersheds and where there are formal candidates that are elected based on full state concerns and issues of the people. Both of these dynamics make an equitable sense of localized and state-wide balance in representation politics.

9. formal-to-formal and informal-to-formal checks and balances: checks and balances on the geographical districting of appellate courts and other lower federal court jurisdictions, geographically. There are potentially jurisdictional biases that are institutionalized in court frameworks: in terms of whether they are representative or unrepresentative of human health, ecological damage, or economic externalities. These situations of sustainability are facilitated when the higher courts are placed in downstream areas in a multi-watershed context, instead of upstream. In short, all 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 an upstream court may be biased in ignoring. Only through appreciating that there is a geography to pollution and a geography to how procedurally court cases are brought against it shows that since pollution goes downstream typically, court frameworks of hierarchy of jurisdiction be arranged accordingly to put the power of the courts in the appropriate downstream locations instead of being absconded and isolated upstream and making judgments about inflicting pollution on other areas. This is why higher courts shall be a downstream jurisdiction, and following the issue of watershed jurisdiction similar to the voting district frameworks discussed elsewhere. The same shall apply within particular states as well, as for the federal frameworks.

10. informal-to-formal and informal-to-informal checks and balances between parties though proportional representation in the Electoral Congress to assure particular geographies as states-which have varied politics-have the vote for the Chief Executive and Vice Chief Executive. This proportional representation in the Electoral Congress would make the Electoral Congress more like what it was supposed to be, a representation of the variegation within a particular state that then subsequently gets to be represented in the Electoral Congress. This is what it was supposed to be, a geographical vote, instead of what it has become as a way to keep third/fourth parties out of the nationalist context of power and representation. (Bioregional Letter #1-3)

11. formal-to-formal checks and balances in legislative power to executive power arrangements, connected to the informal-to-formal issues mentioned above: an additional classical use of checks and balances can be kept in mind with the flexible executive/legislative contexts that are dependent upon the specific Chief Executive election outcome: either merging in parliamentarianism or separating in presidentialism dependant upon different voting outcome contexts. "Classical" here means ideas that there are checks and balances between different formal powers while most of the bioregional state is for putting many additional checks and balances between informal power groups that are left out of present Western democratic theory senses of checks and balances. These additional checks and balances between the legislative and the executive to keep the Chief Executive from getting overly powerful with low voter approval. (the parliamentarianism-presidentialism flexible changes discussed above).

12. formal-to-formal checks and balances in legislative/executive/judiciary issues by making particular downstream watersheds the context, and the subsequent checks on executive appointments to judiciary, when the voter outcome shows that the executive shall be a parliamentarian leader when their approval is low. Plus, low voter outcomes of particular executives shall be kept from appointing judiciary issues. (Discussed in the Constitution of Sustainability, Bioregional Letter #20.)

13. informal-to-formal checks and balances: Bringing political theorist Goodnow's issues into play in Western democratic theory and in ecological democratic theory, with the previous lack of addressing urban representation frameworks of government, or urban sites in representation frameworks in the formal state. These additional checks on unrepresentative urban level governmental frameworks are in the bioregional state, with a federal jurisdiction over any urban governmental organization instead of a state issue. The United States, unlike any other European heritage framework of governmental origin, has removed these innately localist, jurisdictional issues (Dillon's Rule, early 20th century) and considered urban areas simply the creation of the state level of jurisdiction. This has led to massive urban sprawl in the United States because of the ease of incorporation, which has environmental as well as political and segregative effects (Rush, 1995; Logan and Molotch, 1987; Kenneth Jackson, 1985; Orfield, 1997). This leads to corruption and lack of urban representation in the state for particular and specifically urban issues, which are gerrymandered from a distant state capital instead of by the people in a particular urban level, without any potential redress of grievances for large conurbation issues within the federal frameworks. It's a simple issue of check and balance and capacity of redress of grievances for urban jurisdictional issues. To add this urban jurisdictional issue as separate from the state, as well as to check and balance against any repercussion of this urban jurisdictional issues are entirely federal. This has a geographic rationale as well: most urban expressions are a border expressions of multiple states, making then an innate federal interactive issue instead of one of particular states effectively prescripting the legitimation of the Dillon Rule. A great deal of environmental degradation is connected with this split of jurisdictional issues in conurbations that are borderline phenomena to particular states. (Whitaker, 2000)

14. formal-to-formal checks and balances between states and federal jurisdictions in using state borderline watersheds issues as a way to check and balance between multiple state politics potential pressures for environmental degradation in border watersheds, by having border watersheds be given the federal vote whenever any state voters and federal voters are getting split by state boundaries in common watersheds. For instance, since states are formal checks and balances on federal power; and since the federal is a checks and balances on state power; border watersheds are a feedback to all particular states in which they are affected by a state's abstract jurisdiction or borderline that may cross the watershed and divide it jurisdictionally. Federal voting always goes by contiguous watersheds as checks on expanding federal power, since the federal is a checks on expanding state power, and vice versa. The federal power is seen as one derived from the people as a whole in their contiguous watersheds without regards to particular states; particular states are seen as important checks and balances on moderating and decentralizing federal power, of which the federal power can be another potential framework of corruption without state checks and balances.

