The Golden Couple (Ivanka and Jared)

July 10, 2017

This article has a full-length pic of the dress. It's not appropriate for the event, in my opinion.

http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/style/826223/ivanka-trump-pink-dress-g20

And here it is on the Harvey Nichols site

http://www.harveynichols.com/brand/roksanda-ilincic/195695-sibella-bow-embellished-cady-dress/p2868125/

It would be about $1400 in US dollars.

July 10, 2017

With all of this talk about Ivanka's dress, this song won't stop playing in my head:

July 10, 2017

Someone should have stopped her before she left the hotel room in that outfit.

July 10, 2017

Twitler decided to tweet about the issue today. I love Chelsea's response: "Trump defends his daughter Ivanka’s breach of diplomatic protocol"

Spoiler

President Trump used his favorite megaphone — Twitter — to defend his daughter Ivanka on Monday morning for a breach of diplomatic protocol at the Group of 20 summit this weekend.

Though Trump's oldest daughter has repeatedly said she tries to steer clear of politics, she found herself thrust into a political maelstrom Saturday when she briefly filled in for her father at a table of world leaders when he left the room for other meetings.

A grainy photo of Ivanka, taken by a member of Russia's delegation, showed the president's daughter seated between British Prime Minister Theresa May and Chinese President Xi Jinping at a massive table during a G-20 working session on “Partnership With Africa, Migration and Health.”

Her decision to briefly fill in for her father immediately sparked a backlash, ranging from international eyerolls to outright criticism. And on Monday, Trump — who seemed to spend the early morning hours alternately watching and then live-tweeting “Fox & Friends” — also turned to Twitter to defend his daughter.

“When I left Conference Room for short meetings with Japan and other countries, I asked Ivanka to hold seat,” Trump wrote. “Very standard. Angela M agrees!”

He added that if Chelsea Clinton had been a similar situation, instead of outrage, the reaction from the news media would have been calls for Chelsea herself to run for president.

“If Chelsea Clinton were asked to hold the seat for her mother, as her mother gave our country away, the Fake News would say CHELSEA FOR PRES!” Trump wrote.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel — or “Angela M” in Trump parlance — earlier this year hosted Ivanka at a summit focused on women empowerment in Berlin and did defend the president's daughter to reporters.

“Ivanka Trump belonged to the American delegation, so that is in line with what other delegations do,” Merkel said Saturday. “And it is known that she works at the White House and carries responsibility for certain initiatives.’’

Chelsea Clinton also responded to Trump on Twitter, saying that her parents would have never put her in the uncomfortable situation.

"Good morning Mr. President," she wrote. "It would never have occurred to my mother or my father to ask me. Were you giving our country away? Hoping not."

July 10, 2017

This article on the presidunce's blatant nepotism is quite funny.

Here are some choice quotes:

About the truth...

Quote

Of course we want to know the truth. We always do, though whether Trump is the go-to guy for that is a matter of opinion.

About his life partner...

Quote

But the fact of it isn’t the interesting thing about Ivanka’s preferment. With Trump, could anything on the nepotistic front come as a shock? The one surprise is that the tangerine huckster hasn’t tried to do a Francis and Clare Underwood from House of Cards by installing his life partner, That Thing On His Head, as VP.

4 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Twitler decided to tweet about the issue today. I love Chelsea's response: "Trump defends his daughter Ivanka’s breach of diplomatic protocol"

Hide contents

President Trump used his favorite megaphone — Twitter — to defend his daughter Ivanka on Monday morning for a breach of diplomatic protocol at the Group of 20 summit this weekend.

Though Trump's oldest daughter has repeatedly said she tries to steer clear of politics, she found herself thrust into a political maelstrom Saturday when she briefly filled in for her father at a table of world leaders when he left the room for other meetings.

A grainy photo of Ivanka, taken by a member of Russia's delegation, showed the president's daughter seated between British Prime Minister Theresa May and Chinese President Xi Jinping at a massive table during a G-20 working session on “Partnership With Africa, Migration and Health.”

Her decision to briefly fill in for her father immediately sparked a backlash, ranging from international eyerolls to outright criticism. And on Monday, Trump — who seemed to spend the early morning hours alternately watching and then live-tweeting “Fox & Friends” — also turned to Twitter to defend his daughter.

“When I left Conference Room for short meetings with Japan and other countries, I asked Ivanka to hold seat,” Trump wrote. “Very standard. Angela M agrees!”

He added that if Chelsea Clinton had been a similar situation, instead of outrage, the reaction from the news media would have been calls for Chelsea herself to run for president.

“If Chelsea Clinton were asked to hold the seat for her mother, as her mother gave our country away, the Fake News would say CHELSEA FOR PRES!” Trump wrote.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel — or “Angela M” in Trump parlance — earlier this year hosted Ivanka at a summit focused on women empowerment in Berlin and did defend the president's daughter to reporters.

“Ivanka Trump belonged to the American delegation, so that is in line with what other delegations do,” Merkel said Saturday. “And it is known that she works at the White House and carries responsibility for certain initiatives.’’

Chelsea Clinton also responded to Trump on Twitter, saying that her parents would have never put her in the uncomfortable situation.

"Good morning Mr. President," she wrote. "It would never have occurred to my mother or my father to ask me. Were you giving our country away? Hoping not."

What's really noticable about the tangerine toddler's tweets today is not what he did tweet about, but rather what he didn't tweet: a defense of Junior's and Jared's meeting with the Russians during the campaign.

July 10, 2017

15 hours ago, JMarie said:

And she's sitting when nobody else is. Much like her father in this pic https://twitter.com/goldengateblond/status/883474845786284032/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc^tfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.freejinger.org%2Findex.php%3Fapp%3Dcore%26module%3Dsystem%26controller%3Dembed%26url%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fgoldengateblond%2Fstatus%2F883474845786284032

Why does nobody want to sit with the Trumps? {sarcasm}

Because you would inevitably end up being a part of an investigation.

She just can't escape her pampered little world, can she? At a world summit and she continues to dress like a fashion model/princess. Seriously, open-toed, strappy stilettos? This is a screaming reflection of what's going on in her head. "Policy for maintaining cooperation with our allies? Uhm, sure. LOOK AT ME! I'm sooooo chic."

July 10, 2017

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

“When I left Conference Room for short meetings with Japan and other countries, I asked Ivanka to hold seat,” Trump wrote.

Was he worried someone would steal his seat?

July 10, 2017

36 minutes ago, laPapessaGiovanna said:

Was he worried someone would steal his seat?

Yes, hide it in the hopes that he would just leave and go find a golf course. It really wouldn't surprise me if he was afraid that someone would take it. He's the kind of person who always believes that everyone else is jealous of him and wants to steal all of his fancy stuff.

July 10, 2017

36 minutes ago, laPapessaGiovanna said:

Was he worried someone would steal his seat?

Yes, a real president. He's probably secretly afraid that other world leaders have Bernie or Hillary stuffed in a corner somewhere just waiting for Caligula to take his bathroom break, so he can be replaced. Even he knows how unqualified he is!

July 10, 2017

1 hour ago, AnywhereButHere said:

Yes, a real president. He's probably secretly afraid that other world leaders have Bernie or Hillary stuffed in a corner somewhere just waiting for Caligula to take his bathroom break, so he can be replaced. Even he knows how unqualified he is!

He was probably thinking Angela Merkel had Obama hiding behind a curtain, ready to pounce.

July 11, 2017

Sanders: ‘We Should Be Proud’ Ivanka Sat In For Her Father At G20 Meeting

Quote

Deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Monday said the United States “should be proud” that Ivanka Trump took her father’s place at a meeting of G20 leaders over the weekend, a decision which quickly drew criticism.

“I think that we should be proud to have Ivanka sitting in that seat, considering particularly the topic at hand was part of her portfolio,” Sanders said at an off-camera White House briefing.

An unnamed senior administration official told CNN that when Ivanka Trump stepped in “the topic involved areas such as African development — areas that will benefit from the facility just announced by the World Bank,” an initiative Ivanka Trump helped develop.

President Donald Trump on Monday defended his decision to step away and have his daughter, a senior White House adviser, take his place at the meeting of world leaders.

“Very standard,” he tweeted, and claimed that if Chelsea Clinton did the same “the Fake News” would endorse her for president.

