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      in World Politics

      Land Reform Can Transform India’s Economy

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      According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, India faces a serious decline in employment due to the COVID-19 crisis. An estimated 122 million people lost their jobs during the first quarter of 2020. Streams of migrant workers returned to their villages — often the only fallback option for the millions working in urban informal sectors. Regardless of their vows to never come back to the cities, the majority of them will likely have to return in order to earn their livelihood. In the present state of affairs, agriculture, the mainstay of rural India, cannot offer them incomes comparable to industries and construction firms in cities.

      360˚ Context: The State of the Indian Republic

      READ MORE

      Despite its falling share in the economy, agriculture is India’s most important sector. Its contribution to the country’s GDP has decreased from 51.81% in 1950-51 to 15.87% in 2018-19, but it still employs about 42% of the country’s workforce. While increasing shares of secondary and tertiary sectors is a natural phenomenon of economic growth, in India, this has happened without maximizing the potential for growth in agriculture. Per-acre yields of rice and wheat in India are drastically lower than those of other BRICS nations.

      The shift in GDP share is the result of high growth rates in secondary and tertiary sectors despite relative stagnation in agriculture. The agricultural sector still has a massive scope to generate greater income and employment. However, this can be done only with the spirit of liberalization, similar to what other sectors of the economy have received since the 1990s.

      Overregulation and Underutilization

      Soon after independence, land reform laws were enacted throughout the country with the objective of distributing land equitably and increasing the efficiency of farm operations. This produced only partial success due to a variety of reasons. The ownership of only 4% of operated land could be transferred to cultivators, 97% of which lies in just seven states — Assam, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra and West Bengal. Notwithstanding this uninspiring outcome, land reform laws foisted excessive restrictions on the tenancy of agricultural land.

      This has adversely affected the growth of agriculture in the country. Landowners are reluctant to lease out their land under formal tenancy due to their fear of losing it permanently. According to National Sample Survey Reports, about 15 million tenants cultivate 10 million hectares of land on an informal basis; 92% of these tenants are landless laborers or marginal farmers. They have no security of tenure or access to institutional credit, crop insurance and other benefits offered to farmers under government schemes. Due to legal restrictions on tenancy, many landowners who cannot cultivate themselves prefer to leave their land fallow. In 2015-16, 26.72 million hectares of land were left fallow across India.

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      These restrictions on access to cultivable land not only deprive poor people in rural areas of opportunities to enhance their incomes, but also have a detrimental effect on the growth of the entire agriculture sector. Simply formalizing tenancy and cultivating millions hectares of fallow land can be a game-changer for agriculture in India. Once tenants get security of tenure and access to institutional credit, they will have requisite incentives and funds to make long-term investments on their land.

      This can be achieved only with immediate and effective policy interventions by state governments. The National Institution for Transforming India, the premier policy think tank of the government of India, has set the ball rolling by publishing the Model Agricultural Land Leasing Act, 2016, to help the states enact new laws or make required changes to their existing laws on the tenancy. The Model Act seeks to formalize tenancy agreements, circumventing the restrictions imposed by the land-reform laws of the state. It aims to integrate the security of tenure along with the protection of ownership. However, until now, only a few states have gone ahead in this direction.

      Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Madhya Pradesh have amended their existing laws to allow the renting of agricultural land on liberal terms. The Maharashtra Agricultural Land Leasing Bill, 2017, now awaits the assent of the president of India. The Andhra Pradesh Land Licensed Cultivators Act, 2011, was enacted even before the Model Act of 2016 was framed. This special law has recently been replaced with the Andhra Pradesh Crop Cultivator Rights Act, 2019. The other states also need to implement this vital reform to transform agriculture in their states.

      Alternate Solutions

      The enactment or amendment of laws is only a first step in improving the access of the rural poor to the land. Even in states where these laws have been enacted, very few landowners and tenants have come forward to enter formal agreements. Landowners are still apprehensive of losing their land, and tenants are still afraid of getting ousted if they insist on formal agreements. Therefore, state governments also need to effectively communicate with tenants and landowners to allay their fears and convey the benefits of formal agreements to them.

