{"id":7964,"date":"2025-04-04T12:20:48","date_gmt":"2025-04-04T12:20:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/howard-lutnick-rants-about-beautiful-beef-and-weak-beef\/"},"modified":"2025-04-04T12:20:48","modified_gmt":"2025-04-04T12:20:48","slug":"howard-lutnick-rants-about-beautiful-beef-and-weak-beef","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/howard-lutnick-rants-about-beautiful-beef-and-weak-beef\/","title":{"rendered":"Howard Lutnick rants about \u2018beautiful\u2019 beef and \u2018weak\u2019 beef"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When it comes to commerce secretaries, it seems fair to say that “no news is good news.” By which I mean: If a president’s commerce secretary<\/a> is constantly named in headlines — in particular, eyebrow-raising headlines — that’s almost never positive for the administration.<\/p>\n

President Donald Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick<\/a>is a prime example, as he seems incapable of avoiding controversy and mockery.<\/p>\n

He was widely denounced for suggesting recently that only “fraudsters” would worry about missing a Social Security check<\/a>. And on Wednesday, he gave a bizarre diatribe on Fox News that was intended to tout Trump’s tariffs on nations around the world (which have sent the stock market reeling<\/a>). Lutnick decried the fact that Europe won’t take imports of certain meats from America, something he chalked up in part to jealousy<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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I mean, European Union won’t take chicken from America! They won’t take lobsters from America. They hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak. It’s unbelievable! <\/p>\n

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Watch the clip here<\/a>:<\/p>\n

As writer Charlie Nash explained in an article for Mediaite<\/a>there are some pretty justifiable reasons why European countries have rejected many American meats. He noted the E.U.’s ban on meat from animals treated with hormones and added:<\/p>\n

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The European Union has also restricted imports of American poultry due to its tendency to be washed with chlorine — a banned practice in both Europe and the U.K. — while in 2016, Sweden asked the E.U. to ban imports of live American lobster due to concerns over them being an invasive species. <\/p>\n

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So Lutnick seems to think the growth hormones used by some American farmers are making our cows big, strong and desirable, which I suppose may provide a boost of confidence to any cows that happened to have caught his Fox News appearance. But even the American Cancer Society says there isn’t consensus<\/a> on the human health risks posed by the hormones, noting:<\/p>\n

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Some early studies found a possible link between blood levels of IGF-1 and the development of prostate, breast, colorectal, and other cancers, but later studies have failed to confirm these reports or have found weaker relationships. While there may be a link between IGF-1 blood levels and cancer, the exact nature of this link remains unclear.<\/p>\n

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As for chlorinated chicken, it’s widely opposed in the United Kingdom and has remained a worrisome issue among its residents for years, with critics claiming the use of chlorine to wash chickens allows American sellers to, as <\/a>T<\/a>he New York Times put it<\/a>“let hygiene slide during feeding, growing, and slaughtering, and then make up for lapses at the end with a good disinfectant.”<\/p>\n

Trump, nonetheless, is trying to make the U.K. accept chlorinated chicken as a condition for tariff relief, but a spokesperson for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer told The Independent<\/a> on Thursday that the country’s position on the matter is “unchanged.”<\/p>\n


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Ja’han Jones<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Ja’han Jones is an BLN opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. He is a futurist and multimedia producer focused on culture and politics. His previous projects include “Black Hair Defined” and the “Black Obituary Project.”<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When it comes to commerce secretaries, it seems fair to say that “no news is good news.” By which I mean: If a president’s commerce secretary is constantly named in headlines — in particular, eyebrow-raising headlines — that’s almost never positive for the administration. President Donald Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnickis a prime example, as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7965,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trump"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}