Asked when the President will stop re-litigating issues from the 2016 election, when he attacked not just his opponent Hillary Clinton but her daughter and husband as well, Sanders said his tweet “wasn’t about putting them in the front.”

“This was about responding to an outrageous attack against a White House senior adviser,” she said. “And it’s a pretty standard protocol that when the leader gets up, someone takes their seat.”

Two things:

Nobody elected Miss Prissy-face Ivanka into office, nor was she confirmed by the Senate. Certainly not someone to be proud of, that's for sure.
WTF does "[his tweet] wasn't about putting them in front" even mean? You can put someone first, or you can put up a front, but putting them in front? In front of what? Or did she mean, 'putting them in the forefront'? Yeah, that was probably an unintentional and unexpected side-effect of the tweet.

July 13, 2017

On 7/10/2017 at 6:49 AM, Childless said:

Someone should have stopped her before she left the hotel room in that outfit.

She looks like she is going to tend her sheep in that Little Bo Peep outfit! She has no CLUE how to dress, I saw a photo of her taken sometime this week as she was leaving her house for work, wearing some kind of full, flowy chiffon-type skirt, sleeveless, scoop-necked blouse and high-heeled sandals. Professional? I think not, unless you are a member of the world's oldest profession!

July 13, 2017

10 hours ago, AuntK said:

She looks like she is going to tend her sheep in that Little Bo Peep outfit! She has no CLUE how to dress, I saw a photo of her taken sometime this week as she was leaving her house for work, wearing some kind of full, flowy chiffon-type skirt, sleeveless, scoop-necked blouse and high-heeled sandals. Professional? I think not, unless you are a member of the world's oldest profession!

The sad thing about this is she has been raised to believe if she just looks pretty, men will be charmed and give her what she wants. For all her bluster, she knows she has to have that look to succeed. She has never known anything else. What a wonderful example for other young women.

I'm also concerned about how she and her husband are surviving. Neither take a salary from their "jobs." So they are advising the president, more influential than anyone else around him and yet they are still living off funds from their companies. We know that anything extra the Orange toddler needs, say for Barron's school, he gets from one of the boys, without knowing exactly where it comes from, yeah, sure, we believe that! But who's watching Ivanka and Jared's money? Lots of meetings with very influential world leaders while they run private companies. They just can't resist, can they?

July 13, 2017

9 minutes ago, GrumpyGran said:

The sad thing about this is she has been raised to believe if she just looks pretty, men will be charmed and give her what she wants. For all her bluster, she knows she has to have that look to succeed. She has never known anything else. What a wonderful example for other young women.

I'm also concerned about how she and her husband are surviving. Neither take a salary from their "jobs." So they are advising the president, more influential than anyone else around him and yet they are still living off funds from their companies. We know that anything extra the Orange toddler needs, say for Barron's school, he gets from one of the boys, without knowing exactly where it comes from, yeah, sure, we believe that! But who's watching Ivanka and Jared's money? Lots of meetings with very influential world leaders while they run private companies. They just can't resist, can they?

Puh-leeze! I don't think we have to be concerned about how they are surviving. They are completely and exclusively focussed on making money, don't ever think otherwise. That is the only thing that matters to them, and any and all advice they give the presidunce is in relation to how they can make more money. Oh, and maybe how they can deflect from this Russia thing.

I am not concerned for them in the slightest.

I am worried for the survival of the American people though.

July 13, 2017

"All Roads Now Lead to Kushner"

Spoiler

For a year, the refrain from the Trump camp has been a defiant mix of “Lock her up,” “but the emails” and “fake news.”

Now it turns out that what was fake wasn’t the news but the Trump denials, that the truly scandalous emails were in the Trumps’ own servers and that the person who may have committed a felony is actually Donald J. Trump Jr.

The writer Stephen King put it this way: “The news is real. The president is fake.”

The question is where this goes next. I suggest two directions.

First, look beyond Donald Trump Jr. to Jared Kushner and to President Trump himself.

Second, explore how Trump Jr.’s attempt at collusion with Russians may relate to the bizarre effort by Kushner to set up a secret communication channel with the Kremlin.

To back up, just in case you’ve been stuck on a desert island, here’s what you missed this week. Donald J. Trump Jr. received an email in June 2016, eight days after his father clinched the Republican nomination for president, that said the Kremlin had “offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary. … This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

In 1960, the Kremlin made a similar offer to support the candidacy of John F. Kennedy against Richard Nixon, but the Kennedy campaign rebuffed it. Likewise, when the Al Gore campaign in 2000 received confidential materials relating to the George W. Bush campaign, it called the F.B.I.

Trump Jr. didn’t call the F.B.I.; instead, he responded, “I love it.” He apparently arranged a phone call to discuss the material (we don’t know that the call happened or, if it did, its content), and then set up a meeting for him, Kushner and campaign chairman Paul Manafort to meet with a person described in the emails as a “Russian government attorney.”

In other words, informed of a secret Kremlin effort to use highly sensitive information about a former secretary of state (presumably obtained by espionage, for how else?) to manipulate an American election, Trump Jr. signaled, “We’re in!”

“This was an attempt at collusion,” noted Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon. It may or may not have amounted to a felony, for soliciting a foreigner to contribute something “of value” in connection with an American election. The Predict-It betting website now lists gambling odds about whether Trump Jr. will be indicted.

The Trumps’ defense is that the meeting was a “nothingburger” with no follow-up. That would be more compelling if the Trumps hadn’t previously denied at least 20 times that such a meeting had ever taken place. Their credibility is in tatters.

Crucially, this is bigger than Donald Trump Jr.

The Trumps insist that the president himself was unaware of the Russian offer. Yet the day after Trump Jr. received the first email and presumably had his phone conversation about the supposedly incriminating material, his father promised to give “a major speech” in which “we’re going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons. I think you’re going to find it very informative and very, very interesting.”

That speech targeting Hillary Clinton didn’t take place. But on June 15, the first leak of stolen Democratic materials did.

Then there’s Kushner. Trump Jr. forwarded the emails to Kushner, whose response was to attend the meeting, although he apparently left within 10 minutes. Kushner later neglected to report the meeting and others with Russians on his SF-86 forms to receive national security clearance (intentional omission is a felony).

The meeting gave the Kremlin potential blackmail material against the Trumps, and thus possibly leverage over them.

In addition, McClatchy reports that investigators in Congress and the Justice Department are exploring whether the Trump campaign digital operation — supervised by Kushner — helped guide Russia’s remarkably sophisticated efforts to use internet bots to target voters with fake news attacking Hillary Clinton.

Then there was the extraordinary initiative by Kushner in the transition period to set up the secret communications channel. There’s no indication that the channel was actually established, and the assumption has been that the communications would have required visits to Russian consulates — which would be bizarre.

But Barton Gellman, a careful national security writer, has another theory. He notes that James Comey, the ousted F.B.I. director, in testimony to Congress referred to the risk that this channel could “capture all of your conversations.” Gellman suggests that this may mean that Kushner sought mobile Russian scrambling equipment to take to Trump Tower.

Look, this is a murky, complicated issue. But this much we know: Kushner attended a secret meeting whose stated purpose was to advance a Kremlin effort to interfere in the U.S. election, he then failed to report it, and finally he sought a secret channel to communicate with the Kremlin.

One next step is clear: Take away Jared Kushner’s security clearance immediately.

July 13, 2017

What I find most unbelievable is that the same naive idiot that let himself be involved in Junior's emailgate is the one delegated to find a solution for ME conflicts! Really? his bevaviour is so dumb that I marvel that he can tie his shoes strings without help and he should be the one that outsmarts everybody at international meetings, the most trusted adviser to the president? Not only! He should also solve the opioid crisis and rejuvenate the federal system?

Ha ha ha ha the world is laughing its pants off.

July 13, 2017

17 minutes ago, laPapessaGiovanna said:

What I find most unbelievable is that the same naive idiot that let himself be involved in Junior's emailgate is the one delegated to find a solution for ME conflicts! Really? his bevaviour is so dumb that I marvel that he can tie his shoes strings without help and he should be the one that outsmarts everybody at international meetings, the most trusted adviser to the president? Not only! Je should also solve the opioid crisis and rejuvenate the federal system?

Ha ha ha ha the world is laughing its pants off.

It's the arrogance of entitled legacy children, always told that they are better than others, smarter than others, more deserving than others. These people did not even understand the difference between private business and government. Yet, they bulldoze in, believing that these complicated issues haven't been resolved because they themselves haven't been involved yet.

