Eric Lipton
speaker
759 appearances
6 recordings
4 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 5 Aug
Eric Lipton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Raw materials needed for all kinds of manufacturing in the United States.
If we don't have access to metals, we can't build just about anything.
We're talking about weapons.
We're talking about oil drilling equipment.
We're talking about AI, computer chips, even EVs, all kinds of products.
And we're in a bit of a bind right now because China has dominated the sector for several decades, and they've been restricting the United States' access to these critical minerals.
And the United States has figured out that it better get better access to these metals or else we're going to have a serious problem with economic growth.
And both the Trump family and the family of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, they see a money-making opportunity.
Well, in order to understand that, you really need to go backwards several decades.
During the Cold War, the United States was deeply invested in trying to make sure that we had access to these critical minerals, particularly in places like Central Africa.
Where there was huge federal dollars, and even the CIA was active in making sure that we were outmaneuvering the Soviet Union to get access to certain mining operations.
But after the Cold War ended, the United States sort of took this position that this is dirty work.
There's a lot of corruption in mining.
We're just going to offshore this.
We'll just leave other countries to do this work that kumbaya, we're all friends, we'll trade, and we can rely on our partners to get these metals and give them to us so that we can build the things we need to build here.
But that got quite complicated when China realized all the leverage it had over the United States and it started to restrict access to some of these critical metals.
And so starting with President Biden, they began to redirect American policy to make sure that American mining companies had access to these critical minerals, not only in the United States, but at mining sites around the world.
But then...
Reciprocal.
The Trump administration comes in, and Trump makes the situation a lot worse because he starts a trade war that leads China to say, you know what?
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