(The Economic Collapse Blog)—Once upon a time, America was such a beautiful place. As a nation, we are blessed with great natural beauty, and the shiny, clean cities that we constructed from coast to coast were once the envy of the entire world. But now many of the most beautiful places in America have literally been turned into open toilets. Let me give you an example of what I am talking about. Decades ago, California beaches were so spectacular that tourists would come from all over the world to experience them. But now the beaches in one section of southern California resemble “a portable toilet” and have been closed for 700 days in a row due to billions of gallons of untreated wastewater that is flowing into the Pacific Ocean…
Residents of a small coastal city in California said they’ve been ‘trapped in a portable toilet’ after 700 consecutive days of beach closures.
For the past four years, residents of Imperial City, a small town located a 20-minute drive from San Diego, have endured daily exposure to sea spray and aerosol particles emanating from the polluted ocean.
More than 100 billion gallons of untreated wastewater have flowed through Mexico’s Tijuana River and into the Pacific Ocean, eventually reaching the coastal town over the past five years.
Why isn’t California Governor Gavin Newsom doing something about this?
Why isn’t the Biden administration doing something about this?
One local resident says that the smell of human waste is so strong at night that it actually wakes people up…
According to a study by San Diego State University, heavy metals, toxic chemicals, and bacteria detected in the water are being released into the air and lingering in the soils.
‘I’m more frustrated than ever since we found out that it goes into the air. So it’s not just the water,’ a resident said.
In letters from community members calling for action, one resident said the smell is ‘akin to being trapped in a portable toilet,’ so strong that it wakes them up at night.
Can you imagine the cumulative impact that all of this wastewater is going to have if it is allowed to continue to flow like this year after year? But maybe this is what southern California deserves.
The television shows and movies that are created in southern California are exporting our “toilet culture” to the entire world, and now southern California is literally being transformed into a toilet.
Meanwhile, conditions are rapidly deteriorating on the east coast as well.
When I visited New York City a little over two decades ago, everything was very clean and I felt very safe wherever I walked.
But now Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s district “is being described as looking like a Third World country”…
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s district is being described as looking like a Third World country, after video emerged showing trash covered streets overrun by migrants.
Footage captured by Queens resident Ramses Frias shows two streets in the neighborhoods of Corona, Jackson Heights and Elmhurst.
The video shows the streets of the area overflowing with trash, as migrants set up make shift flea markets flogging clothing items.
Roosevelt Avenue has also become known as ‘the market of sweethearts’, with viral videos showing alleged sex workers lining the streets of the area.
Of course it isn’t just her district that is rapidly going down the tubes.
In a 15 million dollar lawsuit that was recently filed, it is alleged that one Burger King location in the Big Apple has been transformed into an “open air drug bazaar”…
A Burger King in New York City has been slapped with a $15 million lawsuit over allegations the fast food restaurant has turned into an ‘open air drug bazaar.’
The restaurant, located at 106 Fulton Street in the Financial District, was sued by long-time resident and filmmaker Kevin Kaufman, 69, who has branded the street ‘a neighborhood in crisis.’
According to the lawsuit, obtained by the New York Post, Kaufman has targeted that location and Burger King’s cooperate office, accusing them of violating the state’s private nuisance law.
Lawlessness is common at the site with pictures of drug users and videos of fights posted online.
Once again we see the word “lawlessness” used to describe what is happening in our largest cities.
How many times in recent months have I warned about how “lawless” this country is becoming?
In fact, in a piece that I authored that was one of the featured articles on Zero Hedge on Sunday, I stated that “America is becoming a little bit more lawless with each passing day”.
In Oakland, crime has gotten so bad that some business owners are openly threatening not to pay taxes…
A growing group of business owners in the Bay Area are declaring that they no longer want to pay taxes after a slew of robberies and thefts made them feel like the city wasn’t doing enough to protect them.
Businesses in Oakland, California, have faced thefts and attacks in recent months.
“We’re scared for our lives,” Cybelle’s Pizza manager Nestor Sanchez said, according to a KTVU report.
During the past several years, thousands upon thousands of businesses have either left our major cities or have shut down for good.
In some cases, entire city blocks have been boarded up.
And now we have learned that hundreds of Family Dollar stores are going to be closed, and that is going to create even more empty buildings…
Family Dollar, the struggling discount chain that caters to low-income customers predominantly in cities, said Wednesday it will close nearly 1,000 stores.
Years of mismanagement and poor conditions in stores have hurt Family Dollar’s brand. Family Dollar, which is owned by Dollar Tree, was recently fined more than $40 million for a rat infestation at a warehouse that forced hundreds of stores to temporarily close.
Decades-high inflation has hit shoppers hard, and a general consumer pullback has impacted Family Dollar customers and the chain’s profits, exacerbating its battle with discount competitors such as Dollar General, Walmart and others.
In addition, the reduction in benefits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, has left struggling families with as much as $250 less per month. Discount stores and consumer goods companies say they have felt the impact of that loss.
Meanwhile, every month hundreds of thousands of extremely desperate people come pouring across our southern border.
According to Axios, “more than 8 million asylum seekers and other migrants will be living inside the U.S in legal limbo by the end of September”.
The stage has been set for civil unrest on an absolutely epic scale, and we are just months away from the most tumultuous election season in our entire history.
I entitled my latest book “Chaos” for a reason, because that is exactly what we are going to experience.
The people that are running this country are systematically ruining it.
Everything that our forefathers worked so hard to build is going down the drain, and that should deeply sadden all of us.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.