Julio Gonzalez makes an excellent point regarding Progressive-Democrat Party Presidential candidate and Senator (D, CA) Kamala Harris’ attitude about voters.
Kamala Harris says her campaign is failing because people aren’t ready for a woman of color to be president.
The funny part is, this is the primary, not the general election.
So the people she is accusing of racism are Democratic primary voters.
To which I add: Harris is projecting.
Donald Trump, Jr, says The Washington Post is destroying its credibility with its gaffes. Young Trump is correct on the first part (except, perhaps, for the tense), but he’s being generous with the last part.
This newspaper headlined its article purporting to be an obituary about Daesh’s head, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, styling the…person…an austere religious scholar. Earlier, the newspaper smeared a high school student, saying he’d mistreated in some way a Native American who had, in fact, accosted the boy, banging a drum in the boy’s face.
Trump said,
They don’t even pretend to be objective[.]
This is plain to see; however, the words of WaPo aren’t gaffes. The folks who lead and who write for the WaPo are professional, highly talented, thoroughly trained pressmen at the top of their game. Words are their stock in trade. They knew, and know, what they’re writing; they knew, and know, what they’re going to write as they form the thoughts.
They write what they write with careful deliberation.
Much ado is being crafted over President Donald Trump’s use of the word “lynching” to describe what the House Progressive-Democrats are doing with their “impeachment” smear.
They neglect the fact that at least as many whites were lynched in our history—for crimes ranging from rustling, murder, rape, and the like, to “crimes” of supporting or protecting blacks—as there were blacks lynched for the “crime” of being black after our Civil War.
Which brings me to the party that is doing the most crying over Trump’s use of the term.
The Democratic Party:
That party’s modern evolution, the Progressive-Democratic Party:
These politicians, objecting to Trump’s use of the term, expose their own racism with their manufactured dudgeon.
This is demonstrated in the lead paragraph of a recent Wall Street Journal article.
Chief executives are taking vocal stands on issues like gun control, climate change, and immigration, but global affairs bring a different complexity and calculation, especially for companies doing business in China*.
After all,
In the aftermath of Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey’s now-deleted tweet, the National Basketball Association has found the consequences of even implicitly criticizing Chinese policy can be swift and sizable.
Not to pick on the NBA in particular (although its behavior has been especially public, cowardly, and so reprehensible), Apple and Alphabet, among lots of others, also have sacrificed principle for company “security” in the PRC, while favoring yuan, also, over principle.
No, taking principled positions don’t get complexified by the environment in which they’re taken. The fundamental tenets of ethics, of morality, are universal and constant; the only adjustments are in the manner of their implementation. There’s nothing at all complex about that. Company personnel are either principled, ethical, moral, or they are not. These are not matters of situation or convenience.
And this:
Executives have to thread a needle when a company’s commercial and financial interests clash with the CEO’s personal values and the cultural values of an enterprise and its home country, said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a leadership expert at the Yale School of Management. “One of the rarely discussed downsides of globalization is you get caught in those crosscurrents,” he said.
Those “cross-currents” are irrelevant. Either the CEO or the enterprise have principles worth standing by and sacrificing for, or the CEO or the enterprise have no principles. It’s that simple.
Another misunderstanding is this one by Paul Argenti, Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business Professor of Corporate Communication:
The job of a CEO is not to save the world or make the world safe for democracy[.]
No, but it is a core part of his job to be, at all times and in all circumstances, ethical, moral, and not hypocritical. An example of business’ glaring hypocrisy: the Business Roundtable. That group is carefully and with deliberation silent on the NBA’s, et al., meek acquiescence to the PRC’s tyrants.
One last misunderstanding, this one by Rick Wartzman, Drucker Institute’s Director of the KH Moon Center for a Functioning Society [paraphrased by WSJ]:
The fracas sparked by ephemeral statements can distract from more substantive questions of social responsibility[.]
And
“What concerns me is whether statements, while important, become a substitute for the more meaningful work around what it means to be a responsible company and take care of all your stakeholders[.]”
Again, no. The only way such things can distract is if the statement maker chooses to be distracted. Staying focused on the business of the company in such a circumstance may be hard to do, but being hard means it’s eminently possible.
*The WSJ, like most of the NLMSM, refers to the People’s Republic of China as though it were the one and only. They ignore the nation just across a narrow straight from the mainland, the Republic of China that sits on the island of Taiwan.
Howard Silver, commissioner of the National Basketball Association, in the aftermath of a tweet by Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey,
said in a CNN interview cited by The Wall Street Journal‘s Notable & Quotable,
I think in this day and age, you really do have to stand for something[.]
This is after Rockets players apologized to the PRC for their GM’s tweet, Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta ran away from his GM’s tweet,
Listen….@dmorey does NOT speak for the @HoustonRockets.
and the NBA as a whole affirmed their preference for PRC money over honor.
The NBA really does have to stand for something.
Absolutely. Except when the NBA comes in for opprobrium from the PRC over a tweet supporting the citizens of Hong Kong. Then the league and its players and team management cower down.
Stand for freedom for the citizens of Hong Kong? They can’t: there’s no headroom under the bed.