Opinion
By Jeff Childers
08-05-24
Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! It’s been quite a weekend. Your essential news roundup includes: last week’s Dow Jones slide crashes into the rest of the world markets and they topple over; media lies about reasons; the market-Middle East connection; markets and the election; U.S. media buries Middle East conflict, and Biden’s neocons focus on Israel; new Supreme Court book calls for decriminalization; British protest illegal immigration and two-tiered justice while UK government plots J6-style prosecutions; and anti-vaxx tennis champion wins Olympic gold medal.
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
🔥🔥 Yesterday, C&C reported on what was at first a US-only story, but as markets opened around the globe yesterday, the story went worldwide. The New York Times ran a mendacious article this morning headlined, “Markets Around the World Are Jolted by Fears of Slowing U.S. Growth.” It was, in fact, the top article on the Times’ website, and will probably be the top story today as things get worse. The sub-headline explained, “A rout that began in Asia continued in Europe, and U.S. stocks are set to fall. Japan’s benchmark index logged its worst single-day point decline.”
Somewhere exists a highly secured room filled with rows of desks and oversized terminal displays, with moving wallpaper made of streaming video feeds, where young intelligence analysts snatch Adderall from candy dishes and chase them with Red Bull pulled from mini-fridges below their desks. These are the narrative bakers; they watch world events in real-time and feed carefully crafted headlines to hungry editors, directing what the media says about everything. A crusty, Cold War-era veteran sits at an empty desk in a glass-walled office inset along one wall, chewing nicotine gum and occasionally conferring with youthful narrative spinners on a particularly thorny or difficult lie.
I am convinced this deep-state narrative crafting team must have run out of Adderall after somebody stole their package off the safe house’s front porch. Or maybe the supervisor was out sick after testing positive for covid, and the kids logged onto Minecraft instead of working. Whatever happened, this can’t possibly be their best work.
I say that because the explanation media has offered to explain what started late last week as a -1,000-point Dow Jones selloff (out of 40,000), now a global markets crash, was so unbelievably dumb it could only be the work of the deep-state’s ‘B’ team. Anyway, here’s what the Times suggested:
Got that? The Times wants you to believe the entire jittery world is worried about ‘signs’ of a slowing U.S. economy. Not even an actual slowing economy! Just the signs of one! (At first, it seemed sort of heartwarming. I mean, I didn’t know they cared so much.)
You see what’s happening? The CIA’s narrative spinners are getting stuck. On the one hand, they can’t admit the U.S. economy is actually slowing, because that would hurt the Kamala campaign. Nor can they admit the real reason for global market panic. So they came up with this pathetic ‘fears over signs of a slowing market’ excuse.
Let’s apply a little grey matter. In early trading yesterday, Japan’s Nikkei fell by over twelve percent, which is a whole lot in one day. That was equivalent to a -4,800 point drop in the Dow. The Pan-European Stoxx index fell over -2% in early trading, and every major market in Europe also dropped. South Korea’s benchmark Kospi index was down over -10% before it suspended trading. Equity markets in Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong and even China all closed lower. Stocks in India, which has been one of the best performing markets in Asia this year, traded down over -2%.
But why? What horrible development caused every world market to freak out? According to the official narrative, and I am not making this up, it was a bad U.S. jobs report late last week. The report supposedly showed hiring still happening, but a little slower, and unemployment ticking up to a modest three-year high:
Truly, this is the most insane lie they’ve peddled so far this year, in some ways worse and more insidious than old Chesnuts like “six foot distancing” or 2024’s “we aren’t sure if it was a bullet.”
World markets don’t crash when the U.S. gets a mildly negative jobs report. What a ridiculous idea.
🔥 Obviously, as I explained yesterday, the real reason for the panicky world markets was not any Biden Administration Jobs Report. Those Biden economic reports have become about as reliable as a weather forecast from the Mad Hatter, and nobody believes them anyway. No, the real reason for the panicking markets is completely rational: they are panicking because of Israel’s assassinations of two terror leaders last week, combined with the U.S.’s failure to even try to quickly de-escalate the Middle East.
When the markets saw aircraft carriers steaming toward the Red Sea instead of diplomats, they quite reasonably started selling stocks in lots of companies that don’t do well during world wars. Want some evidence for my theory? Here you go.
It wasn’t all bad news in the markets. Not everyone was panicking. Check out defense contracting giant Lockheed Martin (LMT), which jumped up nearly +20% in one week (+30% over its 6-month price):
Hang on, there seems to be a trend! Defense firms are doing great. Raytheon (RTX) posted gains of +21.98% last month. Northrup Grumman (NOC) rose +13.76% in the same period. General Dynamics (GD) is up +3.80% over the last 30 days.
Yesterday I erroneously opined that war was bad for business. That’s only mostly true. It is true, unless your business is war. In that case, war is great for business.
Anyway, the media’s lies over the real reason for market crashes is more proof, if you needed it, that you’re more likely to get the truth from a panhandling crack addict than the corporate media. But knowing the truth, do not panic. If you’re ‘in the market,’ hang in there and buy the dip. If you’re not in the market, don’t worry about it.
The reason I point all this out is because when the Middle East cools back down, the markets will recover. It’s not anywhere near as complicated as the media claims.
