Editor’s Note: There’s a fine line between expressing the truth without sugarcoating it and sounding like we all just need to give up. Things are looking pretty bad out there, but it’s imperative that despite the massive challenges western society is facing, we cannot lose hope. I publish articles, such as the one below by Michael Snyder, because we need to be fully aware of the circumstances. It’s equally important that we keep fighting the good fight and not give up. We can overcome these challenges, Lord willing. And if we cannot, then the Biblical end may be near, and that’s an infinite blessing to be given. So don’t let doom and gloom make you impotent. See the truth. Spread it. Then, let’s act to make it all better. Here’s Michael…
We are in the early stages of a global economic collapse, and people all over the globe are getting extremely angry. Here in the United States, higher prices are an inconvenience, but in other parts of the world higher prices can mean the difference between feeding your family or not.
And once people get to a point where they cannot even survive on the incomes that they are bringing in, they can become very unpredictable and very violent.
For example, a large economic protest that just happened in Lebanon quickly descended into violence as protesters aggressively clashed with government security forces…
Although the protest began peacefully, demonstrators clashed with security forces, who repeatedly shot tear gas into the crowd after demonstrators breached the barbed wire in front of the government building.
“It’s not just our salaries, we’re fighting for our lives,” a retired officer told The National after escaping a cloud of tear gas.
“After serving our country for over 30 years, we can’t even live off our pensions,” he said.
Cries of “Shame on you!” could be heard as protesters ran from the smog of tear gas.
We are seeing similar protests in the western world. On Sunday, an absolutely massive protest in Prague called on government leaders to resign because of “high inflation and energy prices”…
Thousands of people rallied again in the Czech capital, Prague, on Sunday calling on the government to resign as they protested against high inflation and energy prices.
It was the second such rally in the central Wenceslas Square, called for by a new non-parliamentary political party PRO, which in English stands for Law, Respect, and Expertise.
“We want to express our disapproval of this government, of the political situation, of what’s going on in the Czech Republic and in fact in the whole of Europe,” said one protestor, Renata Urbanova.
Unfortunately, economic protests such as these have become quite common over the past year.
In fact, one team of researchers determined that there were 12,500 such protests during 2022…
Last September, Italians in Rome, Milan and Naples burned their energy bills in a coordinated protest against soaring prices. In October, thousands took to French streets to decry government inaction over the high cost of living. And in November, Spanish workers rallied for higher wages, chanting “salary or conflict.”
Researchers have defined an unprecedented global wave of more than 12,500 protests across 148 countries over food, fuel and cost of living increases in 2022. And the largest were in Western Europe.
Will that number be even higher in 2023?
All over the world, people need to eat, and food prices just keep rising.
In March, food prices in the UK rose “at their fastest rate for 45 years”.
And it is now being projected that the global rice shortfall this year will be the largest in 20 years. That will mean even higher prices for the billions of people that eat rice.
Even here in the United States, food prices are becoming extremely oppressive. Earlier today, I was stunned to learn that one bakery in New York is actually selling a ham and cheese sandwich for 29 dollars.
NYC bakery Eli Zabar was selling a $29 ham & cheese sandwich… but DON'T WORRY, it was on "health bread" pic.twitter.com/WKDujaWNOC
— Andrea Mew (@andreajmew) April 12, 2023
Can you believe that?
Up until just recently, we haven’t seen economic protests in North America like we have around the rest of the world, but that has started to change.
Right now, approximately 155,000 government workers in Canada have gone on strike because the cost of living has been rising much faster than their paychecks have…
The mushroom cloud of central bank monetary destruction keeps growing, and is increasingly fueling discontent among workers whose standards of living are eroding along with the purchasing power of their wages.
Europe has already seen a wave of strikes aimed at securing inflation-offsetting pay raises. Now it’s Canada’s turn: At midnight, more than 155,000 Canadian federal government workers went on strike in what’s being described as the largest walkout against a single employer in the country’s history.
The strike was called by the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) union, which has been in negotiations for a new contract since 2021. This strike primarily encompasses two groups of federal employees: 120,000 at the Treasury Board and 35,000 at the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA).
No matter who you are or where you live, you can see that the cost of living is rising at a very alarming pace. And that isn’t likely to change any time soon.
In the U.S., one recent survey discovered that a whopping 67 percent of all Americans believe that their incomes are falling behind inflation…
Continual inflation has hurt Americans, with roughly two-thirds of them reporting their wages cannot keep up, according to the most recent CNBC All-America Economic Survey.
Only 5% of Americans say their household income is outpacing inflation, with 67% stating it is falling behind and 26% saying it is keeping up, according to CNBC. The vast majority of the public is adjusting their spending habits and lifestyles due to inflation, with 81% saying they are taking measures like reducing entertainment spending and travel or dipping into savings to cover expenses.
The Federal Reserve has been rapidly increasing interest rates in a desperate attempt to contain inflation, but those higher rates have pushed us into a very serious economic downturn.
Large companies are laying off workers all over America, and that list includes Disney and Facebook…
This year, 596 tech firms have laid off 171,308 workers. The list is anticipated to expand, with Meta Platforms Inc. initiating job cuts today and Walt Disney Co. preparing to reduce its workforce by thousands in the coming week.
According to an internal memo seen by Bloomberg, the Facebook parent company told managers they should prepare for job cuts on Wednesday. The memo states jobs across Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Reality Labs will be affected.
The move to reduce headcount by at least 10,000 positions at the company was outlined by founder Mark Zuckerberg’s goal of greater efficiency earlier this year. Another round of job cuts is expected next month.
I know that I have covered an enormous amount of material very quickly in this article. But people need to understand the seriousness of what we are now facing. It isn’t just the U.S. economy that is in trouble. The entire global system is beginning to shake and tremble, and eventually it will completely implode.
According to Google, there are currently 7.888 billion people living on this planet. Approximately half of those people live on $6.85 or less a day.
Poverty and hunger are rapidly growing all over the world, and we are going to witness so much pain and suffering in the months and years ahead.
But most people don’t understand any of this, because the mainstream media just continues to insist that everything will work out just fine somehow.
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Article cross-posted from End of the American Dream.
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.