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riversedge

(69,727 posts)
Sun Dec 30, 2018, 02:00 AM Dec 2018

When 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 Trump’s 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 Trump’s father, Fred, took pains to pass Friedrich’s 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. Braunstein’s 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 Trump’s history. Remember Dr. Harold “Sweetheart, this is Watergate” Bornstein? Dr. Ronny “Candy Man” Jackson? They’re not unlike the president’s iffy lawyers: Marc “Watch Your Back” Kasowitz, Michael “I’m Going To Come At You” Cohen, and Rudolph “Truth Isn’t 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 profession’s 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
KR! Cha Dec 2018 #1
Exactly! Too many professions now stand for license to make $ dishonestly delisen Dec 2018 #2
worship of greed Hermit-The-Prog Dec 2018 #3

delisen

(6,039 posts)
2. Exactly! Too many professions now stand for license to make $ dishonestly
Sun Dec 30, 2018, 02:57 AM
Dec 2018

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.






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