I’m sure you’ve heard the good news that we won’t have Ivanka Trump’s “fashion brand” to kick around anymore.
According to Trump, she’s just so involved in Washington politics that she can’t give the company the love it deserves. This is odd in a couple of ways. One is that she hasn’t been running the company since her father became president due to conflicts of interest. (Or rather: the public backlash that she could expect from exactly the demographic she was trying to sell to.)
The other odd thing is that I don’t know what she’s been doing in Washington. She was supposed to be moderating her father. Well, that didn’t work out very well. And then she just vanished. So anything she’s doing in Washington, you can bet it is — at base — lobbying to make the Trump family fortune bigger.
Did Ivanka Trump Create Fashionable Clothing?
But as I was reading up on this, I came upon a great article in The Guardian from a year and a half ago, Is Ivanka Trump’s Fashion Line Any Good? It’s written by Hannah Marriott, the Fashion Editor of the paper.
The article was written shortly after Nordstrom and other retailers dropped Ivanka Trump from their stores. Daddy Trump and the rest of the right wing claimed it was all about politics. Nordstrom said her stuff just wasn’t selling well. But Marriott had a different idea: the Ivanka Trump line just wasn’t very good. She wrote, “The collection shows a talent for taking the temperature of what was happening in design five years ago…”
Another Opinion
Everyone who knows me, knows what a fashion maven I am not. Other than underwear and socks, I do not believe I have a single piece of clothing that was not given to me. People are always trying to improve me. (You really would think that after all this time, they would have given up.)
But Marriott is not the only person to say that the Ivanka Trump clothing line was not up to snuff. Caille Millner at The San Francisco Chronicle wrote, Why Ivanka Trump Really Shut Down Her Line of Clothing. In the article, she goes in search of Ivanka Trump clothing in local stores and finds them decidedly not good choices for the people they were meant to appeal to. She concludes, “I point to this shopping excursion because, ultimately, I think the products are what sunk Ivanka Trump.”
I looked for glowing reviews of the Ivanka Trump line and I did not find any. So with these two opinions combined with the fact that Daddy Trump has never put out anything good, I think it’s safe to say that Ivanka Trump’s clothing line (or fashion brand or whatever the hell you want to call it) sucked.
Why Did This Expensive Crap Get Stocked?
My question is: why did Nordstrom carry what was clearly an expensive line with mediocre quality and design? That’s pretty much a rhetorical question. I think most people around here already know the answer: the Trump name. It doesn’t matter how many times Daddy Trump failed, corporate America is always willing to give him or his equally evil but more polished offspring another chance.
It reminds me of the days when I worked in corporate America. As a whole, management were the biggest marks for con artists. I’ve sat in on interviews with people who were clearly unqualified for the jobs they were applying for. The regular employees could spot the con in an instant. The managers were usually blown away. I think it’s because managers value style over substance. Workers have to actually produce something.
But imagine after Trump is out of the White House and a Democrat is in there cleaning up the huge mess from years of Republican rule (this time, the Democratic president really will need to go on an apology tour — not just in the fevered imaginations of Fox News hosts and watchers). I’m sure that Ivanka Trump will reintroduce her new clothing brand.
And Nordstrom will stock it, again! When it comes to a Trump, corporate America can’t be fooled enough.
The Rich Aren’t Allowed to Fail in America
Of course, this is generally true of the rich in modern America. You just can’t screw up enough so that you won’t be given another chance — another loan you won’t be able to pay back — another high-paying job you aren’t qualified for.
But the Poor Are
If you are not rich, well, roll the dice! If you screw up, there will be no one to catch you if you fall.
It’s funny. I remember all through the 2012 presidential campaign hearing about how important it was to reward “risk takers.” But the fact is that the rich in this country aren’t really taking risks. When a worker takes all their savings to start a small business, they are laying it on the line. Not so for the rich, even if they lose all their money. That’s because all their rich friends will lift them back up.
A regular American can hope at best that when their business fails, the economy isn’t too bad and they can get a job.
A Rose by Any Other Name?