And how do you know he ties his own shoes? He probably has a person who does that for him.

July 14, 2017

"Ivanka and Jared begin the plunge from grace"

Spoiler

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have tried their best to soar gracefully above the raging dumpster fire that is the Trump administration. Unhappily for the handsome couple, gravity makes no allowances for charm.

Kushner, already reported to be a “person of interest” in the Justice Department probe of President Trump’s campaign, is arguably the individual with the most to lose from the revelation that the campaign did, after all, at least attempt to collude with the Russian government to boost Trump’s chances of winning the election.

The president’s hapless eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. — who convened the June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer for the purpose of obtaining dirt on Hillary Clinton — had no operational role in the campaign. Paul J. Manafort, who also attended, was the campaign’s chairman, but his many shady business dealings with several Ukrainian and Russian characters were already under scrutiny, so the encounter with attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya could be seen as just another item on the list.

Kushner was at the meeting, too, however, and he had oversight of the campaign’s digital operations. That could be a problem, given the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia interfered with the election and that the meddling took place largely in cyberspace.

And unlike the other participants, Kushner has an official position in the Trump administration. He serves in the White House as a senior adviser to the president with responsibility for numerous high-profile initiatives — and with a top-secret security clearance, which should be revoked immediately.

Trump Jr. says that Kushner didn’t stay long at the session with Veselnitskaya and that no damaging information about Clinton was imparted. But because he kept the meeting secret for more than a year, scoffing indignantly at the very notion of collusion with the Russians, and then twice lied about the nature of the meeting before finally coming clean, no one should believe another word that Trump Jr. says on the subject. At least, not until special counsel Robert S. Mueller III puts him under oath, which I believe is likely to happen.

At one point in his changing story, Trump Jr. said that Kushner and Manafort didn’t even know what the meeting was about. Yet he copied both of them on an email chain that begins with an intermediary’s offer of campaign help from the “Russian government.” The proper thing to do would have been to call the FBI, but this crowd knows nothing of propriety.

The Veselnitskaya encounter was one of more than 100 meetings or phone calls with foreigners that somehow slipped Kushner’s mind when he applied for his security clearance. He revealed this one in one of his subsequent efforts to amend the form.

It is hard to imagine what connection Kushner might have had to the Russian hacking of Democratic National Committee computers and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails. But there was another component of the clandestine effort to help Trump get elected: Investigators believe that as Election Day approached, Russian trolls and “bots” flooded the social media accounts of key voters in swing states with “fake news” and disinformation about Clinton, according to a report Wednesday by McClatchy .

How would the Russians know which voters to target, down to the precinct level, in states such as Wisconsin and Michigan? This is a question that surely will be posed to Kushner, since at the time he happened to be overseeing a sophisticated digital campaign operation that tracked voters at a granular level.

Ivanka Trump’s name has not surfaced in the Russia affair. But she, like her husband, is serving as a presidential adviser, and she received unwanted attention when she briefly took her father’s place at the head table during the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg. We expect officials representing our country to have been elected by the voters or appointed because of merit, not installed by the caprices of heredity.

She also received unwanted scrutiny when three labor activists were arrested in May for investigating alleged sweatshop practices at a factory in China where Ivanka Trump-brand shoes have been manufactured.

Among Manhattan’s progressive upper crust, Jared and Ivanka — they really are first-name-only celebrities at this point — were expected to at least temper the hard-right policy positions being pushed by other presidential advisers. If this indeed is what they are trying to do, they’ve had a negligible impact to date.

Writing in Time magazine, Henry Kissinger wished Kushner well “in his daunting role flying close to the sun.” Jared and Ivanka have first-class educations. They know how the Icarus story ends.

I don't feel bad for them. They chose to be involved.

July 14, 2017

"Ivanka Inc.: The first daughter talks about improving the lives of working women. Her father urges companies to “buy American.” But her fashion line’s practices collide with those principles – and are out of step with industry trends."

Spoiler

On Inauguration Day, President Trump stood in front of the U.S. Capitol and vowed that his “America First” agenda would bring jobs back to the United States.

“We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs,” he declared, adding: “We will follow two simple rules — buy American and hire American.”

Looking on from the front of the stage was Trump’s daughter Ivanka, the celebrity and fashion entrepreneur who would soon join him in the White House.

The first daughter’s cause would be improving the lives of working women, a theme she had developed at her clothing line. She also brought a direct link to the global economy the president was railing against — a connection that was playing out at that very moment on the Pacific coast.

As the Trumps stood on stage, a hulking container ship called the OOCL Ho Chi Minh City was pulling into the harbor of Long Beach, Calif., carrying around 500 pounds of foreign-made Ivanka Trump spandex-knit blouses.

Another 10 ships hauling Ivanka Trump-branded shoes, cardigans and leather handbags bound for the United States were floating in the north Pacific and Atlantic oceans and off the coasts of Malta, Malaysia, Japan, South Korea and Yemen.

Those global journeys — along with millions of pounds of Ivanka Trump products imported into the United States in more than 2,000 shipments since 2010 — illustrate how her business practices collide with some of the key principles she and her father have championed in the White House.

While President Trump has chastised companies for outsourcing jobs overseas, an examination by The Washington Post has revealed the extent to which Ivanka Trump’s company relies exclusively on foreign factories in countries such as Bangladesh, Indonesia and China, where low-wage laborers have limited ability to advocate for themselves.

And while Ivanka Trump published a book this spring declaring that improving the lives of working women is “my life’s mission,” The Post found that her company lags behind many in the apparel industry when it comes to monitoring the treatment of the largely female workforce employed in factories around the world.

From big brands such as Adidas and Kenneth Cole to smaller, newer players like California-based Everlane, many U.S. clothing companies have in recent years made protecting factory workers abroad a priority — hiring independent auditors to monitor labor conditions, pressing factory owners to make improvements and providing consumers with details about the overseas facilities where their goods are produced.

But the Trump brand has taken a more hands-off approach. Although executives say they have a code of conduct that prohibits physical abuse and child labor, the company relies on its suppliers to abide by the policy.

The clothing line declined to disclose the language of the code.

Trump, who now works full time in the White House, has stepped away from daily operations of her business. She has assumed a high-profile place on the world stage — a role that was on display last weekend when she briefly filled in for her father during a meeting with foreign leaders, seated between the president of China and the British prime minister.

Trump still owns her company, which has faced increasing scrutiny in recent months for its use of overseas factories, and her representatives have said she has the power to veto new deals.

Trump did not respond to requests for comment about what efforts she made to oversee her company’s supply chain before she joined the administration.

Her attorney Jamie Gorelick told The Post in a statement that Trump is “concerned” about recent reports regarding the treatment of factory workers and “expects that the company will respond appropriately.”

In the wake of Trump’s departure, the brand has begun to explore hiring a nonprofit workers’ rights group to increase oversight of its production and help improve factory conditions, the company’s executives told The Post.

Abigail Klem, who has been the brand’s president since 2013, said she is planning her first trip to tour some of the facilities that make Ivanka Trump products in the coming year.

Klem said she is confident that the company’s suppliers operate “at the highest standards,” adding, “Ivanka sought to partner with the best in the industry.”

The company had not yet matched the policies of other labels because it was newer and smaller, she added, but is now focusing on what more it can do.

“The mission of this brand has always been to inspire and empower women to create the lives they want to live and give them tools to do that,” Klem said. “We’re looking to ensure that we can sort of live this mission from top to bottom with our licensees, with our supply chain.”

The company still has no immediate plans to follow the emerging industry trend of publishing the names and locations of factories that produce its goods. It declined to provide a list of the facilities.

The Post used data drawn from U.S. customs logs and international shipping records to trace Trump-branded products from far-flung factories to ports around the United States. The Post also interviewed workers at three garment factories that have made Trump products who said their jobs often come with exhausting hours, subsistence pay and insults from supervisors if they don’t work fast enough.

“My monthly salary is not enough for everyday expenses, also not for the future,” said a 26-year-old sewing operator in Subang, Indonesia, who said she has helped make Trump dresses.

Like many U.S.-based apparel companies, the Trump brand signs deals with suppliers, which, in turn, contract manufacturing work to factories around the world. The system allows products to be sold to consumers for lower prices and creates economic opportunity — and risks — for workers in poor regions.

