Corporate Media Fail to Hold Trump’s Feet to Fire on Ongoing Bigotry Once Again

http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/corporate-media-fails-to-hold-trump-s-feet-to-fire-on-ongoing-bigotry-once-again

On Saturday, Donald Trump tweeted an image of a red Star of David next to a picture of Hillary Clinton with hundred dollar bills in the background, with the caption “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever” superimposed on the Star of David. A few hours later, amid strong condemnation from social media respondents, Trump deleted the image and reposted the same image except with a circle replacing the original Star of David. Unequivocally, the message is that Clinton is in the pocket of rich Jews, a stereotypical image that was harnessed by Hitler himself to build a “justification” for sending millions of Jews to their slaughter. So where was the media in covering the story? Unfortunately, the great corporate watchdog has sanitized the story, having failed to learn from history.

During the ascent of Adolf Hitler to power, the U.S. media helped to paint a positive image of this demagogue. Not unlike corporate media’s soft pedaling of Trump, coverage of Hitler’s campaign played up the support he had from the German people, based on the numbers attending his campaign speeches, while playing down his hateful demagoguery. Shortly after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, an article appeared in the New York Times stating, “There is at least one official voice in Europe that expresses understanding of the methods and motives of President Roosevelt — the voice of Germany, as represented by Chancellor Adolf Hitler.” The Christian Monitor even touted the virtues of Nazism, proclaiming that it had a “capacity for organization unequaled in our times by any except the Bolshevik leaders.”

So, it is ironic to learn that the mainstream corporate media, including the New York Times, along with its network news brethren, have once again fallen down on the job. This time it is not in the coverage of a deranged foreign demagogue but, instead, in coverage of a domestic one the likes of Donald Trump.

The New York Times’ response to Trump’s Tweet was a toothless article titled “Donald Trump Deletes Tweet Showing Hillary Clinton and Star of David Shape.” Was the real story that Trump deleted the anti-Semitic tweet or that he posted it in the first place? The article states, “Mr. Trump apparently realized the problem with the original Twitter post because he rarely apologizes for his remarks or deletes his posts. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday.” He “apparently realized the problem”? “Realizing the problem” implies lack of intention, as though it only occurred to him that the post was Anti-Semitic after the public outcry. To put to rest the rationalization that the image was a sheriffs star mysteriously imposed upon a pile of money, Mic reported that the same image was posted about one week or so earlier on a white supremacist internet message board, and produced the link to the website. Instead of condemning what was obviously aimed at maligning Clinton in a manner that would likely resonate with the anti-Semitic faction of his base, the Times has given Trump yet another free pass to espouse hatred.

Unfortunately, the lack of clear unequivocal condemnation was deafeningly absent from the network media nine hours after the story broke. ABC, NBC, CNN, and NBC all soft pedaled it on their websites; Fox did not even mention it, but instead focused on the FBI investigation of Hilary Clinton. Subsequently, when the independent media began to buzz with the story, the network media began to address the story, in a sanitized manner. The issue now was whether a renegade staffer posted the offensive image unbeknownst to Trump. However, on Monday, July 4, Trump tweeted, “Dishonest media is trying their absolute best to depict a star in a tweet as the Star of David rather than a Sheriff’s Star, or plain star!” The “dishonest media” is “trying its absolute best”? To the contrary, the networks followed Trump’s red herring, raising the question of whether it was a sheriff’s star, and brought in his surrogates on the issue to dignify the claim (including the infamous, former Trump Campaign advisor, now CNN commentator, Corey Lewandowki). A sheriff’s star without circles highlighting each of its points? A plain star taken from a white supremacist website? Could it be, the networks queried, that Trump “innocently” appropriated the image from someone else’s tweet? But, Trump defended the tweet, even though it originated from a white supremacist website.

Trump’s persistent pattern of racism threatens to undermine the progress made in the past several decades in the United States on civil liberties, and to spawn a new era of Nazism, this time in America. The corporate mainstream media needs to beware. When Hitler came to power, he immediately seized the press and turned it into a Nazi propaganda machine. Trump has already taken away the press credentials from the Washington Post, among other news organizations, barring them from attending his press conferences; proclaiming that “journalists are among the worst people I know”; and lashing out at particular journalists, calling them “sleaze”; he has already made abundantly clear that he will not tolerate journalists who challenge him. Is it not also clear, therefore, what a Trump presidency would portend for the media?

