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The U.S. House of Lords?
by Ken Krayeske
Hartford, CT
Is the American body politic digging through Britain's trash heap for its guiding philosophy?
It would be nothing new. We've borrowed good ideas from the Brits- like the Magna Carta and the bicameral legislature. And we've taken bad ideas - like eugenics, the concept that people can be bred to be better like horses. Hitler took it to genocidal extremes, while the state of Vermont experimented with forced sterilizations.
Today, our cousins in the English electorate seem to be migrating towards a fairer, more humane representative government. Voters across the big pond recently repudiated their warmongering prime minister. As important, they are taking small steps to discard the ancient oligarchic institution of the House of Lords.
On this side of the Atlantic, our warmongering President - who got his job through nepotism - allegedly won a resounding popular vote victory in November. My choice of words reveals I don't trust our election results, tallied by partisan hacks who benefit when their organization wins. Chicanery will thus rule.
More harmful to the American system of representative democracy is the prevalence of power families on the political landscape.
Sure, the powerhouse Adams clan, that of the second and sixth presidents (father and son) helped steer early America, but U.S. voters waited 120 years before even electing the first cousin (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) of a previous president (Theodore Roosevelt).
Our republican democracy was founded in part to prevent bloodlines - like royals - from controlling civic affairs today flirts with the dominance of a new landed gentry, a class of wealthy people who create laws that protect their wealth.
America now has the Clintons (a president and a senator); the Kennedys (a president, an attorney general, three senators, a rapist, two murderers, and various gadflies); the Alaskan Murkowskis (two senators); the CT Dodds (two senators); the RI Chafees (two senators); the Chicago Dalys (two mayors) and of course, the Texas Bushes (two presidents, a vice president, two governors and many, many war crimes).
Check out the unauthorized biography of George Herbert Walker Bush for the dirt on the Bush gene pool's rise to power, starting with the early fortune made by trading with the Nazis and the subsequent election of Prescott Bush as Connecticut's junior Senator in 1948.
An acquaintance recently suggested that there oughtta be a law to prevent blood kin from holding presidency for more than three terms. So if Hilary Clinton were to run for president, she should only have one term. Thus, no more Bushes could occupy the Oval Office because the Bushes would have three terms as of 2008.
It's a better idea than repealing the estate tax, or in Republican-speak, the death tax. It's a clever linguistic sleight of hand that fools the average person into thinking that when they die, they will be taxed.
In reality, the estate tax affects less than one percent of our nation. The government taxes its the wealthiest citizens who seek to pass along their riches to their children.
On its surface, the repeal of the estate tax would damage philanthropic giving. Many charitable bequeathments occur because the dying, rich person knows that money, if given to kin, would be taxed by the government.
Yet our cold-blooded Congress wants to dismantle this instrument of egalitarianism, and create a legal class of people who pay no taxes on inherited wealth, (and thus no income tax, because they are not working to live) and then let those people run the country, like the House of Lords.
The cherished ideals of our country state that all are created equal. Yet if some are born into a protected class of wealth, then do we acknowledge that some bipeds are more equal than others? Are we willing to discard the second part of Jefferson's thought, the one about the equal rights of all to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
Genetically-engineered politics imperil our freedom, and for us to create a world where all have equal opportunities, we must work against the cabals of clansmen.
5/9/05