In China, where three activists investigating factories making her line were recently arrested, assembly-line workers produce Ivanka Trump woven blouses, shoes and handbags. Laborers in Indonesia stitch together her dresses and knit tops. Suit jackets are assembled in Vietnam, cotton tops in India and denim pants in Bangladesh — a country with a huge apparel industry where garment workers typically earn a minimum wage of about $70 a month and where some have recently faced a harsh crackdown from factory owners after seeking higher pay.

...

And in Ethiopia, where manufacturers have boasted of paying workers a fifth of what they earn in Chinese factories, workers made thousands of pounds of Ivanka Trump-brand shoes in 2013, shipping data show.

Klem, the Trump brand president, said the company is exploring ways to produce some goods in the United States but that “to do it at a large scale is currently not possible.”

Klem spoke to The Post in the fashion line’s offices on the 23rd floor of Trump Tower, three floors below the headquarters of the Trump Organization. On a table next to her lay a copy of a 2016 Business of Fashion report, “Unravelling the Myth of ‘Made in America.’ ”

“The workers no longer exist here or only in very small, small capacity; the machinery in many instances does not exist here,” Klem said. “It is a very complex problem.”

Industry experts say about 97 percent of all clothing and shoes purchased in the United States is imported from countries where wages are lower and products can be made more cheaply.

If Ivanka Trump’s company followed the president’s exhortations to move production to the United States, its prices would rise dramatically, potentially pushing buyers away and dragging down company profits, according to industry experts.

The Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, a nonprofit organization, estimated in 2013 that a denim shirt that cost $3.72 to make in Bangladesh would cost more than three times as much to make in the United States.

Instead of pulling production back into the United States, the apparel industry has been focused on a different strategy: trying to reassure American consumers that their retail purchases are not the result of exploitation.

...

A wide range of clothing lines now inspect their own supply chains to make sure labor standards are met, the companies say. Among them is Levi Strauss, which, like Trump’s brand, licenses some of its production from a large New York-based clothing distributor called G-III Apparel.

A Levi spokeswoman told The Post that the company inspects its production facilities annually and has published factory information since 2005.

Many smaller brands turn to industry-backed groups, such as the Fair Labor Association or the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, to help address factory conditions and worker treatment.

Krochet Kids, which sells dresses for less than $60, includes clothing tags hand-signed by workers at its facilities in Uganda and Peru. Reformation, whose dress Trump wore to a recent congressional picnic, screens its overseas suppliers and recently moved to an expanded factory in downtown Los Angeles, where it offers guided tours.

“The questions today aren’t whether to engage in [monitoring factories], but whether to go beyond, all the way down to the cotton fields,” said Doug Cahn, a former Reebok executive who pioneered the development of corporate codes of conduct and now consults for brands and manufacturers.

The Trump company’s relatively passive approach is notable — as is its lack of participation in industry efforts to improve conditions for workers, according to labor advocates.

“I have been doing this stuff for 20 years, and I have never seen her brand in any of these venues,” said Judy Gearhart, executive director of the International Labor Rights Forum.

Klem said that “as a small, young brand, we did not have the chance to influence the debate around social compliance issues, but that has obviously changed during this past year.”

“We recognize that our brand name carries a special responsibility,” she added.

...

The Ivanka brand: From glitzy jewelry to #WomenWhoWork

Ivanka Trump was a 26-year-old model and guest judge on her father’s reality show, “The Apprentice,” when she took on her first solo venture outside the family business: lending her name and creative energy to a Manhattan diamond boutique.

From the beginning, Trump said she envisioned Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry as a glitzy refuge for the upper crust. In a 2007 Arabian Business magazine profile, headlined “Daddy’s Girl,” Ivanka Trump said the jewelry, mostly priced between $5,000 and $50,000, would be marketed to ambitious, wealthy women who “have everything, yet . . . nothing to prove.”

Initially, Trump’s brand put an emphasis on sustainability. In 2011, her company introduced a short-lived bridal jewelry collection made from “eco-friendly” Canadian-mined diamonds and recycled platinum. The following year, entrepreneur Russell Simmons’ Diamond Empowerment Fund, a nonprofit organization that works to help educate youth in diamond-producing countries, gave her its “Newest and Brightest” award.

“It’s just good business to care about everyone involved in the various layers of production . . . especially when the end product is such a beautiful symbol of love,” Trump said, according to a news release by the group.

...

By then, she had started expanding into other products, eventually signing deals for clothes, shoes and handbags.

Shipping data show that tons of Ivanka Trump-brand shoes were rolling off factory production lines in Dongguan, the sprawling industrial city in southern China, and onto container ships with names such as APL Beijing and Hyundai Dynasty.

Trump’s clothing line — styled to sell an image of modern metropolitan glamour — quickly became the core of her business, with mid-market prices and an expanding collection of stylish pumps, off-the-shoulder tops and flower-print cocktail dresses.

In late 2012, Trump signed a deal with G-III, an established apparel group known for its work with Guess, Calvin Klein and celebrity brands such as Jessica Simpson. Trump’s collection flourished and, with it, production ramped up in G-III’s contract factories across China and Vietnam, according to shipping data.

In 2016, G-III told Forbes that the Ivanka Trump clothing line had generated $100 million in retail revenue in the past year.

Trump served as her company’s star marketer, wearing her brand’s nude heels and a $10,000 bracelet during photo shoots and TV interviews.

In last year’s presidential campaign, Trump took the opportunity to showcase her products on the national stage. After she paid tribute to her father at the Republican National Convention in one of her soft-pink sheath dresses, her social media team urged buyers to “shop Ivanka’s look,” and the $138 Chinese-made dress quickly sold out.

In the company’s Trump Tower headquarters, a staff of about 16 employees runs the Ivanka Trump design team, social media accounts and branding campaigns — including #WomenWhoWork, a movement-as-hashtag that emerged as the company’s driving motto.

Its marketing mixes promotions for evening bags with celebrations of female power. What was once advertised as trendy clothing for women in “the boardroom and beyond” has evolved into what IvankaTrump.com calls “a solution-oriented lifestyle brand, dedicated to the mission of inspiring and empowering women to create the lives they want to lead.”

In recent months, however, efforts to market the upbeat Ivanka Trump clothing brand have run headlong into the polarizing Trump political brand.

After Nordstrom dropped her line in February, citing low sales, the president complained on Twitter that his daughter had been “treated so unfairly,” and pro-Trump supporters rushed to buy her products. Presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway drew a rebuke from federal ethics officials for telling TV viewers, from the White House press room, to “go buy Ivanka’s stuff.”

Detractors of the president, meanwhile, have posted negative reviews of Ivanka Trump items online, needling her for relying on foreign labor.

Klem said the controversies have not hurt sales. She declined to disclose figures, but said that the brand’s business is “growing rapidly.” Revenue was up 21 percent in 2016, with continuing growth in 2017, executives said.

‘We are the ultra-poor’

In May, Lord & Taylor stores showcased the newest items in the Ivanka Trump denim collection: a series of indigo, white and pink pants retailing for $79. Affixed to each was a label brandishing the #WomenWhoWork slogan, featuring aspirational admonishments such as “Act purposefully” and “Invest in each other.”

The labels on the jeans show they were made for G-III Apparel in Bangladesh, whose garment industry has weathered a series of deadly factory disasters, including a 2013 building collapse that killed more than 1,100 workers. In the wake of that tragedy, Disney pulled its production out of the country, and brands such as Walmart and Gap vowed to pay for safety training for factory managers.

Shipping records do not reveal which factories in the country produce Ivanka Trump goods, and both the brand and G-III refused to say which facilities make her products.

G-III spokesman Chris Giglio said the company’s supply chain is “routinely audited by us and by independent third parties. When issues arise, we work with our local partners to find and implement safe, fair and sustainable solutions.”

Along with facing safety risks, Bangladeshi garment workers toil for one of the world’s lowest minimum wages.

“We are the ultra-poor,” said Kalpona Akter, a Bangladeshi labor organizer and former garment worker who was first hired by a factory at the age of 12. “We are making you beautiful, but we are starving.”

In December, thousands of workers seeking higher pay went on strike outside the capital city of Dhaka. In response, police rounded up and arrested several dozen labor organizers, and factory owners filed criminal complaints against hundreds of workers, according to Human Rights Watch. An estimated 1,500 garment workers were suspended or fired.