It is not acceptable to dismiss a blatant case of anti-Semitism (no less than attacks on Mexicans, Muslims, and the handicapped) espoused by someone who may well become the next President of the United States. Perhaps the media is banking on a President Trump who abandons his hateful rhetoric and assumes a “presidential” posture. This is, indeed, the hope of the GOP, which seems to think that the real Trump is not the Trump on the campaign trail. This same mistake was made by the American press in covering Hitler. Thus, a January 30, 1933 editorial in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin stated, “there have been indications of moderation” on Hitler’s part; and on January 31, 1933, the Cleveland Press said, “appointment of Hitler as German chancellor may not be such a threat to world peace as it appears at first blush.”

Of course, the rest is history!

Agamemnon wrote:

That would be big if Tavon could be effective as a pure WR, possibly a #1 WR.

I personally dont think he has that in him.

I like him as a multiple weapon who runs and catches passes both. I don’t think he has the makings of a pure receiver.

If he catches passes on more types of routes, then, yay. But I think that would be just part of the overall mix.

Billy_T wrote:

But that’s not “the left.” Will you at least admit that Jeffrey Lord is wildly mistaken in asserting that the KKK was a “leftist” organization, and that the Nazis were?

Exactly. That kind of stuff right there qualifies the writer as a know-little partisan muck stirrer and little else.

No one can go around in the company of genuinely informed people and call the KKK and the Nazi’s “leftists” without producing embarassed silence.

What can you say, it’s american spectator.

wv wrote:

…still wont make a dent in the
political situation, coz people are afraid.

Actually.

More than one study has shown that fear of crime leads to increased backing for gun control.

. Not only did they steal horses from other tribes and settlers but they were particularly skilled in gathering ferel horses, breaking them, and using them in battle.

They also bred and sold horses.

In fact it was hard to deal with the comanche because they would make treaties with one area of Texas and not another. They didn’t recognize a general “government of Texas.” In the areas where they had treaties, they became primary horse dealers.

Each individual comanache would own anywhere from 5 to 1000 horses (though the highest number would tend to be a highly regarded veteran war leader).

You’re right, they were great horse warriors of their world. Some have said they were the greatest horse warriors in history; some have said it’s the comanche and the mongols both, each in different ways. A comanche warrior could hang from the side of his horse and aim a bow and arrow accurately from that position, shooting from the side of the horse’s neck.

It wasn’t just war though. Comanche prized mobility. So much so that they simply failed to understand jails and prisons—the comanche had a fierce reputation for torturing prisoners, and saw nothing wrong with that, but to them, locking someone up in a closed space meant they were not being regarded as human. Take away a man’s ability to move freely, and he was no longer really a person.

And of course they hunted from horseback.

..

bnw wrote:

Scratched it all out of nothing. Terrible soil to start with. Been working on it for 20 years. Over 30 fruit trees, grapes, thornless blackberries, asparagus, hops.

Put up pics if you can.

zn wrote:

Well we differ on that.

For example what is the Comanche view on owning a horse?

Interesting question right there.

I don’t like reductive political blog-itorials, no matter what their orientation.

Locke on property is a very complex issue and does not reduce to the things being said here.

And I have no agenda in this other than that of preferring far-reaching and nuanced historical analysis over any of its opposites.

…

Historical Overview

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/property/

There are extensive discussions of property in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Marx, and Mill. The range of justificatory themes they consider is very broad, and I shall begin with a summary.

