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Ivanka: My Dad Was Going To Appoint Me To Run The World Bank

Ivanka: My Dad Was Going To Appoint Me To Run The World Bank

Ivanka Trump on Wednesday confirmed that Trump’s nepotistic quest to install his family members into key government positions goes further than originally thought.

In an interview with the Associated Press, the first daughter confirmed that Trump offered her the role as head of the World Bank — but that she turned it down, telling her father that she is “happy with the work” she does as a vague “senior adviser” at the White House.

Of course, Ivanka Trump has few qualifications to be leader of the World Bank, which provides low-interest loans to developing countries and advises those countries on how to invest their funds.

Prior to her father’s election, Ivanka ran a clothing line that bears her name — which shuttered thanks in part to the fact that the Trump name has been irreparably tarnished by her father’s presidency.

Ivanka Trump has made some much-publicized efforts to help women in developing countries while serving in her father’s administration. But those efforts haven’t lived up the hype; her main “Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative,” for instance, would only have provided $1toward each women in the program.

This isn’t the only job Trump reportedly offered to his daughter. Back in February, he considered nominating her to be United Nations ambassador — yet another job she is not remotely qualified to hold.

That time, Ivanka Trump refused to comment on whether her dad ever offered her the UN ambassador job, telling the Associated Press that she was going to “keep that between” them.

That was a smart move on her part, given that it would violate anti-nepotism laws for her father to advocate for giving her that job.

But now that Ivanka Trump has admitted that her dad did in fact offer her a key role in the Trump administration, we can add yet another entry to Trump’s list of likely offenses.

Published with permission of The American Independent. 

ISDS: A Corporate Cluster Bomb To Obliterate Our People’s Sovereignty

ISDS: A Corporate Cluster Bomb To Obliterate Our People’s Sovereignty

The Powers That Be are very unhappy with you and me. They’re also very unhappy with senators like Elizabeth Warren, activist groups like Public Citizen, unions like the Communications Workers of America and … well, with the majority of Americans who oppose the establishment’s latest free-trade scam.

Despite its benign name, the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a cluster bomb of legalized “gotchas” that won’t bode well for the vast majority of Americans and for our small businesses. TPP empowers global corporations from Brunei, Japan, Singapore, Vietnam, and seven other nations to circumvent and even overturn our local, state, and national laws. Those moneyed elites are upset that rabble like us oppose their latest effort to enthrone corporate power over citizen power, and they’re particularly peeved that we’ve found TPP’s trigger mechanism — something called “Investor-State Dispute Settlements.”

That’s a mouthful of wonky gobbledygook, isn’t it? Indeed, ISDS is an intentionally arcane phrase meant to hide its democracy-destroying impact from us. It would create a system of private, international tribunals through which corporations (i.e., “investors”) could sue our sovereign governments to overturn laws that might trim the level of corporate profits that — get this — they “expected” to make.

These tribunals are not part of our public courts of justice but are totally privatized, inherently biased corporate “courts” set up by the UN and the World Bank. A tribunal’s “judges” are corporate lawyers, and they unilaterally decide whether the protections we’ve enacted for workers, consumers, our environment, etc. might pinch the profits of some foreign corporation.

This mess all started when the Dr. Frankensteins on our Supreme Court created a monster by declaring that a lifeless, soulless corporation is a “person.” But the corporate giants thought, “Why stop there?” So now, another coterie of Frankensteins is trying to transform multinational private corporations into “nations.” The secretly engineered Trans-Pacific Partnership magically endows private profiteering corporations with sovereign rights equal to those of real nation-states. Under TPP, a “corporate nation” — unlike individual citizens of real nations — could directly compel the U.S. or other countries to alter their laws in order to increase corporate profits. Of course, the Frankensteins dismiss such concerns as an “irrational fear,” claiming that no corporation would actually be able to force a country to change its laws.

To give you a look of what this is going to look like, let’s take a peek at what other corporate-written trade deals have done to the laws written in the USofA.

