(The Economic Collapse Blog)—Once upon a time, America’s cities were beautiful, clean and the envy of the entire world. But now the rest of the world is literally laughing at how badly they have degenerated. A stunning nationwide crime wave has combined with the greatest homelessness crisis in modern U.S. history, the greatest drug crisis in modern U.S. history, and the greatest migration crisis in modern U.S. history to produce absolutely deplorable conditions in the streets of our largest cities. For example, if you find a plastic cup on the ground in New York City, you may want to carefully examine what is inside before you decide to pick it up. The following comes from the New York Post…
“There was a cup of what I thought was somebody’s discarded hot chocolate that turned out to be not hot chocolate,” said street cleaner John Cashvan.
“On warmer days, it can smell like a toilet over here — and not a well kept-toilet.”
In the past week, locals and volunteers said they’ve spotted cups filled with urine around the park’s entrance near the former school, along with human-sized poop in tree beds and between parked cars.
“Most of them want to pee in plastic cups rather than the ground, and they leave them on people’s door steps,” said longtime resident Garrett Rosso, 64, who said he spotted a dozen cups filled with urine.
One migrant had no problem taking an al fresco whiz on a tree Wednesday afternoon as The Post surveyed the stomach-churning scene.
Authorities in the Big Apple have run out of places to put all of the people that have come flooding into the city.
And more are arriving with each passing day.
Of course the same things could be said about Los Angeles.
At this point things are so bad that even the Hollywood Walk of Fame “has become overrun with homelessness and violent crime”…
The Hollywood Walk of Fame has become overrun with homelessness and violent crime, leaving tourists and locals feeling unsafe.
The iconic LA landmark, once the epitome of glitz and glamour, is disappointing visitors with its dirty sidewalks and repulsing locals who have experienced violent attacks.
Decades ago, the streets of Los Angeles were very safe and very clean.
But now if you wander the streets of Los Angeles by yourself you are literally putting your life at risk…
One local, Amy Michele, said she was punched in the face when running errands on the boulevard.
‘I’ve seen people with machetes and knives just slicing the air in front of them hoping to get someone who passes by,’ she said in a TikTok video warning others.
‘I’ve seen people sell drugs out of the back of a truck.
‘I’ve witnessed a hostage situation at one of the apartment complexes on Hollywood Boulevard.
‘I’ve been punched in the back of the head by a homeless person’ she added.
At this stage, virtually the entire city is becoming just like Skid Row.
Los Angeles is an extremely dirty city, and all of that filth has spawned a massive explosion in the rat population. But Los Angeles is not “the rattiest city” in America. For the ninth year in a row, Chicago has taken that title…
Orkin Pest Control named Chicago the Rattiest City for the ninth year in a row. Los Angeles follows Chicago in second and New York City finishes in third place.
More than 80 percent of the U.S. population lives in urban areas, and so what is happening to our cities really reflects what is happening to the country as a whole.
In Oakland, auto theft has increased almost 50 percent during the past year, and there is one square mile near the airport that has become world famous for how lawless it is.
In particular, there are three gas stations where criminals steal from rental vehicles dozens of times a day, and the police seem powerless to do anything about it…
Less than a mile away from the Chevron, a Shell gas station on Hegenberger Road is also plagued by thefts. Around five hundred yards from the Shell, another Chevron is another hotspot. And next to that, the parking lot of an In-N-Out Burger is hit daily.
Police say the criminals, who operate in well-organized groups, follow the same playbook: a spotter keeps watch for targets, usually rentals headed to or from the airport, as they pull up at the gas stations.
They then alert accomplices, who pull up in a vehicle when the targets start to pump fuel. Often, they smash a rear window or pop the trunk of unlocked vehicles before making off with luggage and valuables. The thefts take just seconds.
The spike has earned the Shell the nickname ‘America’s most dangerous gas station’. The two Chevron sites are also top contenders for the unwanted title.
There are police that patrol the area, but they are restricted from chasing non-violent criminals, and so the thieves know that they will be able to get away if they flee rapidly…
But the officer, who’s picked up an overtime shift to keep watch and act as a deterrent, wasn’t just referring to the theft epidemic when he made the strikingly blunt assessment.
He was referring, in his words, to the ‘restrictive’ policies passed by city and state lawmakers which mean police officers can’t even pursue the thieves because smash-and-grab theft is a ‘nonviolent crime’.
‘We can’t do a car chase on nonviolent crime,’ he told DailyMail.com from the seat of his police cruiser. ‘I can go behind the cars and try and turn on my lights, but why would they stop?’
I would strongly advise not visiting Oakland.
But of course most of our other major cities are not much better.
In Denver, so many migrants have been pouring into the city that the city’s primary public hospital is on the verge of financial collapse…
The migrant crisis in Denver has plunged the city’s main public hospital deep into the red after patients received $136 million in treatment they couldn’t pay for.
Denver Health lost $2 million in 2022 – but that was substantially-reduced by a $20 million cash injection from the state.
In 2022, the hospital system lost $35 million, with bosses warning of ‘dire consequences’ for the hospital if 2024 is as bad as the previous two.
Our cities were already filled with hordes of extremely desperate people, but over the past few years our politicians have allowed millions more to enter this country.
Now we live in a permanent atmosphere of lawlessness, and our society is absolutely teeming with predators.
Earlier this month, I was absolutely horrified to read about what seven of those predators did to two children at a mall in Houston, Texas…
Very few things shock me in this age of social media extremism, live-streamed terror and international permacrisis.
But the headline last week truly forced the bile to rise in my throat:
Seven Texas men filmed themselves gang-raping two toddlers in a bathroom of Houston’s Galleria Mall.
Sickening, indescribable evil.
A 29-year-old mall worker Arthur Hector Fernandez was identified as the suspected ‘ringleader’ and arrested in December, charged with assault. His accomplices are yet to be identified.
This is what America has become.
That story actually didn’t stay in the news cycle for very long at all, because this sort of thing has become very common in our society.
The truth is that the fabric of our culture really is coming apart at the seams all around us and we really are on the brink of societal collapse.
I believe that 2024 will be the most chaotic year that any of us have ever seen, and I believe that the years beyond 2024 will be even more chaotic.
If we had made much different choices as a society, we could have gotten much different results.
But now our cities are being turned into open sewers, and our entire nation is becoming a little bit more lawless with each passing day.
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.
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.
