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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhen professionals sell out, we get a president like Trump
When professionals sell out, we get a president like Trump
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-heffernan-trump-professionals-20181229-story.html
By Virginia Heffernan
Dec 29, 2018 | 3:10 AM
When he was 16, Friedrich Trump, President Trumps grandfather, fled mandatory military service in the German Imperial Army. Having decided he was too weak to serve, Trump slunk off to North America around 1885. Now it appears that Trumps father, Fred, took pains to pass Friedrichs moral cowardice on to Donald.
In 1968, according to the New York Times, Fred may have struck a draft-dodging deal for Donald with one of his tenants, Larry Braunstein, a podiatrist. Braunsteins daughters remember their father saying he diagnosed Trump with bone spurs as a favor to his landlord. The diagnosis won Trump a medical exemption from the draft during the Vietnam War.
Corrupting doctors is something of a leitmotif of Trumps history. Remember Dr. Harold Sweetheart, this is Watergate Bornstein? Dr. Ronny Candy Man Jackson? Theyre not unlike the presidents iffy lawyers: Marc Watch Your Back Kasowitz, Michael Im Going To Come At You Cohen, and Rudolph Truth Isnt Truth Giuliani.
Doctors and lawyers, along with clergy, architects and engineers, are members of what used to be quaintly called the professions. Unlike a real estate promoter who runs casinos into the ground, heads up a fake university and promiscuously sells his ignoble name, professionals are expected to stand for something higher than profit. Many swear oaths in their fields. And they can lose their standing if they violate their professions ethical tenets.
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When our current national nightmare is over, if it ever is, everyone from doctors and lawyers to PR firms and lobbyists who enabled the bad guys must face their own reckoning.
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When professionals sell out, we get a president like Trump (Original Post)
riversedge
Dec 2018
OP
delisen
(6,039 posts)2. Exactly! Too many professions now stand for license to make $ dishonestly
I have been finding that the typical fast food worker has higher ethical standards than many professionals.
Licensing in many cases is just being used to limit entry into a field.
I have spent a lot of time recently on a project dealing with homeless people and have used fast food places for meetings. I have seen fast food workers help out homeless people and agonize for example over whether to call police to remove a disruptive homeless person.
The amount of empathy has surprised me, as well as the level of discussion about the right way to do things.
During the same period of time I have dealt with lawyers, contractors and some other licensed professionals who are totally unethical and protected by licensing.
Hermit-The-Prog
(33,041 posts)3. worship of greed