Remember that these Frankensteins say that no corporation outside our country can change our laws. Really? Well, just ask “Flipper” the dolphin. While not yet able to confront a nation directly, corporations can get their home governments to sue in the World Trade Organization to overrule another nation’s laws. That’s what happened to our “dolphin-safe” tuna labeling law. Most Americans oppose tuna fishing with nets that also catch and kill the loveable Flipper, so we have a law encouraging dolphin-free fishing methods. Tuna packers that comply can put “dolphin-safe” on their labels, thus giving consumers a marketplace choice. Free enterprise at work!

But some Mexican fishing companies got their government to complain that our label discriminates against their dolphin-slaughtering methods — and a World Trade Organization “compliance” panel ruled that our label is a “technical barrier to trade,” essentially overruling a law that We the People enacted.

And now, if the Trans-Pacific Partnership is approved, foreign corporations won’t have to get their national governments to intervene, for they will become governments. Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and the other revolutionaries of 1776 would upchuck at this desecration of our nation’s democratic ideals — and so should we. For the lowdown on this and to join today’s rebellion against the aristocracy of corporate elites, go to www.citizen.org/trade/.

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com. 

Photo: Global Trade Watch via Flickr

Chasing Hillary: What The Republicans Refuse To Learn From Wile E. Coyote

Chasing Hillary: What The Republicans Refuse To Learn From Wile E. Coyote

As their fear swells in advance of Hillary Clinton’s anticipated presidential campaign, the feverish smears of the Republican right increasingly resemble the desperate gambits of a certain Wile E. Coyote. The latest episode in their cartoonish crusade appeared in the Washington Free Beacon, which headlined “The Hillary Letters” the other day with an ominous subhead: “Hillary Clinton, Saul Alinsky correspondence revealed.”

Not only did Clinton become acquainted as a young woman with the legendary community organizer – a fact mentioned in Living History, her own memoir – but she apparently wrote at least two letters to him in the summer of 1971. At the time, she was working as a legal intern for a well-known left-wing law firm in Berkeley – another item noted in Living History, which was published 11 years ago.

Now the Free Beacon, a neoconservative online publication, has dug up those two notes that she sent to Alinsky, which prove conclusively that she was interested in the man’s books and ideas, and enjoyed talking with him.

For those who don’t know much about Alinsky, he was an iconoclastic activist who sought to improve the lives of poor families, by showing them how to demand and win the same kind of services enjoyed by their middle-class neighbors.  William F. Buckley once described him as “very close to being an organizational genius,” and more recently the leaders of the Tea Party have admitted that they consult his works for organizing tips. He famously disdained all forms of totalitarian ideology, including Communism, working more closely with religious institutions than political parties of any complexion. Consistently, the heirs to his Industrial Areas Foundation have forged strong alliances with local church leaders, including the U. S. Catholic bishops. No doubt Pope Francis would have loved him.

In the most telling passage from the letters Clinton sent to Alinsky during that turbulent summer more than 40 years ago, she writes: “The more I’ve seen of places like Yale Law School and the people who haunt them, the more convinced I am that we have the serious business and joy of much work ahead—if the commitment to a free and open society is ever going to mean more than eloquence and frustration.” (She doesn’t sound much like a Communist either.)

But like the hapless Looney Tunes varmint brandishing his Acme dynamite sticks, the right-wing pamphleteers are so furious in their fruitless pursuit of Clinton that they will seize any and every bomb to throw at her, no matter how many times they blow themselves up instead. Those angry, soot-covered boobs never seem to understand why their attacks leave her completely unscathed — and often even stronger than before.

Nor do they realize that their shrill condemnations of Clinton sound contrived, confused, and even contradictory: Sometimes she is a secret radical, as the Alinsky “scoop” was meant to insinuate, and sometimes she is a tool of Wall Street and corporate interests, as a silly release from the Republican National Committee claimed on the opening day of this year’s Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York.

That same day, on the CGI stage at Manhattan’s Sheraton Hotel, the former Secretary of State conducted a lively discussion with two other notorious radicals – Ginni Rometty, the first female president of IBM Corporation, and Jim Yong Kim, the president of the World Bank.

So while her ideological opponents continued to make themselves look ridiculous, she was publicly exploring a few of her own lifelong obsessions: how to improve the lives and health of working people, how to empower women and girls around the world, and how to advance America’s commitment to “a free and open society.” That suggests why, despite decades of vilification by media outlets and the far right, she remains among the world’s most admired leaders.

Should Hillary Clinton choose to run for president again, she is certain to stumble and make mistakes, like any other politician. But unless her dull-witted adversaries somehow begin to comprehend who she really is, she will remain perfectly safe from them.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

IMF’s Lagarde: ‘Bold Action Needed’ For Global Economy

IMF’s Lagarde: ‘Bold Action Needed’ For Global Economy

Washington (AFP) – The global economy has picked up but bold action is needed to surmount serious dangers and deliver the benefits more evenly, International Monetary Fund managing Director Christine Lagarde said Thursday.

Lagarde said the Ukraine crisis, slower growth in emerging economies, the threat of deflation in the eurozone, financial sector vulnerabilities in the two leading economies and market turbulence generally are serious hurdles to extending the global recovery.

Spelling out the policy challenges for the world’s economic policy-makers at the start of the annual IMF and World Bank spring meetings, Lagarde said determined efforts were needed to strengthen growth, after a “subdued” rebound from the economic crisis.

“The global economy is turning the corner, but the recovery is still too weak and too slow….Bold actions are needed,” she said.

“For some, despite the fact that growth is strengthening, they’re not feeling it. We still have 200 million people unemployed.”

The IMF laid out a detailed policy agenda for its meetings with finance ministers and central bank chiefs from around the world, which highlights the need for vigilance in countries at all points on the economic cycle.

Advanced economies need to be sure not to mishandle the shift from easy-money regimes set during the financial crisis, and the Fund warns that tightening too fast could derail their recovery and hurt growth in other countries.

China needs to deftly handle its non-banking credit bubble, and the United States needs to address new risks in corporate debt, margin lending and leveraged finance, the IMF warns.

Japan needs to push through on the “third arrow” of its turnaround — structural reforms — while emerging markets must themselves redo policies to adjust to a world of tighter capital.

Lagarde reiterated the IMF’s advice to the European Central Bank. urging it to quickly embark on operations to fend off deflation which could reverse Europe’s recovery.

While saying the fund respects the ECB’s judgement, she urged it to act “sooner rather than later”.

Both the IMF and the World Bank stressed that the Ukraine crisis could also damage the world’s economic prospects, as both bodies marshall billions of dollars to prop up Kiev’s finances after the ouster or pro-Moscow president Viktor Yanukovich in February.

In the wake of its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region last month, Russia stepped up the tensions Thursday with President Vladimir Putin threatening to cut off its supply of natural gas to Ukraine.

Finance ministers of the G7 industrial powers will hold discussions mainly on Ukraine Thursday on the sidelines of the IMF and World Bank meetings, according to diplomats.

Their view is likely to be put to a meetings late Thursday and Friday in Washington of the G20 economic chiefs.

World Bank President Jim Yong Kim warned that the crisis will have far-reaching effects on Russia, which could be forced into recession.

“This is a very serious issue for Russia — a very serious issue for its growth prospects,” Kim told reporters. “So we simply urge all of the parties to continue with negotiations and find a peaceful means of moving forward.”

The IMF has forecast global growth at 3.6 percent this year, and 3.9 percent next year. But Lagarde noted that the G20 itself in February observed that with the right policies and the right cooperation between countries, growth could be higher by two percentage points over the next half-decade.

“That is the kind of growth trajectory that would help create jobs,” she said.

In response, Nicolas Mombrial, of the anti-poverty group Oxfam, said the IMF needs a plan that would address another part of the picture, inequality.

“There’s no trade-off between growth and inequality. There will be no inclusive growth if economic inequality remains out of control.”

AFP Photo/Karen Bleier