At a Dhaka apparel summit in February, U.S. Ambassador Marcia S. Bernicat described the mass firings and arrests as “a giant, disappointing step backwards on labor rights” and warned that international buyers “have to ask themselves how they will sell garments made in a country where large numbers of workers and union leaders are suddenly arrested, fired or suspended simply because they or their fellow workers asked for a wage increase.”

A number of apparel brands have called on factories to halt the worker crackdown. A spokesman for H&M told The Post that it has instructed Dhaka factory owners that the company will pull its business unless the factories reinstate the fired workers and drop the criminal complaints.

Trump’s brand and G-III have not publicly addressed the crackdown. Klem said that the company’s code of conduct gives workers in its supply chain “the right to freely associate in accordance with the laws of the countries in which they are employed.”

In recent years, hundreds of clothing lines and manufacturers have poured millions into financing safety improvements in garment factories through two major initiatives, the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh and the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, a group made up of 29 North American retailers.

Neither Trump’s company nor G-III Apparel has contributed to those efforts, according to program officials. But a factory used last year by a G-III subsidiary has benefited from the safety initiatives, according to U.S. customs records and Bangladeshi government reports.

The factory, That’s It Sports Wear Ltd., the site of a 2010 fire that killed 29 employees, worked with both programs to install fire doors, sprinklers and other safety improvements, records show. The Ha-Meem Group, which owns the factory, does not produce Ivanka Trump goods, the company’s chairman, A.K. Azad, told The Post.

Jessica Champagne, deputy director for field operations and strategy at the Worker Rights Consortium, an independent monitoring group, said that “any responsible brand sourcing from Bangladesh” should support the accord, adding that “failure to do so puts workers’ safety at risk.”

Klem said the company would consider doing so if its yet-to-be-hired workers rights consultant recommends such a move.

G-III did not respond to questions about why it does not participate in the factory improvement program. At a panel discussion last year, one of its executives noted that the distributor has a set of standards that its facilities must meet.

“We have a team on the ground running around every factory in Asia and visiting these factories and drilling it into their head what these requirements mean,” Adam Ziedenweber, G-III’s vice president of global sourcing compliance, said in the March 2016 event at the Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School.

But Ziedenweber, who did not respond to questions from The Post, also noted the challenge of keeping prices low while making investments in factories.

“You know, the retailers, the consumers aren’t asking for it,” he said. “None of the consumers say, ‘Well, this was made in a building that was going to fall down.’ ”

Unable to make ends meet

Financial insecurity is a constant companion for the predominantly female workforce at PT Buma, a factory in Indonesia’s West Java province that produced a batch of Ivanka-branded knit dresses that shipping records show arrived in Newark on Jan. 18, two days before Trump’s inauguration.

K., a 26-year-old sewing-machine operator, told The Post that she makes the equivalent of $173 a month, the region’s minimum wage. Her full name, like that of other workers, is being withheld by The Post because the workers fear being punished or fired for speaking to the media.

She said she spends $23 to rent her small studio in the bustling factory town of Subang, where she sleeps on a mattress on the floor and hangs her clothes from a string hung along the wall.

She saves the rest for her 2-year-old daughter but worries she will not be able to afford elementary school fees, which can cost as much as $225 a year.

With no child care, K. is forced to leave the toddler at home with her parents in their village, a journey of about 90 minutes away by motorbike across the rice fields. On the weekend, she joins an exodus of parents from Subang who clamber onto motorbikes and into shared vans, racing home for brief reunions.

“I really miss the moments when we play together,” K. said.

A 25-year-old woman said PT Buma hires her as a fabric cutter on a day-to-day basis, paying her a monthly salary that ranges between $68 to $135 for as much as 24 days of work — far below the region’s minimum wage and a rate that workers advocates say is probably a violation of local law.

The fabric cutter and her husband have to borrow money to cover their daily expenses and those of their 10-year-old son, who lives 45 minutes away with his grandmother. She sees him about once a month.

Their possessions consist of her husband’s motorbike and their clothes. “I have nothing,” she said.

Inside the factory, workers said supervisors berate employees if they fall behind their targets or if stitches need to be redone. “Work faster, these clothes are urgent,” one 30-year-old employee said she was told. “Why do you work slow?”

PT Buma participates in Better Work, an international program to improve garment industry conditions, according to the Better Work website.

A PT Buma representative who declined to give his name said the factory no longer produces Ivanka Trump clothing. He said the company refused to answer any more questions and abruptly ended the call.

When asked about the working environment at PT Buma, Klem said in a statement that the brand hopes to develop programs to support the “thousands of women” in its supply chain.

For K., the dresses she has helped produce — which retail for as much as $138 — seem as out of reach as the daughter of the U.S. president herself, whose name the worker said she now wishes she had chosen for her own little girl.

“Ivanka clothes are beautiful, expensive, sexy — just perfect,” she said.

Fear of retaliation

The dangers to workers who try to seek better labor conditions are especially acute in China, where activists say heavy surveillance and police presences are used to protect company profits and the country’s lucrative reputation as the “factory of the world.”

Ivanka Trump’s products have been made in more than two dozen factories across China since 2010, shipping data show.

Yen Sheng, a Hong Kong-based company with factories in Dongguan where workers are paid between $190 and $289 a month, has shipped thousands of pounds of Ivanka Trump cowhide-leather handbags and other items since 2015, customs records show.

Employees in Dongguan told The Post that the company withholds sick pay unless they are hospitalized and avoids paying overtime by outsourcing work to the unregulated one-room factories that dot Dongguan’s back streets. But pressing for change is not an option, they said.

“If you don’t work, other people will,” one woman at the company’s Dongguan subsidiary Yen Hing Leather Works said. “If you protest, the company will ask the police to handle it. The owner is very rich. He can ask the police to come.”

Trump brand executives said its products are not made at Yen Hing. A manager at the Dongguan factory, Huang Huihong, told The Post that its workers have produced Ivanka Trump goods in the past.

Officials at Yen Hing denied the workers’ allegations, saying they “strictly follow the laws in our business operation.” Mondani, the Trump brand’s handbag supplier, did not respond to requests for comment.

The work conditions at Chinese factories that make Trump’s products have gained public attention in recent weeks after the detentions of three activists from a group called China Labor Watch who were investigating the facilities. The group said it found evidence at one facility of laborers working 18-hour days and enduring verbal abuse from managers, allegations that the Chinese factory denied.

Chinese authorities accused the activists of using illegal surveillance equipment and suggested they might have been selling commercial secrets to foreign entities. They were released on bail in late June. A trial is pending.

The State Department denounced the arrests, saying that labor rights activists “have been instrumental in helping . . . American companies understand the conditions involving their supply chains.”

Li Qiang, the group’s executive director, said it had never faced such police pressure in nearly two decades of experience investigating factories and said he believes this case was handled differently because “this is Ivanka Trump’s factory.”

Hua Haifeng, one of the detained activists, told The Post after his release, “The first question the police asked was to the effect of ‘whether you know it’s Ivanka Trump’s factory and then came here to investigate.’ ” Local police officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Li’s group says it has sent four letters since April to Ivanka Trump at the White House detailing the working conditions in the factory and asking for her to advocate for their colleagues.

Deng Guilian, Hua’s wife, also pleaded with Trump to intervene, telling The Post, “For her, it’s just a matter of a few words, but those few words would save the entire family.”

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July 14, 2017

4 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Ivanka and Jared begin the plunge from grace"

Reveal hidden contents

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have tried their best to soar gracefully above the raging dumpster fire that is the Trump administration. Unhappily for the handsome couple, gravity makes no allowances for charm.

Kushner, already reported to be a “person of interest” in the Justice Department probe of President Trump’s campaign, is arguably the individual with the most to lose from the revelation that the campaign did, after all, at least attempt to collude with the Russian government to boost Trump’s chances of winning the election.

The president’s hapless eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. — who convened the June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer for the purpose of obtaining dirt on Hillary Clinton — had no operational role in the campaign. Paul J. Manafort, who also attended, was the campaign’s chairman, but his many shady business dealings with several Ukrainian and Russian characters were already under scrutiny, so the encounter with attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya could be seen as just another item on the list.

Kushner was at the meeting, too, however, and he had oversight of the campaign’s digital operations. That could be a problem, given the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia interfered with the election and that the meddling took place largely in cyberspace.

And unlike the other participants, Kushner has an official position in the Trump administration. He serves in the White House as a senior adviser to the president with responsibility for numerous high-profile initiatives — and with a top-secret security clearance, which should be revoked immediately.

Trump Jr. says that Kushner didn’t stay long at the session with Veselnitskaya and that no damaging information about Clinton was imparted. But because he kept the meeting secret for more than a year, scoffing indignantly at the very notion of collusion with the Russians, and then twice lied about the nature of the meeting before finally coming clean, no one should believe another word that Trump Jr. says on the subject. At least, not until special counsel Robert S. Mueller III puts him under oath, which I believe is likely to happen.

At one point in his changing story, Trump Jr. said that Kushner and Manafort didn’t even know what the meeting was about. Yet he copied both of them on an email chain that begins with an intermediary’s offer of campaign help from the “Russian government.” The proper thing to do would have been to call the FBI, but this crowd knows nothing of propriety.

The Veselnitskaya encounter was one of more than 100 meetings or phone calls with foreigners that somehow slipped Kushner’s mind when he applied for his security clearance. He revealed this one in one of his subsequent efforts to amend the form.

It is hard to imagine what connection Kushner might have had to the Russian hacking of Democratic National Committee computers and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails. But there was another component of the clandestine effort to help Trump get elected: Investigators believe that as Election Day approached, Russian trolls and “bots” flooded the social media accounts of key voters in swing states with “fake news” and disinformation about Clinton, according to a report Wednesday by McClatchy .

How would the Russians know which voters to target, down to the precinct level, in states such as Wisconsin and Michigan? This is a question that surely will be posed to Kushner, since at the time he happened to be overseeing a sophisticated digital campaign operation that tracked voters at a granular level.

Ivanka Trump’s name has not surfaced in the Russia affair. But she, like her husband, is serving as a presidential adviser, and she received unwanted attention when she briefly took her father’s place at the head table during the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg. We expect officials representing our country to have been elected by the voters or appointed because of merit, not installed by the caprices of heredity.

She also received unwanted scrutiny when three labor activists were arrested in May for investigating alleged sweatshop practices at a factory in China where Ivanka Trump-brand shoes have been manufactured.

Among Manhattan’s progressive upper crust, Jared and Ivanka — they really are first-name-only celebrities at this point — were expected to at least temper the hard-right policy positions being pushed by other presidential advisers. If this indeed is what they are trying to do, they’ve had a negligible impact to date.

Writing in Time magazine, Henry Kissinger wished Kushner well “in his daunting role flying close to the sun.” Jared and Ivanka have first-class educations. They know how the Icarus story ends.

I don't feel bad for them. They chose to be involved.

Now I'm picturing Ivanka flitting around the West Wing, singing "Defying Gravity" while staffers give her the stink-eye behind her back.

And Jared doesn't know who Icarus is. First-class education, pfft, they got their first-class education the same way you get a first-class seat on an airplane-$$$$$$$$.

July 14, 2017

7 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Ivanka Inc.: The first daughter talks about improving the lives of working women. Her father urges companies to “buy American.” But her fashion line’s practices collide with those principles – and are out of step with industry trends."

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On Inauguration Day, President Trump stood in front of the U.S. Capitol and vowed that his “America First” agenda would bring jobs back to the United States.

“We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs,” he declared, adding: “We will follow two simple rules — buy American and hire American.”

Looking on from the front of the stage was Trump’s daughter Ivanka, the celebrity and fashion entrepreneur who would soon join him in the White House.

The first daughter’s cause would be improving the lives of working women, a theme she had developed at her clothing line. She also brought a direct link to the global economy the president was railing against — a connection that was playing out at that very moment on the Pacific coast.

As the Trumps stood on stage, a hulking container ship called the OOCL Ho Chi Minh City was pulling into the harbor of Long Beach, Calif., carrying around 500 pounds of foreign-made Ivanka Trump spandex-knit blouses.

Another 10 ships hauling Ivanka Trump-branded shoes, cardigans and leather handbags bound for the United States were floating in the north Pacific and Atlantic oceans and off the coasts of Malta, Malaysia, Japan, South Korea and Yemen.

Those global journeys — along with millions of pounds of Ivanka Trump products imported into the United States in more than 2,000 shipments since 2010 — illustrate how her business practices collide with some of the key principles she and her father have championed in the White House.

While President Trump has chastised companies for outsourcing jobs overseas, an examination by The Washington Post has revealed the extent to which Ivanka Trump’s company relies exclusively on foreign factories in countries such as Bangladesh, Indonesia and China, where low-wage laborers have limited ability to advocate for themselves.

And while Ivanka Trump published a book this spring declaring that improving the lives of working women is “my life’s mission,” The Post found that her company lags behind many in the apparel industry when it comes to monitoring the treatment of the largely female workforce employed in factories around the world.

From big brands such as Adidas and Kenneth Cole to smaller, newer players like California-based Everlane, many U.S. clothing companies have in recent years made protecting factory workers abroad a priority — hiring independent auditors to monitor labor conditions, pressing factory owners to make improvements and providing consumers with details about the overseas facilities where their goods are produced.

But the Trump brand has taken a more hands-off approach. Although executives say they have a code of conduct that prohibits physical abuse and child labor, the company relies on its suppliers to abide by the policy.

The clothing line declined to disclose the language of the code.

Trump, who now works full time in the White House, has stepped away from daily operations of her business. She has assumed a high-profile place on the world stage — a role that was on display last weekend when she briefly filled in for her father during a meeting with foreign leaders, seated between the president of China and the British prime minister.

Trump still owns her company, which has faced increasing scrutiny in recent months for its use of overseas factories, and her representatives have said she has the power to veto new deals.

Trump did not respond to requests for comment about what efforts she made to oversee her company’s supply chain before she joined the administration.

Her attorney Jamie Gorelick told The Post in a statement that Trump is “concerned” about recent reports regarding the treatment of factory workers and “expects that the company will respond appropriately.”

In the wake of Trump’s departure, the brand has begun to explore hiring a nonprofit workers’ rights group to increase oversight of its production and help improve factory conditions, the company’s executives told The Post.

Abigail Klem, who has been the brand’s president since 2013, said she is planning her first trip to tour some of the facilities that make Ivanka Trump products in the coming year.

Klem said she is confident that the company’s suppliers operate “at the highest standards,” adding, “Ivanka sought to partner with the best in the industry.”

The company had not yet matched the policies of other labels because it was newer and smaller, she added, but is now focusing on what more it can do.

“The mission of this brand has always been to inspire and empower women to create the lives they want to live and give them tools to do that,” Klem said. “We’re looking to ensure that we can sort of live this mission from top to bottom with our licensees, with our supply chain.”

The company still has no immediate plans to follow the emerging industry trend of publishing the names and locations of factories that produce its goods. It declined to provide a list of the facilities.

The Post used data drawn from U.S. customs logs and international shipping records to trace Trump-branded products from far-flung factories to ports around the United States. The Post also interviewed workers at three garment factories that have made Trump products who said their jobs often come with exhausting hours, subsistence pay and insults from supervisors if they don’t work fast enough.

“My monthly salary is not enough for everyday expenses, also not for the future,” said a 26-year-old sewing operator in Subang, Indonesia, who said she has helped make Trump dresses.

Like many U.S.-based apparel companies, the Trump brand signs deals with suppliers, which, in turn, contract manufacturing work to factories around the world. The system allows products to be sold to consumers for lower prices and creates economic opportunity — and risks — for workers in poor regions.

In China, where three activists investigating factories making her line were recently arrested, assembly-line workers produce Ivanka Trump woven blouses, shoes and handbags. Laborers in Indonesia stitch together her dresses and knit tops. Suit jackets are assembled in Vietnam, cotton tops in India and denim pants in Bangladesh — a country with a huge apparel industry where garment workers typically earn a minimum wage of about $70 a month and where some have recently faced a harsh crackdown from factory owners after seeking higher pay.

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And in Ethiopia, where manufacturers have boasted of paying workers a fifth of what they earn in Chinese factories, workers made thousands of pounds of Ivanka Trump-brand shoes in 2013, shipping data show.

Klem, the Trump brand president, said the company is exploring ways to produce some goods in the United States but that “to do it at a large scale is currently not possible.”

Klem spoke to The Post in the fashion line’s offices on the 23rd floor of Trump Tower, three floors below the headquarters of the Trump Organization. On a table next to her lay a copy of a 2016 Business of Fashion report, “Unravelling the Myth of ‘Made in America.’ ”

“The workers no longer exist here or only in very small, small capacity; the machinery in many instances does not exist here,” Klem said. “It is a very complex problem.”