The ancient authors speculated about the relation between property and virtue, a natural subject for discussion since justifying private property raises serious questions about the legitimacy of self-interested activity. Plato (Republic, 462b-c) argued that collective ownership was necessary to promote common pursuit of the common interest, and to avoid the social divisiveness that would occur ‘when some grieve exceedingly and others rejoice at the same happenings.’ Aristotle responded by arguing that private ownership promotes virtues like prudence and responsibility: ‘[W]hen everyone has a distinct interest, men will not complain of one another, and they will make more progress, because every one will be attending to his own business’ (Aristotle, Politics, 1263a). Even altruism, said Aristotle, might be better promoted by focusing ethical attention on the way a person exercises his rights of private property rather than questioning the institution itself (ibid.). Aristotle also reflected on the relation between property and freedom, and the contribution that ownership makes to a person’s being a free man and thus suitable for citizenship. The Greeks took liberty to be a status defined by contrast with slavery, and for Aristotle, to be free was to belong to oneself, to be one’s own man, whereas the slave was by nature the property of another. Self-possession was connected with having sufficient distance from one’s desires to enable the practice of virtuous self-control. On this account, the natural slave was unfree because his reason could not prescribe a rule to his bodily appetites. Aristotle had no hesitation in extending this point beyond slavery to the conditions of ‘the meaner sort of workman.’ Obsessed with need, the poor are ‘too degraded’ to participate in politics like free men. ‘You could no more make a city out of paupers,’ wrote Aristotle, ‘than out of slaves’ (ibid., 1278a). They must be ruled like slaves, for otherwise their pressing and immediate needs will issue in envy and violence. Some of these themes have emerged more recently in civic republican theories, though modern theories of citizenship tend to begin with a sense of who should be citizens (all adult residents) and then proceed to argue that they should all have property, rather than using existing wealth as an independent criterion for the franchise (King and Waldron 1988).

In the medieval period, Thomas Aquinas continued discussion of the Aristotlean idea that virtue might be expressed in the use that one makes of one’s property. But Aquinas gave it a sharper edge. Not only do the rich have moral obligations to act generously, but the poor also have rights against the rich. Beginning from the premise that ‘[a]ccording to the natural order established by Divine Providence, inferior things are ordained for the purpose of succoring man’s needs…’ (Aquinas ST, p. 72), Aquinas argued that no division of resources based on human law can prevail over the necessities associated with destitution. This is a theme which recurs throughout our tradition—most notably in Locke’s First Treatise on Government, (Locke 1988 [1689], I, para. 42)—as an essential qualification of whatever else is said about the legitimacy of private property (Horne 1990).

In the early modern period, philosophers turned their attention to the way in which property might have been instituted, with Hobbes and Hume arguing that there is no natural ‘mine’ or ‘thine,’ and that property must be understood as the creation of the sovereign state (Hobbes 1983 [1647]) or at the very least the artificial product of a convention ‘enter’d into by all the members of the society to bestow stability on the possession of…external goods, and leave every one in the peaceable enjoyment of what he may acquire by his fortune and industry’ (Hume 1978 [1739], p. 489). John Locke (1988 [1689]), on the other hand, was adamant that property could have been instituted in a state of nature without any special conventions or political decisions.

Locke’s theory is widely regarded as the most interesting of the canonical discussions of property. In part this is a result of how he began his account; because he took as his starting point that God gave the world to men in common, he had to acknowledge from the outset that private entitlements pose a moral problem. How do we move from a common endowment to the ‘disproportionate and unequal Possession of the Earth’ that seems to go along with private property? Unlike some of his predecessors, Locke did not base his resolution of this difficulty on any theory of universal (even tacit) consent. Instead, in the most famous passage of his chapter on property, he gave a moral defense of the legitimacy of unilateral appropriation.

Though the Earth…be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other Men. (Locke 1988 [1689], II, para. 27)
The interest of Locke’s account lies in the way he combines the structure of a theory of first occupancy with an account of the substantive moral significance of labor. In the hands of writers like Samuel Pufendorf (1991 [1673], p. 84), First Occupancy theory proceeded on the basis that the first human user of a natural resource—a piece of land, for example—is distinguished from all others in that he did not have to displace anyone else in order to take possession. It did not particularly matter how he took possession of it, or what sort of use he made of it: what mattered was that he began acting as its owner without dispossessing anyone else. Now although Locke used the logic of this account, it did matter for him that the land was cultivated or in some other way used productively. (For this reason, he expressed doubts whether indigenous hunters or nomadic peoples could properly be regarded as owners of the land over which they roamed.) This is partly because Locke identified the ownership of labor as something connected substantially to the primal ownership of self. But it was also because he thought the productivity of labor would help answer some of the difficulties which he saw in First Occupancy theory. Though the first occupier does not actually dispossess anyone, still his acquisition may prejudice other’s interests of others if there is not, in Locke’s words, ‘enough and as good left in common’ for them to enjoy (Locke 1988 [1689], II, para. 27). Locke’s answer to this difficulty was to emphasize that appropriation by productive labor actually increased the amount of goods available in society for others (ibid., II, para. 37).