      Until the time when requisite laws are enacted effectively, group loans can provide relief to informal tenants. In Kerala, where tenancy is illegal, about 250,000 informal tenants have organized themselves into joint liability groups. These groups receive crop loans from banks without requiring formal tenancy agreements. The guidelines of the Reserve Bank of India and the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development allow such agreements without requiring formal tenancy. Alternatively, Odisha has recently launched the Balaram scheme to provide agricultural credit to groups of landless laborers. Other states should also liaise with banks to provide credit to informal tenants until the time when legal provisions for allowing tenancy are put in place.

      Such reforms have enormous potential to revamp and develop Indian agriculture, especially during the ongoing economic turmoil. At the national level, the central government has shown the way forward by deregulating agricultural markets. Now it is time for states to act decisively.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Joe Biden's cabinet picks: what we've learned from his choices so far

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      On Tuesday, Joe Biden formally introduced his first slate of picks for cabinet posts.
      One Senate Republican said Biden’s choices “went to Ivy League schools, have strong resumés, attend all the right conferences and will be polite and orderly caretakers of America’s decline”.
      Another scoffed that the list of names resembled a guest list for a “Georgetown dinner”.
      But most, less partial, observers agreed that after four years of chaos under Donald Trump, himself a self-proclaimed outsider, a dose of insider knowledge and institutional stability might be just what Washington needs.
      Here are five things we’ve learned so far about Biden’s choices.
      Experience counts…
      “If not household names,” the Washington Post opined, “Biden’s picks are steeped in the ways” of the capital, knowing the place as Donald Trump’s collection of political allies, businessmen, donors, grifters, gadflies and relatives did not.
      Secretary of state nominee Tony Blinken, for example, worked for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and for Biden when he was Obama’s vice-president. Janet Yellen, now heading for the treasury, was chair of the Federal Reserve. John Kerry, the climate envoy, was a Massachusetts senator for 28 years, ran for president in 2004 and was secretary of state in Obama’s second term.
      Nor are those named for less prominent positions callow or untried. National security adviser pick Jake Sullivan is “only” 43 years old but he worked for Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state and for Biden when he was VP. Avril Haines, named director of national intelligence, is a former deputy chief of the CIA, deputy national security adviser and deputy chief counsel to Senate Democrats.
      …but so does having worked for Obama
      Experience can also bring baggage. Biden worked for the 44th president and so did many of his hires, to the extent, Politico reported on Tuesday, that some who worked on the Biden campaign this time round are feeling a little cheesed off.
      “The Obama staffers are now cutting out the people who got Biden elected,” the website quoted a senior Biden official as saying. “None of these people found the courage to help the vice-president when he was running and now they are elevating their friends over the Biden people. It’s fucked up.”
      Another Biden adviser who worked on the campaign, Politico said, called that criticism “very valid”.
      Big positions, among them secretary of defense and attorney general, remain to be filled. Contrary to many progressive dreams, they will not be filled by Obama himself. Promoting his memoir, the former president has ruled out taking any role under Biden. If he did, he says, his wife Michelle would leave him.
      Internationalism is back
      One potentially positive side of a reliance on Obama alumni is to be found in the fact that Obama was a world president, intent on strong relationships with allies as well as engagement with traditional foes, an approach far removed from Trump’s attacks on America’s friends and alarming habit of cosying up to dictators. In short, the likes of Blinken, Yellen and Kerry already have strong relations with government leaders and officials in the international centre who are desperate for a reset.
      “Tony Blinken’s ties to Europe are lifelong, deep and personal,” Politico Europe wrote on Tuesday, discussing his near-flawless French, past life in Paris, skepticism about Brexit and status as “a fierce believer in the transatlantic alliance”.
      “On every major foreign policy issue – terrorism, climate, pandemics, trade, China, the Iran nuclear deal – he has a recurring mantra: the US should work with its allies and within international treaties and organisations.”
      Diversity matters …
      The Post called Biden’s win “something akin to the revenge of the Washington establishment”, but the Democrat has so far also lived up to his promise to name an administration which reflects American diversity far more strongly than Trump’s did. More

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      in Elections

      Biden will have the presidency. But Republicans still have the power | Adam Tooze

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      President Trump’s efforts to overturn the outcome of the 3 November election, which appear to be over, provided his opponents with a source of sadistic amusement. Trump’s self-humiliation in the eyes of the liberal world is complete. To his followers, of course, the fight goes on. And his Republican colleagues have reason to be cheerful. We should not allow the schadenfreude to distract us from this basic fact. Yes, Biden defeated Trump. But in that same election the Democrats failed to gain the majority of seats that the new president needs to actually put an end to the era of Republican dominance. Things might still go right in Georgia, but that would leave the Senate hanging by a thread.Four times, at moments of historic crisis, the US electorate has handed the White House to a Democrat – 1916, 1932, 2008 and 2020. But this year is the first time it has done so without also handing the Democrats a clear majority in Congress. The basic difference between Biden and his predecessors is that he lacks a solid political basis from which to wield power.The details of state-level politics across the US may seem pettifogging. What is a Senate runoff in Georgia compared to a global pandemic, or the challenge of the rise of China? This incommensurability is jarring, but it is what defines the US as a democratic superpower. The scale of the US economy, its fiscal capacity and military might make it the most powerful state on the planet. But who controls that power depends on fickle and often trivial whims of local political circumstance and on the infighting between the divided branches of US government.America’s rise to global power occurred in a crucial 20-year period between 1932 and 1952 in which, except for a brief two-year hiatus, the Democratic party controlled both the White House and Congress. That dominance defined a new image of the US as a driver of global progress, but that external face was founded at home on an incongruous coalition in which the “solid South” provided the necessary votes in Congress. Jim Crow segregation was the price. The Democrats remained the dominant power in Congress through the early 1990s, but there was never to be another period quite like the mid-century decades. More

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      in World Politics

      Not All Quiet on the Western Sahara Front

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      On October 21, groups of Polisario Front’s supporters blocked the highway at Guergarat, in the extreme southwest of the Western Sahara. This is in the buffer zone between territory controlled by Morocco and the land claimed by the Polisario — the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro, the rebel movement fighting for the independence of the former Spanish territory of Western Sahara, now under Rabat’s control — effectively blocking transportation between Morocco, Mauritania and countries further south. Moroccan troops responded quickly and cleared the road so that more than 100 trucks could resume carrying goods. The Polisario claimed no knowledge of the action and labeled Morocco’s response as an “act of war.”

      The Sahrawis: Obstacles to Self-Determination

      READ MORE

      What happens next could determine the fate of the 29-year-old ceasefire that marked the cessation of hostilities and the beginning of UN efforts to resolve the status of the territory that Morocco claims is part of its kingdom. While Rabat has offered broad autonomy to the region under its sovereignty, the Polisario Front and its backer, Algeria, are demanding a referendum that the UN Security Council dropped from its agenda in 2007 after multiple failed attempts at compiling a mutually agreed voter list stymied any credibility for that option.

      So far, 16 African countries, the UAE and Jordan have opened consulates in the region, providing Morocco with crucial international support for its territorial claims. As per Al Jazeera, “The strategy has been effective: Out of 84 countries that previously recognized the Polisario, 44 recently rescinded their support and recognition.”

      Tension Builds

      Morocco described the blocking of the road by Polisario supporters, allegedly backed by armed fighters, as a breach of the ceasefire. The Polisario said the Moroccan army’s entry into the buffer zone had fatally undermined the ceasefire. And so the tension builds. Behind it are lingering questions of why (and why now), of what the end game is, and of why Algeria and the Polisario are of one mind on this latest conflict?

      Embed from Getty Images

      The UN is now on alert despite the lack of a special envoy to monitor the crisis after the previous representative resigned last year due to health issues. The African Union has also indicated its concern, although it has not proposed a concrete intervention. Among the Arab states, only Algeria condemned Morocco’s reaction to the blockade. The war of words continues.

      For years, supporters on both sides have indicated displeasure at the lack of formal and realistic negotiations between the parties. Morocco has garnered broad international support for its autonomy proposal, which has been called “serious and credible” by the US and many others. While in the Polisario camp, its youth are becoming increasingly restive at the lack of more aggressive action by the leadership to change the status quo and push for independence or something more acceptable than the present doldrums.

      To some analysts, this is what lies at the core of the current tension — actions by a small group of unhappy camp-dwellers, fed up with the cronyism and corruption of the leadership. The Polisario Front and Algeria had no option but to follow behind this tiny minority as neither has a better alternative other than engaging in negotiations. The status quo has many benefits regionally and internationally. First of all, Algeria, which is in a serious domestic crisis with its own people and competing leadership cadres, sees this as a way to help relieve some of the dissonance at home. However, this does not seem to be working as there have been no public expressions of support for the Polisario’s announced withdrawal from the ceasefire.

      Similarly, the Polisario elite, who have refined their autocratic leadership and kleptomania for more than four decades, cannot allow the dissidents to draw them into a war that they are neither prepared for nor capable of carrying out effectively. Morocco benefits from the perception that the Polisario — and, by inference, Algeria — are more interested in fomenting instability in a critical region where terrorism in the neighboring Sahel is of concern rather than in engaging in formal negotiations to resolve the conflict.

      The UN, the United States and France, the major international players at the scene, would be happy with the former status quo as it relieved parties of using diplomatic leverage to move the combatants to proactively engage in peaceful steps for conflict resolution. It has become increasingly obvious that the modus operandi here goes along the lines that if no crisis exists, there is no point in starting something that no one wants to intervene in. In his statement, UN Secretary-General António Guterres voiced “grave concerns” surrounding the most recent developments in Western Sahara, warning against “violations of the ceasefire and the serious consequences of any changes to the status quo.”

      No Simple Way

      There is no simple way forward or return to the status quo without Algeria facing up to its role in sponsoring the Polisario Front for over 40 years and enabling some kind of diplomatic movement. In the words of the Organization for World Peace, “As the Polisario’s main backer, Algeria has a responsibility to prevent this situation from escalating or being manipulated by other organizations. Working with Morocco, both sides should encourage a peaceful de-escalation of the current violent rhetoric in order to prevent the conflict from reigniting.”

      Similarly, Morocco should take no action beyond its setting up a military outpost in the buffer zone until the Polisario Front returns to the ceasefire agreement. It should also work with the UN to restart formal and comprehensive negotiations on its autonomy proposal. Algeria cannot, for its own domestic reasons, escalate military threats that destabilize the area. It should work to calm the situation so that it can more effectively mediate its own Hirak movement going on now for more than a year.

      Finally, the incoming Biden administration in Washington — quite familiar with the Western Sahara as it is comprised of many members of the Obama administration, which was a strong supporter of delaying any proactive US push to resolve the conflict — should understand the larger potential disaster if regional destabilization accelerates, terrorist cells expand from ungoverned spaces, and other players agitate for their own interests in the area. This is not the best scenario for starting out the new US administration’s North Africa strategy.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      Yuval Harari Conspires to Dismiss Conspiracy Theory

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      In an opinion piece for The New York Times, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari attempts to clear up our thinking about conspiracy theories, a major feature of modern political culture, which, like so many others, has been aggravated and blown out of proportion by the advent of social media.

      Instead of tracing the complex history of conspiracy theory and its various components, as Harari did for human knowledge itself in his best-selling book, “Sapiens,” he focuses on one particular aspect of it, which he calls “global cabal theory.” More precisely, he defines this as a particular type of theory that depends on the belief in “a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together.”

      Can Joe Biden Rewrite the Rules of the Road?

      READ MORE

      In limiting the discussion to the idea of global all-powerful cabals, he neglects the most common and confusing use of the conspiracy theory meme, which has been popularized by media personalities as diverse as Alex Jones, Rachel Maddow and even European leaders such as Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron.

      Jones has built a business out of finding or inventing conspiracies that enable him to present alternative explanations of news stories that result in some form of a catastrophe or public tragedy. It functions like the improvised American religions set up to extract money from people seeking to believe a narrative concocted by a charismatic preacher with a divine channel toward understanding the ways evil functions in the world.

      Establishment Democrats in the media, especially those who work for MSNBC, have been running a conspiracy theory show for the past four years, led by Rachel Maddow. It draws its strength from the obvious fact that US President Donald Trump is an inveterate liar. This means that anything Trump denies may actually be true, including the idea invented to explain away Hillary Clinton’s ignominious defeat to a charlatan politician that could only be explained by collusion between the 2016 Trump election campaign and Russia’s Vladimir Putin in person.

      Johnson’s stab at conspiracy theory in early 2019, months before he secured the serious and sobering responsibilities of prime minister in the UK, was simply part of his fanciful discourse defending the incontrovertible “truth” of Brexit. Worried at the time that Parliament might find the means of canceling the sacred result of the 2016 referendum to leave the European Union, he blurted out: “I think that people will feel betrayed. And I think they will feel that there has been a great conspiracy by the deep state of the UK, the people who really run the country, to overturn the verdict of the people.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Conspiracy:

      Any coordinated activity by a group of people that produces an outcome disagreeable to the speaker

      Contextual Note

      Harari’s piece is puzzling. It leaves the reader wondering about his intent as well as why The New York Times chose to publish it. His point seems to be we must never take conspiracy theories seriously because they can’t be true. But this contradicts his explicit assertion that conspiracies do exist: “There are, of course, many real conspiracies in the world.” This is nothing more than the truism that people do conspire for a lot of different reasons.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Instead of citing some of these and exploring how they work and why they occur, he dismisses these very real conspiracies with the following reasoning: “Sometimes a corporation, a political party or a dictatorship does manage to gather a significant part of all the world’s power into its hands. But when such a thing happens, it’s almost impossible to keep it hush-hush.”

      Harari seems to be saying that a global cabal theory can’t be true because at some point the truth will spill out, for the simple reason that some people are chattier than others. To make his case convincing, he had to fabricate a straw man hypothesis that supposes the existence of a conspiratorial system with the capacity “to puppet master nearly eight billion” individuals. Because that sounds impossible, the idea must be false.

      There are several problems with this reasoning. The first is that effective conspiracies do not require 100% secrecy. The “Omertà” system of the Mafia — the law of silence — actually does attain close to 100% obedience from its members. Its perfect record is sometimes broken not because of disobedience but due to the existence of a higher authority, the law itself, that sometimes captures a potential squealer. But in a conspiracy that controls the law itself, no higher authority exists to induce the confession of a rat. No logical reason exists why such a conspiracy couldn’t exist. There is even historical evidence that such conspiracies have existed.

      In today’s world, an effective conspiracy with potentially global reach can, without compromise, allow squealers to emerge publicly, simply because it knows how to control the media and the news. Powerful systems of government easily undermine the credibility not only of eventual rats but also of dissidents and objective investigators, those who have effectively seen through the facade. This has never been easier than in this era of “alternative facts.”

      Historical Note

      The assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Senator Robert Kennedy, in the 1960s have both produced numerous and sometimes conflicting conspiracy theories. Any of those theories may be mistaken in its details because so much has been so carefully hidden. But that doesn’t mean there was no conspiracy. It simply means that no single theory may tell the complete truth. But in both of those historical cases, there have been witnesses and even insiders who have blurted out facts at odds with the official narrative. For a logician, this means that the official narrative is just one more competing conspiracy theory.

      Thanks to the ability of the operatives of any true modern conspiracy to manage the media, none of this contradictory testimony, credible or not, ever achieves the status of courtroom truth. The established media understands that it can be harmful to their reputation for seriousness to give too much credence to anything that can be branded a “conspiracy theory,” even if it is the result of serious investigative reporting. It is all part of the now well-honed skill set described by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky: manufacturing consent.

      Yuval Noah Harari has no time for Chomsky’s analysis of complexity. He concludes on this upbeat note: “Realizing that no single cabal can secretly control the entire world is not just accurate — it is also empowering. It means that you can identify the competing factions in our world, and ally yourself with some groups against others. That’s what real politics is all about.”

      The New York Times has every reason to frown upon conspiracy theories. More than ever, The Times has become an organ of the establishment whose essential role is to manufacture consent for the dominant power structure that functions at the cultural level like a cabal but at the pragmatic level like an ordinary competitor in a wide-open commercial game. By failing to distinguish between those two functions — the pursuit of business interests and the construction of a common culture with shared symbols and rules — Harari ends up trivializing the very idea of conspiracy, hiding its cultural reality.

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      Does that mean Harari is a complicit member of a conspiracy in which The New York Times plays a crucial role? Like anything that concerns conspiracies, the answer can only be both yes and no. Conspiracies are essentially elaborate games played according to a set of rules that everyone recognizes but only a few on the margins even try to understand. Once the game is underway, everyone agrees that the players’ action must be motivated by their shared consent to achieve something within the rules.

      Thinkers like Harari and the stable of editorialists at The New York Times are there to tell us a simple message: Learn the rules so that you can play the game. And, especially, don’t get distracted by the meaning of the rules. Harari makes this absolutely clear when he says that everyone’s task is to join their preferred teams. But team members don’t just “ally” out of self-interest. They identify with the team they join. That is how the team achieves the optimal level of consent that makes it competitive.

      For Harari, that game logic defines politics. But politics plays a dual role. It defines culture and is defined by it. In the end, culture is the true cabal.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Will New York's elite give Ivanka and Jared a warm welcome or the cold shoulder?

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      In the purgatory of Donald Trump’s unacknowledged election defeat, the knives are out for Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump who, like dozens of other lesser-placed Trump acolytes, may be looking to return to New York, a city that the lame-duck president calls an “anarchic jurisdiction”.
      The reception they will receive, judging from the city’s press commentary, could be brutal.
      “They are the Faustian poster couple of the Trump presidency, the king and queen of the principle-torching prom at which so many danced alongside them, although in less exquisitely tailored attire,” wrote Frank Bruni in the New York Times this week.
      Posing a question broadly to what he called “the whole shockingly populous court of collaborators”, Bruno addressed the couple directly: “Tell me, Jared. Be honest, Ivanka. Was it worth it?”
      The answer, of course, is one for the couple alone to answer. But that hasn’t stopped others from offering their thoughts. “I see them as Glenn Close at the end of Dangerous Liaisons, with the entire opera house jeering,” says Jill Kargman, creator and star of Odd Mom Out, a highly praised TV comedy that skewered the Ivanka-style perfectionism of Upper East Side mothers.
      Andrea Bernstein, a WNYC investigative reporter and author of American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power, says it’s not clear that they plan to return to New York, since the Kushner family real estate empire is now focused in the mid-Atlantic states and his wife no longer runs a fashion accessories business.
      Moreover, Bernstein points out, twin New York city and state investigations into Ivanka’s $780,000 in Azerbaijani consulting fees, the on-the-record skewering by former Manhattan friends and increased politicization (she joined the rightwing chat site Parler this week) suggest Democratic New York may not be an optimal place to relocate.
      “I don’t see any indication they are coming back or would be welcome back here,” Bernstein says. “The investigations are a symbol of the problems the family could face back in New York, while the article in Vanity Fair was interesting not for what it said, but that the author said it so publicly.”
      If they do return, they will probably arrive in New York during another period of Covid restrictions. Restaurants are limited to 25% capacity and four per table, the charity and museum gala circuit upon which New York society revolves is on pause, and so opportunities to express the chill of social ostracism may be limited.
      “They’ll have to come back to Republican New York because they won’t be welcomed in liberal quarters,” says New York Times styles writer David Colman.
      “The interesting part is: will organisations that are essentially apolitical, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art – already sitting on pots of money from the Koch brothers – the Frick Collection or the Audubon Society, accept their donation and put them on a table?”
      The Kushners, Colman predicts, will give money to hospitals, medical charities and do something with sick children – “things people can’t get mad at” – and spend time in the Hamptons, the expensive getaway for the rich and powerful. “And she’ll distance herself from her father because he’s going to stay his crazy, fulminating self on Twitter.”
      Top New York hairdresser John Barrett says Ivanka will face no trouble if she chooses to return. “America is all about second acts, and there’s always somebody trying to advance a position or cause. Obviously, some people have been burnt by the administration, but it’ll take very little time for them to buy their way back pretty and rule a certain roost.”
      Not all are so accommodating. One former friend told Vanity Fair’s Emily Jane Fox: “They’ll be welcomed back by people who know the Trumps are as close as they’ll get to power. But everyone with self-respect, a career, morals, respect for democracy, or who doesn’t want their friends to shame them both in private and public will steer clear.” More