Industry experts say about 97 percent of all clothing and shoes purchased in the United States is imported from countries where wages are lower and products can be made more cheaply.

If Ivanka Trump’s company followed the president’s exhortations to move production to the United States, its prices would rise dramatically, potentially pushing buyers away and dragging down company profits, according to industry experts.

The Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, a nonprofit organization, estimated in 2013 that a denim shirt that cost $3.72 to make in Bangladesh would cost more than three times as much to make in the United States.

Instead of pulling production back into the United States, the apparel industry has been focused on a different strategy: trying to reassure American consumers that their retail purchases are not the result of exploitation.

...

A wide range of clothing lines now inspect their own supply chains to make sure labor standards are met, the companies say. Among them is Levi Strauss, which, like Trump’s brand, licenses some of its production from a large New York-based clothing distributor called G-III Apparel.

A Levi spokeswoman told The Post that the company inspects its production facilities annually and has published factory information since 2005.

Many smaller brands turn to industry-backed groups, such as the Fair Labor Association or the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, to help address factory conditions and worker treatment.

Krochet Kids, which sells dresses for less than $60, includes clothing tags hand-signed by workers at its facilities in Uganda and Peru. Reformation, whose dress Trump wore to a recent congressional picnic, screens its overseas suppliers and recently moved to an expanded factory in downtown Los Angeles, where it offers guided tours.

“The questions today aren’t whether to engage in [monitoring factories], but whether to go beyond, all the way down to the cotton fields,” said Doug Cahn, a former Reebok executive who pioneered the development of corporate codes of conduct and now consults for brands and manufacturers.

The Trump company’s relatively passive approach is notable — as is its lack of participation in industry efforts to improve conditions for workers, according to labor advocates.

“I have been doing this stuff for 20 years, and I have never seen her brand in any of these venues,” said Judy Gearhart, executive director of the International Labor Rights Forum.

Klem said that “as a small, young brand, we did not have the chance to influence the debate around social compliance issues, but that has obviously changed during this past year.”

“We recognize that our brand name carries a special responsibility,” she added.

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The Ivanka brand: From glitzy jewelry to #WomenWhoWork

Ivanka Trump was a 26-year-old model and guest judge on her father’s reality show, “The Apprentice,” when she took on her first solo venture outside the family business: lending her name and creative energy to a Manhattan diamond boutique.

From the beginning, Trump said she envisioned Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry as a glitzy refuge for the upper crust. In a 2007 Arabian Business magazine profile, headlined “Daddy’s Girl,” Ivanka Trump said the jewelry, mostly priced between $5,000 and $50,000, would be marketed to ambitious, wealthy women who “have everything, yet . . . nothing to prove.”

Initially, Trump’s brand put an emphasis on sustainability. In 2011, her company introduced a short-lived bridal jewelry collection made from “eco-friendly” Canadian-mined diamonds and recycled platinum. The following year, entrepreneur Russell Simmons’ Diamond Empowerment Fund, a nonprofit organization that works to help educate youth in diamond-producing countries, gave her its “Newest and Brightest” award.

“It’s just good business to care about everyone involved in the various layers of production . . . especially when the end product is such a beautiful symbol of love,” Trump said, according to a news release by the group.

...

By then, she had started expanding into other products, eventually signing deals for clothes, shoes and handbags.

Shipping data show that tons of Ivanka Trump-brand shoes were rolling off factory production lines in Dongguan, the sprawling industrial city in southern China, and onto container ships with names such as APL Beijing and Hyundai Dynasty.

Trump’s clothing line — styled to sell an image of modern metropolitan glamour — quickly became the core of her business, with mid-market prices and an expanding collection of stylish pumps, off-the-shoulder tops and flower-print cocktail dresses.

In late 2012, Trump signed a deal with G-III, an established apparel group known for its work with Guess, Calvin Klein and celebrity brands such as Jessica Simpson. Trump’s collection flourished and, with it, production ramped up in G-III’s contract factories across China and Vietnam, according to shipping data.

In 2016, G-III told Forbes that the Ivanka Trump clothing line had generated $100 million in retail revenue in the past year.

Trump served as her company’s star marketer, wearing her brand’s nude heels and a $10,000 bracelet during photo shoots and TV interviews.

In last year’s presidential campaign, Trump took the opportunity to showcase her products on the national stage. After she paid tribute to her father at the Republican National Convention in one of her soft-pink sheath dresses, her social media team urged buyers to “shop Ivanka’s look,” and the $138 Chinese-made dress quickly sold out.

In the company’s Trump Tower headquarters, a staff of about 16 employees runs the Ivanka Trump design team, social media accounts and branding campaigns — including #WomenWhoWork, a movement-as-hashtag that emerged as the company’s driving motto.

Its marketing mixes promotions for evening bags with celebrations of female power. What was once advertised as trendy clothing for women in “the boardroom and beyond” has evolved into what IvankaTrump.com calls “a solution-oriented lifestyle brand, dedicated to the mission of inspiring and empowering women to create the lives they want to lead.”

In recent months, however, efforts to market the upbeat Ivanka Trump clothing brand have run headlong into the polarizing Trump political brand.

After Nordstrom dropped her line in February, citing low sales, the president complained on Twitter that his daughter had been “treated so unfairly,” and pro-Trump supporters rushed to buy her products. Presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway drew a rebuke from federal ethics officials for telling TV viewers, from the White House press room, to “go buy Ivanka’s stuff.”

Detractors of the president, meanwhile, have posted negative reviews of Ivanka Trump items online, needling her for relying on foreign labor.

Klem said the controversies have not hurt sales. She declined to disclose figures, but said that the brand’s business is “growing rapidly.” Revenue was up 21 percent in 2016, with continuing growth in 2017, executives said.

‘We are the ultra-poor’

In May, Lord & Taylor stores showcased the newest items in the Ivanka Trump denim collection: a series of indigo, white and pink pants retailing for $79. Affixed to each was a label brandishing the #WomenWhoWork slogan, featuring aspirational admonishments such as “Act purposefully” and “Invest in each other.”

The labels on the jeans show they were made for G-III Apparel in Bangladesh, whose garment industry has weathered a series of deadly factory disasters, including a 2013 building collapse that killed more than 1,100 workers. In the wake of that tragedy, Disney pulled its production out of the country, and brands such as Walmart and Gap vowed to pay for safety training for factory managers.

Shipping records do not reveal which factories in the country produce Ivanka Trump goods, and both the brand and G-III refused to say which facilities make her products.

G-III spokesman Chris Giglio said the company’s supply chain is “routinely audited by us and by independent third parties. When issues arise, we work with our local partners to find and implement safe, fair and sustainable solutions.”

Along with facing safety risks, Bangladeshi garment workers toil for one of the world’s lowest minimum wages.

“We are the ultra-poor,” said Kalpona Akter, a Bangladeshi labor organizer and former garment worker who was first hired by a factory at the age of 12. “We are making you beautiful, but we are starving.”

In December, thousands of workers seeking higher pay went on strike outside the capital city of Dhaka. In response, police rounded up and arrested several dozen labor organizers, and factory owners filed criminal complaints against hundreds of workers, according to Human Rights Watch. An estimated 1,500 garment workers were suspended or fired.

At a Dhaka apparel summit in February, U.S. Ambassador Marcia S. Bernicat described the mass firings and arrests as “a giant, disappointing step backwards on labor rights” and warned that international buyers “have to ask themselves how they will sell garments made in a country where large numbers of workers and union leaders are suddenly arrested, fired or suspended simply because they or their fellow workers asked for a wage increase.”

A number of apparel brands have called on factories to halt the worker crackdown. A spokesman for H&M told The Post that it has instructed Dhaka factory owners that the company will pull its business unless the factories reinstate the fired workers and drop the criminal complaints.

Trump’s brand and G-III have not publicly addressed the crackdown. Klem said that the company’s code of conduct gives workers in its supply chain “the right to freely associate in accordance with the laws of the countries in which they are employed.”

In recent years, hundreds of clothing lines and manufacturers have poured millions into financing safety improvements in garment factories through two major initiatives, the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh and the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, a group made up of 29 North American retailers.