One thing’s for certain: if some nobody came out with Ivanka Trump’s products, Nordstrom would never have stocked it in the first place.
This is a thing I wanted to do an article about, but I couldn’t figure out to make it less than 10000 words. You did. Kudos, sir.
I’m not entirely sure why people believe in rank bullshit. I’ve been trying to figure this out for 30 years, and I’m only about 10% there.
What’s astonishing is how many people buy into a social system that rewards very few, but is awesome if you hit all cherries on the slot machine. It’s nonsense and nobody should remotely be fooled. But we is, ain’t we?
The strange thing is that it is social and not biological. Archeology has shown that before the Neolithic Revolution, there wasn’t much in terms of hierarchy. It was when “society” was created that people figured out ways of separating people into the aristocrats (at first kings and clergy) and the prols. And then there has always been that small “liberal class” in between to make sure the aristocrats weren’t so awful that the prols realized that they had power and stormed the gates.
So it’s all made up. Most Americans really do think we live in a meritocracy (such a thing is impossible, but that’s another matter — and it is an immoral idea anyway) despite the fact that the richest family in America inherited all its money. Yeah, I guess I should have done more research before deciding to be my mother’s child!
I get that the rich buy into this bullshit. I don’t get why the vast majority of working class people do.
Because capitalism can never be questioned. We can acknowledge that societal ills exist, but we can never acknowledge their primary cause, which is pure greed.
Supposedly, after “The Jungle” came out, and resulted in food safety reforms, Uptown Sinclair said “I aimed for America’s heart and hit them in the stomach.” The point of his book was to describe abhorrent working conditions; what people took from it was food should be less gross, not that food workers should suffer less. (They’re often not much better off today.)
And Dr. Noam has spent his whole career explaining why this is. If you aren’t joining with others, if you feel like you’re facing an unkind world alone, it’s easy to believe incessantly-sold myths which serve the powerful.
I was reading James Loewen about this the other day. His point wasn’t just that history books have inaccuracies in them, but that the whole way we think of history is wrong. If it’s just “this happened” followed by “that happened” then there’s no causality, no explanation why things happened. (Usually, because groups contesting for power or justice made them happen.) I mean, you can look up a historical event on Wikipedia, and the dates/names are probably 99% correct. But it doesn’t tell you much about why.
I hated history when I was in primary school because that was how it was taught: a bunch of facts to memorize. At the same time, since about 3-years-old, I have been a story junkie. (This is a big part of my plays: I would usually rather hear someone tell a story well than see it rendered.) So history should have been a great love. Because that’s what history is. Historians may fight over exactly how the story is rightly told, but they all work with causation — an essential element of any good story.
I’ve come to see that humans are inherently hierarchical. There are some of us who aren’t — who live by “neither a leader nor a follower be — at least as much as you can while staying out of prison and paying the rent.” (At our last Toastmasters meeting, I was given the question, “What is the first thing you would do if you were president?” I said, “Resign.” Then I paused for laughs and went into more detail because I had to do 1-2 minutes. But it is true. I can’t think of a job I’m worse suited for.)
But most people are hierarchically-inclined. (Ha! That’s a bit of a pun!) So we must set up a society in which those at the top can’t be materially that much better off than those at the bottom. We could, for example, simply say that the federal income tax is 100 percent on incomes over $1 million and we could create a 100 percent wealth tax on wealth over $5 million. (I’m up for far lower numbers; I’m being really kind to the rich assholes here.)
Conservatives and neo-liberals will say this will harm the economy and we’ll be living in grass huts. I think the opposite is true. Instead of there being a small number of hugely wealthy people, there would be far more people (with more actual diversity) who are simply well-off. And if conservatives really want people to be entrepreneurial, let everyone know that they can take risks and not have to worry about losing they homes, healthcare, and ultimately, lives. I feel like I’m being wasted by society. The truth is that I should be working with Mikhail on his invention. But neither of us is because we are forced to make money, even though the society would be far better off in the long-term letting us do this. But instead, we are underutilized so that rich people can become even richer. This is a silly way to structure a society.
By the way, this is a very good video — by a guy who is not a socialist: