Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, and Stitcher (update links).
As President Donald Trump’s flip-flopping on tariffs roils the stock market, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick took to CNBC earlier this week to blame the outsourcing of American manufacturing on labor unions.
“Why would a factory that was making cars in Michigan move to Canada?” Lutnick said. “Because there weren’t unions in these locations. We harmed American workers in exchange for what? The prices of cars didn’t come down.”
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The New Abnormal co-host Danielle Moody pounced on Lutnick’s historical revisionism.
“Wasn’t it Republicans that gave incentives for factories to go abroad?” Moody said. “And the reason why they did it was because it was cheaper.”
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Co-host Andy Levy was even more pointed.
“He’s lying,” Levy shot back, pointing out that unions are plentiful in Canada, where 30 percent of workers are covered by a collective bargaining agreement compared with just over 11 percent in the United States. “Unions [are] just a nice thing that Republicans like to pretend is the cause of every bad labor thing that happens in this country, which is objectively not true.”
In addition, Moody said she “wants to move to Boston: after hearing Mayor Michelle Wu stand up for immigrants in a tense congressional hearing.
“The false narrative is that immigrants in general are criminals or immigrants in general cause all sorts of danger and harm,” Wu said. “If you wanted to make us safe, pass gun reforms, stop cutting Medicaid, stop cutting cancer research, stop cutting funds for veterans.”
Plus! TNA spoke with The New York Times’ David Enrich about Murder the Truth, a new book about New York Times Company v. Sullivan, a landmark Supreme Court ruling that guaranteed freedom of the press and has come under attack from oligarchs seeking to silence the media.
Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, and Stitcher.