🔥 Consider how this crash might affect the election. Who would you rather have in charge as markets crash and world wars break out? Formerly Indian-American Kamala? Or President Trump? He might overuse certain punctuation from time to time, but at least Trump is paying attention:
President Trump had a point. Neither Biden nor Veep Cackle have yet said anything about the markets. It isn’t clear they even know. Kamala’s last tweet —posted after the markets started crashing— was about canceling student debt:
The word “clueless” comes to mind. This is another bipartisan issue. I wonder what Nancy Pelosi’s portfolio manager thinks about the markets?
🚀🚀 Perhaps not coincidentally, this morning I checked the New York Times, the Washington Post, the WSJ, and Politico, and found zero headlines related to the military situation developing in the Middle East — even though that conflict is crashing global stock markets. It’s like they’re trying to craft a completely different reality for U.S. citizens.
If you want to find out what our own government is up to, you have to go to foreign media. Japan News ran a story yesterday headlined, “US and Allies Prepare to Defend Israel as Netanyahu Says It’s Already in ‘Multi-Front War’ with Iran.” So.
What U.S media isn’t telling us is that Blinken and his team are back in Israel. They are publicly calling for restarting the Gaza ceasefire talks, which is utter nonsense at this point, and Blinken knows it. Behind the scenes, they are preparing a regional coalition to defend Israel from another massive Iranian missile strike, like they did in April.
White House Deputy National Security Adviser Jon Finer told ABC, “We are doing everything possible to make sure that this situation does not boil over.” Some people may find that reassuring. The markets obviously don’t.
🔥🔥 Changing the subject slightly, the Denver Post ran a story yesterday headlined, “Americans are ‘getting whacked’ by too many laws and regulations, Justice Neil Gorsuch says in a new book.” In almost 20 years as a judge, including seven on the Supreme Court, Gorsuch said, “There were just so many cases that came to me in which I saw ordinary Americans, just everyday, regular people trying to go about their lives, not trying to hurt anybody or do anything wrong and just getting whacked, unexpectedly, by some legal rule they didn’t know about.”
To remind you, in a May 2023 dissent, Judge Gorsuch called pandemic mitigations perhaps “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.” So perhaps it is not surprising his new book was titled, “Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law.”
In his new book, Gorsuch described cases like that of John Yates. Yates, a Florida fisherman, was criminally convicted of throwing away some undersized grouper. He was prosecuted under the same federal law originally targeting the Enron scandal, the same law that was creatively ‘repurposed’ against the J6 defendants.
Anyway, Yates’ grouper case went to the Supreme Court, where he barely won by a single vote.
Nobody can keep up with all the new laws. Nobody even knows how many crimes are on the books. Over just the last ten years, Congress has annually averaged 344 new laws, totaling 2 to 3 million new regulatory words per year.
In other words, a sitting Supreme Court judge just called for reducing the currently countless number of federal criminal laws. It’s a terrific suggestion. Maybe a new Presidential Administration could make that a priority.
🔥 The UK Independent ran a story yesterday headlined, “No plans to deploy army to quell rioters on UK streets, defence secretary says.” The sub-headline explained, “Prime minister Keir Starmer is holding an emergency meeting as the violence enters its second week.”
Parts of Britain have seen growing riots and protests over the past couple weeks. Initially, British citizens began protesting the country’s illegal immigration policies, after a horrific knife attack left three young girls dead in a dance studio. But now the protests seem to be more about the government’s heavy-handed response to the protests, exposing a two-tiered justice system, especially in light of the 2020’s soft policing of the BLM riots, not to mention any number of unprosecuted immigrant protests since then.
It appears the British are about to get the full ‘January 6th’ treatment. Their flabby new Prime Minister has suddenly learned how to crack down on lawlessness. In a national address, PM Starmer vowed to hunt down the protestors —who’re just regular white folks, not part of any protected political class— to the ends of the Earth:
Like in the U.S., British citizens who were quietly minding their own business suddenly discovered they occupied a lower rung on the justice ladder than other politically favored groups that managed to get their arms around the wheels of government while regular citizens were sleeping.
Time to wake up!
🔥 The UK Independent ran a much more encouraging story yesterday, headlined “Novak Djokovic’s epic last stand ends long quest for Olympic gold medal.” The sub-headline added, “Djokovic defeated his young Spanish rival in a titanic gold medal match at Roland Garros, gaining revenge for defeat at Wimbledon to win a classic, 7-6 (3), 7-6 (2), that left both players in tears.”
CLIP: Djokovic says Olympic gold arguably the ‘biggest success I’ve ever had’ (1:55).
It was as thrilling a matchup as tennis fans could possibly want. But whether or not you’re a tennis fan, this particular story is especially magnificent. The top men’s tennis player was banned from tournaments for nearly two years for refusing to take the jabs. They tried to make an example of him. At nearly 40, those two lost years should have ended his career, which was probably the intent.
But he stuck to his anti-vaxxing guns.
Ever since the mandates ebbed away and the Serbian champion re-entered play, he has enjoyed a series of astonishing and record-breaking wins, not to say miraculous, culminating in this weekend’s Olympic-sized victory. Congratulations, Novak. Thank you for standing up for all of us.
Have a magnificent Monday! Whatever the markets or the Iranians do, don’t worry. We’ll catch up on it all in tomorrow morning’s roundup of essential news and commentary.
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
