Ivanka prepares to step into the role of First Lady Environmental justice and populism for all peoples?
Corporate America lost the latest battle, over the oil pipeline at the Standing Rock reservation, but the politically powerless in America will still struggle to win the war.
Ivanka Trump, eldest daughter of the president-elect, is househunting in Washington and making plans to distance herself from her businesses, potentially paving the way to becoming the most influential First Daughter in US history.
When Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, wanted to talk to Donald Trump about women’s issues after his election win, he halted the conversation and passed the phone to Ivanka. When Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook executive, sought to reach out to the president-elect, she did so through Ivanka.
The 35-year-old former model sat in on her father’s first meeting with a foreign leader, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan. This week she was the point of contact when actor Leonardo DiCaprio met Donald Trump to try to persuade him that climate change is real.
The message seems clear: figures on the American Left hope that Trump will be an ally. He has stocked his Cabinet with staunchly conservative figures, alarming some moderate Republicans who fear the choices lurch too far to the Right.
Trump moved to add a third Goldman Sachs banker to his White House team yesterday when he asked Gary Cohn, president of the Wall Street bank, to be director of the National Economic Council.
Trump is under pressure from a government ethics watchdog to sell his business interests. He is said to be considering a plan where his eldest sons, Eric and Donald Jr, would take control of the Trump Organisation. Ivanka would take a leave of absence from the company.
Trump’s wife expected initially to Melania is stay in New York with their 10-year-old son Barron. That would open the way for Ivanka to play the role of de facto First Lady.
She is understood to be looking for a new home in Washington with her husband Jared Kushner, a property developer who emerged during the campaign as a key adviser to Trump.
In July, Ivanka won plaudits for a polished speech at the Republican National Convention in which she pledged to champion the cause of working mothers.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said yesterday he had removed his name from consideration for a position in Donald Trump’s new Administration, as the president-elect narrows the field of people he is considering for secretary of state.
Giuliani’s withdrawal came after Trump made it clear that he was broadening his search beyond the four finalists transition aides had identified: Giuliani, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, former CIA head David Petraeus, and Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee.
In recent days, Trump has expanded his search to include additional lawmakers and corporate executives, such as Rex Tillerson of Exxon Mobil Corp and Alan Mulally, a former executive at Ford and Boeing.
The Wall Street Journal, citing two transition team officials, said Tillerson had emerged as the leading candidate for the job. It said some Trump advisers saw Tillerson as a mould-breaking pick who would bring an executive’s experience to the post of top US diplomat.
Giuliani, speaking to Fox News, said he sent a letter withdrawing himself from consideration on November 29 but that the transition team had rejected it, saying they wanted to continue to keep him in the running.
‘‘I decided . . . that the whole thing was becoming . . . very difficult for the president-elect, and my desire to be in the Cabinet was great but it wasn’t that great, and he had a lot of terrific candidates.’’
Water is life. This mantra won out this week as peace came to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation.
After a tent city of thousands, and months of protest and violent resistance, the United States government halted plans to run the Dakota Access Pipeline and its crude oil cargo alongside sacred Native American ground and under the Missouri River.
The Obama Administration says it will engage in more consultation with the tribe to assess the impact of the pipeline’s path under a major drinking water source, the Mississippi River.
This is a pause, not an end. The incoming president-elect, Donald Trump, has voiced support for the pipeline.
This week, environmental justice prevailed. But the scenario – impoverished and politically powerless communities bearing the dangerous brunt of corporate decision-making and government malaise – is replicated the world over, and daily.
Just 50km north of Manhattan, the Ramapough Lunaape Nation continues its own battle with environmental toxins. In the 1960s, the Ford Motor Company dumped millions of gallons of paint sludge into empty mines in a remote corner of their territory. Today, huge chunks of the sludge remain, leaching lead, arsenic and xylenes into soil and drinking water. Cancer rates are soaring.
‘‘We’ve had weeks where we buried seven people in seven days’’ said Vincent Mann, Turtle Clan Chief of the Ramapough Lunaape Nation. ‘‘We were more than 800 souls at one point; now we’re just 150.’’
The head chief of the Ramapough Lunaape Nation travelled to Standing Rock to protest. From their tribal lands in New Jersey, Chief Mann worked with protesters and medical insurance companies to make sure that injuries from violent confrontations with authorities were taken care of. It was necessary work. Protesters were blasted with fire hoses in sub-zero conditions. They suffered dog bites and pepper spray injuries; an activist from the Bronx nearly lost her arm after being hit by a concussion grenade hurled by law enforcement.
The Ramapough Lunaape also lent spiritual support, Chief Mann said. ‘‘Our tribe created a camp on our ceremonial land where tribe members prayed in support of Standing Rock.’’
The Standing Rock protest was extraordinary for its participants. The Sioux drew support from every other Native American nation in the US, but also from non-Native Americans: US veterans, and environmental and indigenous peoples’ rights activists from around the world, including New Zealand.
Kiwi director Taika Waititi used his Hollywood pulpit in support of protecting the Sioux’s sacred ground and water.
Haka performed in Gisborne, Rotorua and even one in Standing Rock blew up on social media.
It’s also worth considering the broader political context in which the protest occurred. As Right-wing populism bubbles up in Britain, Europe, Australia and the US, the rights of indigenous people – who are also part of the populace, of course – have been ignored.
Is it because indigenous people are perceived as the ‘‘others’’ these movements reject (despite their unique and original claim to the land the populists seek to ‘‘reclaim’’)?
Is it because environmental justice and other concerns of these communities are perceived to be at odds with job growth and putting food on the table, the economic engine of populism?
Perhaps it’s a bit of both.