Pardon me? No thanks

There is a substantial boomlet of commentators and pundits calling for Joe Biden to issue broad preemptive pardons to likely targets of Donald Trump’s promised retribution and abuse of power.

It should stop.

There must be no issuance of pardons to Donald Trump’s foes in the United States of America. What protects us is the Constitution of the United States of America and our own dignity.

Accepting a pardon means admitting a crime. Opposing Donald Trump is not a crime. It is necessary, and will continue to be necessary.

Opposition to Donald Trump in America doesn’t need explanation or justification — as if any is needed. The criminalization of matters of conscience under a political regime that doesn’t tolerate criticism or dissent is called what exactly again?

I’m quite certain that word is not democracy.

The fear running through America’s most powerful newsrooms and people is stunning 43 days before Trump is inaugurated.

It isn’t just unseemly. It is disconcerting, pathetic at some level, and cynical at another. Where might the pardon window be, and while getting one, can I renew my CLEAR pass?

We live in an era in which bad ideas go from spoken word to unchallenged dogma, self righteously screamed at any passerby at warp speed. So, before the rocket fully ignites, I’d like to express this is amongst the worst ideas ever floated. It is a gateway to banana republicanism through a side door.

Last night in London, my wife and I saw a brilliant play called “The Lehman Trilogy.” It tells the tale of the three brothers from Rimpar, Bavaria, the first of whom arrived in America in 1844. They built an empire that imploded the global economy 164 years later, and contributed to giving America Trump, the demagogue our founders feared eight years after that. Brilliant doesn’t begin to describe the simple production or acting that explains thoroughly in three hours the basics of America’s economic system, history and the power of money in America

Gillian Lynne Theatre, London

The ending of the Lehman story is well known to the world, but there are some details forgotten that the play reminded me about. The last Lehman Brothers CEO was nicknamed “The Gorilla.” His name was Dick Fuld. Today, he is 78 years old and no doubt living like a Raj, given that he received nearly half a billion dollars in total compensation from 1993 - 2007. In 2007, the year prior to the collapse, he was paid a total of $22 million. He earned this as he destroyed the bank completely, while annihilating the hopes, dreams and futures of tens of millions of Americans. He never took responsibility for the bank’s collapse, and instead blamed it on the government and regulators.

He reflected on what he did in 2015, and this is what he said:

Whatever it is, enjoy the ride. No regrets.

Many commenters in our community ask me to write more directly about what to do next. Specifically, people want to know what to do, and in what direction to head after a loss so staggering in its outcome following a “flawless campaign,” according to Sheila Nix, Kamala Harris’ campaign chief of staff.

There is a gathering of Democratic leaders taking place in Arizona this weekend, which is the first official gathering since the Harris defeat.

According to reports, there is a lot of anger and recrimination at the meeting with much finger-pointing and blame-casting. This is natural, normal, healthy and appropriate because somewhere in the pile is the opportunity to find some humility, wisdom, and understanding that the American people said “no” to some things, while not saying “yes” to other things.

The meeting started with platitudes and a land acknowledgement, demonstrating nothing but the back of the hand to native Americans, while giving them a version of the “Latinx” sanctimony rejected by Hispanics in overwhelming numbers at the polls from coast to coast.

Below is the most important speech for the future of the Democratic Party that anyone can take the time to read. This speech represents the path forward strategically, rhetorically, conceptually and logically to be in position for the question that will next be before the American people, which will be different than the last one.

The next question will be about whether we are done having OUR country stripped by billionaire pirates with a license to take anything they wish, granted by a plutocrat who rules with fear in one hand and favor in the other.

The next question will be about overthrowing a king.

Franklin Roosevelt is a titanic figure in world history, a great champion for freedom and architect of enduring peace. He was a true visionary and the greatest president of the 20th century. He is the only president who stands as a true peer to Abraham Lincoln.

He saved free market capitalism, democracy from extremism, and the world from fascism. What Donald Trump is about to sledgehammer on the world stage was dreamed into existence by FDR, and first expressed through the Atlantic Charter in 1941.

Talking late into the night with the Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King at the White House near the end of the Second World War — an event that took place within the lifetime of approximately 58 million living Americans — FDR dreamed of peace and prosperity in the era to come, during which America would be the world’s most powerful nation and shape the rise of the world from the ashes of war. He talked about the American era to come, and said he hoped it would endure for as long as everyone who was alive on the day that the war was won was still alive. The youngest of those people is almost 80. His vision endured for as long as he hoped it would.

FDR accepted his second Democratic nomination at Philadelphia in 1936. Below are excerpts from that speech:

America will not forget these recent years, will not forget that the rescue was not a mere party task. It was the concern of all of us. In our strength we rose together, rallied our energies together, applied the old rules of common sense, and together survived.

In those days we feared fear. That was why we fought fear. And today, my friends, we have won against the most dangerous of our foes. We have conquered fear.

But I cannot, with candor, tell you that all is well with the world. Clouds of suspicion, tides of ill-will and intolerance gather darkly in many places. In our own land we enjoy indeed a fullness of life greater than that of most Nations. But the rush of modern civilization itself has raised for us new difficulties, new problems which must be solved if we are to preserve to the United States the political and economic freedom for which Washington and Jefferson planned and fought.

Philadelphia is a good city in which to write American history. This is fitting ground on which to reaffirm the faith of our fathers; to pledge ourselves to restore to the people a wider freedom; to give to 1936 as the founders gave to 1776—an American way of life.

That very word freedom, in itself and of necessity, suggests freedom from some restraining power. In 1776 we sought freedom from the tyranny of a political autocracy—from the eighteenth century royalists who held special privileges from the crown. It was to perpetuate their privilege that they governed without the consent of the governed; that they denied the right of free assembly and free speech; that they restricted the worship of God; that they put the average man's property and the average man's life in pawn to the mercenaries of dynastic power; that they regimented the people.

And so it was to win freedom from the tyranny of political autocracy that the American Revolution was fought. That victory gave the business of governing into the hands of the average man, who won the right with his neighbors to make and order his own destiny through his own Government. Political tyranny was wiped out at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776.

Since that struggle, however, man's inventive genius released new forces in our land which reordered the lives of our people.. The age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass production, mass distribution—all of these combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it a new problem for those who sought to remain free.

For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital—all undreamed of by the fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.

There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small business men and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.

It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.

The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor—these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small business man, the investments set aside for old age—other people's money—these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in.

Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities.

Throughout the Nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.

An old English judge once said: "Necessitous men are not free men." Liberty requires opportunity to make a living—a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.

For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor—other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.

Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of Government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people's mandate to end it. Under that mandate it is being ended.

The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the Government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the Government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.

Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.

These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.

The brave and clear platform adopted by this Convention, to which I heartily subscribe, sets forth that Government in a modern civilization has certain inescapable obligations to its citizens, among which are protection of the family and the home, the establishment of a democracy of opportunity, and aid to those overtaken by disaster.

But the resolute enemy within our gates is ever ready to beat down our words unless in greater courage we will fight for them.

Now, we are passing into the next era. This is the future.

With respect to Jamie Harrison, identity politics isn’t just a failed political strategy, but a moral failure as well.

What should matter in American politics is a simple word: Americans. This is a unifying word, and it belongs equally to every citizen.

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