15. formal-to-formal check and balance between states (state to state) on border developmental issues: dealing with the border issue in watershed districts on borders where border touched watersheds because they are affected by all states involved. Border watersheds vote in all state elections in all the states in which they are congruent. This is because the root of the Constitution of Sustainability as a federated framework, it is less a federation of states: it is a federation of watersheds, with states being only one subordinate aspect that serves the good of the people, ecologies, and economies of watersheds, instead of the watersheds existing to serve the abstract of the state.

16. Formal-to-formal check and balance on abstract state power from watersheds and from shared watersheds, when applicable: this is the shared watershed to state check and balance. This is because the root of the Constitution of Sustainability as a federated framework, it is less a federation of states: it is a federation of watersheds, with states being only one subordinate aspect that serves the good of the people, ecologies, and economies of watersheds, instead of the watersheds existing to serve the abstract of the state. The purpose of watershed voting frameworks is because of the innate ecological embeddedness aspects between human health, ecology, and economy that becomes shared in a particular watershed context, when states lead to pollution, environmental degradation, and economic ruin in particular watersheds. The sanctity of any watershed framework is the watchword of the Constitution of Sustainability. Any abstracts that are created, from the abstract federal framework to the abstract state framework are subordinate to particular goals of tangible watershed security and durability. Any worship of the federal or the state framework in itself is illusory and misguided, because they are abstracts, and only an association of watersheds brought together to check and balance against historical potential and historical record of having divided and conquered politics managed from an environmentally degradative territorial state (terror-torial state?) is the purpose of the Constitution of Sustainability. At root are watersheds. These are material and tangible frameworks, served by abstracts of the state and the federated context. The state and the federal context serve to counterbalance each other formally (formal-to-formal frameworks), leaving the watershed as paramountly supreme and the modus operandi of the whole Constitution of Sustainability. It is the watersheds that have come together to enact sustainability through common concern of human health, ecological, and economic concerns, instead of the historically unsustainable states that have entered into this federated framework. The Constitution of Sustainability serves to check and balance both the unsustainable frameworks of historically abstract states and historically federated frameworks, that, without a watershed appreciation within them that is tangible, become locuses of "out of sync" human corruptions and ecological destructions.

17. formal-to-formal check on border watersheds power frameworks to states power in the federated framework: within particular single states, the higher level body of the state-level Senate legislature only a 'half' watershed, or the intra-watershed jurisdictional voting, while the house level of the state is the full watershed contingently affected by particular state borderlines.

18. formal-to-formal check on border watersheds power frameworks; this gives additionally a bit of power in a formal checks and balances between federal and states, since states shall be represented as intra-watershed (split 'halfed' voting of a watershed in the Senate of a state) for issues of decentralization, over federal full watershed contexts of voting that include border areas and full watersheds of the border areas.

19. formal-to-formal checks and balances in the state level procedures of entry. When existing unsustainable states change their frameworks beforehand to align with the entry requirements for the Constitution of Sustainability, this assures that the state is "aligned and in sync" already with its own environmental and geographic based politics before entry into the Constitutions of Sustainable States. (See Constitution of Sustainability, Bioregional Letter #20).

20. formal-to-formal checks and balances facilitating formal procedural ways to avoid external imperialist wars and avoid internal civil wars: first, granting public referendums on external entry when under duress ("duress" here, when their state government refuses to adapt their formal institutional frameworks an appeal can be lodged to the Constitution of Sustainability for diplomatic pressure on the unsustainable external state, in the name of its people); second, procedures for peaceable succession into the formal procedures of the Constitution of Sustainability are formalized (See Constitution of Sustainability).

21. informal-to-formal check and balance: avoiding formal age discrimination issues in voting, since any ages can vote in the citizen based watershed council context that is external to the federated or state framework. Systemic power biases in adult-based institutions leave "children" as externalized and thus a more moral voice for ideological pressure politics and for geographical issues of politics for environmental and local issues.