Immanuel Kant’s work on property is less well known than Locke’s, and is more formal and abstract. Kant began by emphasizing a general connection between property and agency, maintaining that there would be an affront to agency and thus to human personality, if some system were not arrived at which could permit useful objects to be used. He inferred from this that ‘it is a duty of right to act towards others so that what is external (usable) could also become someone’s’ (Kant 1991 [1797], p. 74) Though this legitimated unilateral appropriation, it did so only in a provisional way. Since the appropriation of a resource as private property affects everyone else’s position (imposing duties on them that they would otherwise not have), it cannot acquire full legitimacy by unilateral action: it must be ratified by an arrangement which respects everyone’s interests in this matter. So the force of the principle requiring people to act so that external objects can be used as property also requires them to enter into a civil constitution, which will actually settle who is to be the owner of what on a basis that is fair to all.

G.W.F. Hegel’s account of property centers on the contribution property makes to the development of the self, ‘superseding and replacing the subjective phase of personality’ (1967 [1821], para. 41a) and giving some sort of external reality to what would otherwise be the mere idea of individual freedom. These rather obscure formulations were taken up also by the English idealists, most notably by T.H. Green (1941 [1895]), who emphasized the contribution that ownership makes to ethical development, to the growth of the will and a sense of responsibility. But neither of these writers thought of the development of the individual person as the be-all and end-all of property. In both cases it was thought of as a stage in the growth of social responsibility. Both saw the freedom embodied in property as ultimately positive freedom—freedom to choose rationally and responsibly for the wider social good. In Karl Marx’s philosophy, Hegel’s sense of there being several stages in the growth of positive freedom is framed in terms of stages of social development rather than stages of the growth of individuals (Marx 1972 [1862]). And for Marx, as for Plato, social responsibility in the exercise of private property rights is never enough. The whole trajectory of the development of modern society, says Marx, is towards large-scale cooperative labor. This may be masked by forms of property that treat vast corporations as private owners, but eventually this carapace will be abandoned and collectivist economic relations will emerge and be celebrated as such.

The general merits of private property versus socialism thus became a subject of genuine debate in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. John Stuart Mill, with his characteristic open-mindedness treated communism as a genuine option, and he confronted objections to the collectivist ideal with the suggestion that the inequitable distribution of property in actually existing capitalist societies already partakes of many of these difficulties. He insisted however, that private property be given a fair hearing as well:

If…the choice were to be made between Communism…and the present state of society with all its sufferings and injustices,…all the difficulties, great or small, of Communism would be but as dust in the balance. But to make the comparison applicable, we must compare Communism at its best, with the regime of individual property, not as it is, but as it might be made…The laws of property have never yet conformed to the principles on which the justification of private property rests. (Mill 1994[1848], pp. 14–15)
Mill is surely right, at least so far as the aims of a philosophical discussion of property are concerned. Indeed, one way of looking at the history we have just briefly surveyed is that it is the history of successive attempts to tease out, from the mess of actually-existing maldistribution and exploitation, some sense of the true principles on which the justification of an ideal system of private property would rest, and a sense too of other aspects of moral enterprise which such an institution might serve.

Billy_T wrote:

There is absolutely no case in our history wherein tax cuts for the rich have resulted in a decrease in the gap between rich and poor.

Or to put that different, there is absolutely no case in our history wherein tax cuts for the rich have resulted in growth in jobs and wages.

The wealthy invest money to make money off of money.

This fantasy that they use it to invest or propel the economy is an old belief ranking right up there with fear of witches.

Billy_T wrote:

Struck out on the coding.

I’ll just post a link:

Advantageous

It;s simple and I fixed it. For you tubes here, you just plop the url right in the post box, without using any of the functions. If you go back to the post I fixed, you will see what I did.