Neither Trump’s company nor G-III Apparel has contributed to those efforts, according to program officials. But a factory used last year by a G-III subsidiary has benefited from the safety initiatives, according to U.S. customs records and Bangladeshi government reports.

The factory, That’s It Sports Wear Ltd., the site of a 2010 fire that killed 29 employees, worked with both programs to install fire doors, sprinklers and other safety improvements, records show. The Ha-Meem Group, which owns the factory, does not produce Ivanka Trump goods, the company’s chairman, A.K. Azad, told The Post.

Jessica Champagne, deputy director for field operations and strategy at the Worker Rights Consortium, an independent monitoring group, said that “any responsible brand sourcing from Bangladesh” should support the accord, adding that “failure to do so puts workers’ safety at risk.”

Klem said the company would consider doing so if its yet-to-be-hired workers rights consultant recommends such a move.

G-III did not respond to questions about why it does not participate in the factory improvement program. At a panel discussion last year, one of its executives noted that the distributor has a set of standards that its facilities must meet.

“We have a team on the ground running around every factory in Asia and visiting these factories and drilling it into their head what these requirements mean,” Adam Ziedenweber, G-III’s vice president of global sourcing compliance, said in the March 2016 event at the Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School.

But Ziedenweber, who did not respond to questions from The Post, also noted the challenge of keeping prices low while making investments in factories.

“You know, the retailers, the consumers aren’t asking for it,” he said. “None of the consumers say, ‘Well, this was made in a building that was going to fall down.’ ”

Unable to make ends meet

Financial insecurity is a constant companion for the predominantly female workforce at PT Buma, a factory in Indonesia’s West Java province that produced a batch of Ivanka-branded knit dresses that shipping records show arrived in Newark on Jan. 18, two days before Trump’s inauguration.

K., a 26-year-old sewing-machine operator, told The Post that she makes the equivalent of $173 a month, the region’s minimum wage. Her full name, like that of other workers, is being withheld by The Post because the workers fear being punished or fired for speaking to the media.

She said she spends $23 to rent her small studio in the bustling factory town of Subang, where she sleeps on a mattress on the floor and hangs her clothes from a string hung along the wall.

She saves the rest for her 2-year-old daughter but worries she will not be able to afford elementary school fees, which can cost as much as $225 a year.

With no child care, K. is forced to leave the toddler at home with her parents in their village, a journey of about 90 minutes away by motorbike across the rice fields. On the weekend, she joins an exodus of parents from Subang who clamber onto motorbikes and into shared vans, racing home for brief reunions.

“I really miss the moments when we play together,” K. said.

A 25-year-old woman said PT Buma hires her as a fabric cutter on a day-to-day basis, paying her a monthly salary that ranges between $68 to $135 for as much as 24 days of work — far below the region’s minimum wage and a rate that workers advocates say is probably a violation of local law.

The fabric cutter and her husband have to borrow money to cover their daily expenses and those of their 10-year-old son, who lives 45 minutes away with his grandmother. She sees him about once a month.

Their possessions consist of her husband’s motorbike and their clothes. “I have nothing,” she said.

Inside the factory, workers said supervisors berate employees if they fall behind their targets or if stitches need to be redone. “Work faster, these clothes are urgent,” one 30-year-old employee said she was told. “Why do you work slow?”

PT Buma participates in Better Work, an international program to improve garment industry conditions, according to the Better Work website.

A PT Buma representative who declined to give his name said the factory no longer produces Ivanka Trump clothing. He said the company refused to answer any more questions and abruptly ended the call.

When asked about the working environment at PT Buma, Klem said in a statement that the brand hopes to develop programs to support the “thousands of women” in its supply chain.

For K., the dresses she has helped produce — which retail for as much as $138 — seem as out of reach as the daughter of the U.S. president herself, whose name the worker said she now wishes she had chosen for her own little girl.

“Ivanka clothes are beautiful, expensive, sexy — just perfect,” she said.

Fear of retaliation

The dangers to workers who try to seek better labor conditions are especially acute in China, where activists say heavy surveillance and police presences are used to protect company profits and the country’s lucrative reputation as the “factory of the world.”

Ivanka Trump’s products have been made in more than two dozen factories across China since 2010, shipping data show.

Yen Sheng, a Hong Kong-based company with factories in Dongguan where workers are paid between $190 and $289 a month, has shipped thousands of pounds of Ivanka Trump cowhide-leather handbags and other items since 2015, customs records show.

Employees in Dongguan told The Post that the company withholds sick pay unless they are hospitalized and avoids paying overtime by outsourcing work to the unregulated one-room factories that dot Dongguan’s back streets. But pressing for change is not an option, they said.

“If you don’t work, other people will,” one woman at the company’s Dongguan subsidiary Yen Hing Leather Works said. “If you protest, the company will ask the police to handle it. The owner is very rich. He can ask the police to come.”

Trump brand executives said its products are not made at Yen Hing. A manager at the Dongguan factory, Huang Huihong, told The Post that its workers have produced Ivanka Trump goods in the past.

Officials at Yen Hing denied the workers’ allegations, saying they “strictly follow the laws in our business operation.” Mondani, the Trump brand’s handbag supplier, did not respond to requests for comment.

The work conditions at Chinese factories that make Trump’s products have gained public attention in recent weeks after the detentions of three activists from a group called China Labor Watch who were investigating the facilities. The group said it found evidence at one facility of laborers working 18-hour days and enduring verbal abuse from managers, allegations that the Chinese factory denied.

Chinese authorities accused the activists of using illegal surveillance equipment and suggested they might have been selling commercial secrets to foreign entities. They were released on bail in late June. A trial is pending.

The State Department denounced the arrests, saying that labor rights activists “have been instrumental in helping . . . American companies understand the conditions involving their supply chains.”

Li Qiang, the group’s executive director, said it had never faced such police pressure in nearly two decades of experience investigating factories and said he believes this case was handled differently because “this is Ivanka Trump’s factory.”

Hua Haifeng, one of the detained activists, told The Post after his release, “The first question the police asked was to the effect of ‘whether you know it’s Ivanka Trump’s factory and then came here to investigate.’ ” Local police officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Li’s group says it has sent four letters since April to Ivanka Trump at the White House detailing the working conditions in the factory and asking for her to advocate for their colleagues.

Deng Guilian, Hua’s wife, also pleaded with Trump to intervene, telling The Post, “For her, it’s just a matter of a few words, but those few words would save the entire family.”

...

I have a question for FJers who have worked at Marshalls and similar stores. If I was to buy a $69 blouse at Lord & Taylor, Ivanka would get {set percentage} as profit. But what if I bought that same blouse at Marshall's for $29.99? How would she profit from that transaction?

July 14, 2017

I forget who wrote the article but it was about how Ivanka's "women advocacy" is going down the train as Russia and her practices intensify and I was like WHAT ADVOCACY DOES SHE DO FOR WOMEN?!

July 14, 2017

48 minutes ago, JMarie said:

I have a question for FJers who have worked at Marshalls and similar stores. If I was to buy a $69 blouse at Lord & Taylor, Ivanka would get {set percentage} as profit. But what if I bought that same blouse at Marshall's for $29.99? How would she profit from that transaction?

How much of a markup is the item selling at? That is the key. She would get a profit on anything above the cost to create the blouse. The lower the selling price, the lower the profit. And Marshalls or the Rack clearance is the story trying to minimize the loss at some price point. Say $20 or $15

July 15, 2017

22 hours ago, GrumpyGran said:

And Jared doesn't know who Icarus is. First-class education, pfft, they got their first-class education the same way you get a first-class seat on an airplane-$$$$$$$$.

I thought the same thing when I read the statement from Kissinger. Yes, on paper they appear to have first class educations, but I seriously doubt either of them really hit the books. I agree, they got their educations just like daddy Trump did, they bought them!

July 15, 2017

18 minutes ago, AuntK said:

I thought the same thing when I read the statement from Kissinger. Yes, on paper they appear to have first class educations, but I seriously doubt either of them really hit the books. I agree, they got their educations just like daddy Trump did, they bought them!

Charles Kushner had to donate 2.5 million to Harvard in order for his fail-son to get in. His high school described him as a "less than stellar student"

Quote

“There was no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard,” a former official at The Frisch School in Paramus, New Jersey, told me. “His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it. We thought for sure, there was no way this was going to happen. Then, lo and behold, Jared was accepted. It was a little bit disappointing because there were at the time other kids we thought should really get in on the merits, and they did not.”

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