22. informal-to-informal check and balance: avoiding gender discrimination issues in representation voting, since the Civil Democratic Institution equal gender ratios are achieved with the intent of enfranchising the very different sociospatial lives and concern that men and women in aggregate lead (women typically more localized in a distanciated patriarchal context), thus granting a more moral voice for geographical issues of politics for environmental and local issues. However, in the historically more rare matriarchal contexts, this of course favors males as well.

23. formal-to-formal check and balance against divide and conquer of states over different and geographically specific bioregional/watershed politics: the whole idea of the representation framework is to remove this divide and conquer context of historically unsustainable states that have subverted watersheds and the politics of human health, ecology, and economic sustainability. Instead, the point of the bioregional state is to make any abstract state the reflection of the democratic politics and policies across multiple tangible bioregions/watersheds. Historically, the opposite has occurred: where the maligning or disrupting of the tangible watershed, human health, ecology, and economics have been in the service of an abstract unsustainable state politics.

24. formal-to-formal check and balances with urban jurisdictions: any urban jurisdiction of voting shall enclose full watersheds and be assembled from multiple full watersheds (when required) as a feedback against environmental degradation from urban developmental and consumptive frameworks.

25. formal-to-formal checks and balances in administrative and educational power of conformity and ignorance of the innate geographic specificity of any empirical issues. This is seen in the expanded Bill of Ecological Rights dealing with: education, local knowledge and certification requirements for professions, in the labeling issues of crop origins, in supporting organics, in tax frameworks against unsustainability, in the unpatentability of life, in the devolution of financial scale, in checks and balances on corporation power and corporate public participation in the legislature.

26. informal-to-formal and formal-to-formal checks and balances in local geographic-to-national/federal: these are the geographic checks and balances on unsustainable developmentalism in several areas: seen in the additional checks and balances in the CDI, and in the additional supports of a check and balance between majority and minority parties (see other checks and balances above), the latter of which (minority parties) are typically historically always a geographically locused phenomenon as well.

27. informal-to-formal checks and balances in public and private financing: seen in elections, in the public funding of elections and equal media time on public television being the only place for visual television campaign advertisements; seen in checks and balances in scale of finance and private financial organizational scale in the issue of cross border banking empire frameworks are illegal; seen in the dissolution of the privatized Federal Reserve framework; where only the Constitution of Sustainability Treasury is the origin of the money supply instead of a series of private banks (without any public stocks or public participation) and where Constitution of Sustainability Treasury sets the discount rates and interests rates and interests rate loans between private banks; the jurisdiction of various sub-level treasury outlets shall follow watershed contiguity and they will all be placed in downstream watersheds.

28. formal-to-formal checks and balances added in science practice and the professions; in balancing local knowledges with the political pressures of abstracted nomothetic knowledges; this is with the local watershed certifications for professions to practice, in addition to any general certifications already in place; public schools useful for watersheds with environmental monitoring and restoration uses.

29. informal-to-formal checks and balances in local consumption and distanciated commodities; formal supports for local consumption over a distanciated and divided and conquered framework of consumptive disadvantages in trade relationships that lower the value of the farmer dollar; demoting monocropping, for multi cropping and/or permicultural frameworks.

30. formal-to-informal checks and balances, on watershed representation vs. population distribution in representation: this is because population stops being a form of representation in watershed districts except in the act of voting totals for particular elections of candidates of course. The overarching idea distributed across all watersheds in their plurality is to check and balance against urbanizing pressures which are uneven developmental pressures facilitated typically by democratic states unwittingly, that agglutinate urban areas and depopulate and thus create 'rural areas.' If the presumed idea is somehow a "balancing of population and watersheds," this actually sets up more uneven development and a misrepresentation and inequality in the politics of representation across watersheds, because population is always an issue of imbalance and uneven development when it comes to urbanization. This whole issue of the geographic inequalities that this leads to in representation with more political weight being thrown at only one aspect of the urbanization phenomenon without any political check and balance feedback (or demoted feedback) from the ruralizing half of the urbanizing phenomenon, is why the issue of population weight which has historically been connected to representation is demoted entirely in the bioregional state on the abstract state and federal levels.

31. formal-to-formal checks and balances on the issues of residency and formal candidacy: requirements for running for office and living in the state for an unbroken span of years beforehand for a length of years instead of immediately being capable of running for office when arriving in a state and registering as a voter: the point is to promote geographical familiarity instead of clientelistic imported "representatives" from national parties sent to "govern" a state for a party. The idea of democracy is of course the inverse: a state/watershed sending and choosing one of its own as a party representative to govern! Any legislative shall representatives represent particular geographies first, instead of particular "party imports" first. This as well keeps those groups with multiple residencies who travel extensively from being candidates in their "home" (sic) state or watershed. It's an unbroken span of years of single residency. Travel of course is fine as long as the majority of the year they are in that state or watershed as resident. A public duty of government means that they are there to do their public duty of representation of that particular watershed.

32. informal-to-formal checks and balances on scale of corporate affiliations and public offices participation: issues of degree of stock ownership and Board of Directors or CEO affiliations of particular corporations as a hold or disqualification for office because of conflicts of private interest and public interests, until the link has been severed; then when severed, a waiting period before capacity of separation is considered sound.

33. informal-to-formal checks and balances between population distribution inequality and formal representation geographic equality: checks and balances on the Dr. Jeckyll of urban social progressivism and the Mr. Hyde of urban regressive policies that typically support the consumptive clientelism politics of environmental degradation. This is done in the bioregional state by demoting population as a formal weight in the abstracts of federal government, in order to have a check and balance within and between the population issues of distribution that are the urbanization processes. These population distributional issues are ruralizing and urbanizing of population, where if weight was attached to population in the abstract state and federal frameworks, with urbanization, this would give urban areas an overrepresentation and rural areas an underepresentation. Urban processes, always connected with a state support or lack of support, are connected with environmental degradation in that the interactions between the state and urbanization pressure organizational change pressures which facilitate various areas organizationally speaking typically towards privatization and consolidation towards a level of consumptive administration over market relations of choice, because of agglutinating consumptive clientelisms being created out of urban populations combined with the state and urban consumptive undercurrents that undercut other organizational frameworks elsewhere and drain population from one area to another as part of unsustainability (another Bioregional Letter is in the works on this topic, dealing with issues of exit and voice in urban spaces and their influences on political economic networks historically). So to balance the expanding maldistribution of population that is urban/ruralizing processes, the state is the formal apparatus of assuring that all watersheds are represented equally instead of unequally, in order to provide feedback against runaway processes of urbanization and consolidation that are connected with environmental degradation.

34. informal-to-formal checks and balances in financial scale; issue of financial scale addressed elsewhere, above; additional issue of public loans of last resort when denied private loans; support of cooperative frameworks of finance by the government backed watershed lending cooperative institutions; a network of public citizen finance to compete and check and balance against private finance to serve as a competition to privatized finance in citizen cooperative finance. Government insurance of deposits only in cooperative or credit union frameworks of finance. It is far from the governments role to bail out, underwrite, or protect private malfeasance and risk taking. It is the government's role to maintain and support democratic frameworks wherever possible that maintain community and locality from which democracy springs.

35. informal-to-formal checks and balances in creating transportation infrastructure implementation only in terms of widening choice. Instead of institutionalizing conflicts of interest in enforcing only one particular choice of transportation or privatized infrastructures and consumptive of materials only, the aim is always the implementing multiple projects of choice instead of singular projects of single infrastructures or of sponsoring privatized frameworks of transportation. The public government is for public infrastructure and public transportation, instead of supporting privatized frameworks of infrastructure exclusively, without offering any choice.

36. informal-to-formal checks and balances in media ownership consolidation: the state level is the largest allowable framework of private media ownership. The model is that each state has its own localized media frameworks for facilitation of competition and democracy; federal or global frameworks in mails and newspapers are fine to be sent out from one particular watershed or state for worldwide, though the issue of ownership of multiple outlets across multiple states to be prohibited.

37. informal-to-formal checks and balances in the public and private sharing of consumer and citizen information to be prohibited: private information is a private resource and is kept from the public governmental frameworks.

38. formal-to-formal checks and balances on ideas of governmental federalism and governmental consolidation. Both are formal biases that lead to different informal biases in politics: the federated formal framework leads to an undue ability to keep consolidated pressures from occuring simply because of formal frameworks, thus playing into the hands of those informal interests that are more consolidated than the formal 'federated' state in question, thus without any public feedback against their informal consolidated powers. I am thinking particularly of consolidated corporate power and consolidated financial power, and nationalist consolidated party power is important as well. The formal bias of the other, a state consolidated power is that it demotes the capacity of decentralization potentials. To have both checking and balancing against each other is a point of many of the other checks and balances listed above. This point is mentioned for thoroughness.

In conclusion, there are many areas where the bioregional state picks up the slack in existing flawed frameworks of unsustainable and abstract formal democracy. As of this writing, there are 37 institutional design points with 45 different checks and balances issues since many of the 37 points have multiple checks and balances taken into account. To get a general picture of these 45 considerations that have gone into additional checks and balances issue of the bioregional state. They are on average: formal-to-formal: 22; informal-to-informal: 5; informal-to-formal: 19.

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