The Wall Street Journal is usually hit or miss. Sometimes, they offer unbiased news, more so than most corporate media sites. But generally, their takes on financial issues are accurate, especially as it pertains to the bigger corporations through which they have better connections than the smaller financial publications.
A story they posted earlier botched the news completely. In their article titled, “BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street Forced Into Abortion Debate,” they acted like this was an unwelcome development for the three giants of asset management. It is not. All three have always wanted to be included in the debate, and this year they’re finally getting their wish.
From the article:
Shareholders have placed abortion-rights proposals on the proxies at three big retailers this spring: Walmart Inc.; Lowe’s; and TJX, the owner of off-price chains including TJ Maxx. Many more could follow next year.
That development is pressuring asset managers such as BlackRock Inc., Vanguard Group, and State Street Global Advisors to confront the issue because they hold significant stakes in those and other companies on behalf of millions of other investors.
Activist investors submitted the shareholder proposals in December. Broadly, they ask each company to compile a report evaluating the risks and costs of restricted reproductive rights, including on employee hiring and retention. In early May, a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion suggested that the court could overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to an abortion.
Trillium Asset Management submitted the shareholder proposal for TJX, while Clean Yield Asset Management did so for Walmart. Both financial firms are focused on environmental, social and corporate-governance concerns. Educational Foundation of America, a private foundation that makes grants to nonprofits and invests with social and environmental impacts in mind, submitted the proposal for Lowe’s.
Asset managers such as BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street have grown rapidly in recent years. Investors have flocked to them hoping that passive, index-tracking funds can get them steady gains at low cost.
One consequence is that the firms have accumulated voting power in thousands of public companies. They can influence corporate decision-making on a host of issues, including some they might prefer to avoid.
Abortion rights is a polarizing issue nationally. In a new Wall Street Journal poll, conducted with the nonpartisan research organization NORC at the University of Chicago, 68% of respondents said they wouldn’t like to see the court completely overturn Roe, while 30% supported such a move.
Urska Velikonja, a law professor at Georgetown University who focuses on securities regulation and enforcement, predicts that if Roe v. Wade is struck down, there could be hundreds of abortion-related shareholder proposals on company proxies next year.
“We expect for these large asset managers to consider abortion in the same way they consider other social-policy issues like climate change and diversity audits,” she said. “This one seems more head-on a business issue given that it affects a substantial portion of the employees.”
The financial firms have at times initiated their own campaigns to pressure companies to pursue social changes. In 2017, State Street publicly identified more than 1,500 companies with all-male boards as part of its Fearless Girl campaign. Since then, 60% of those companies have added at least one female director. In 2018, following the deadly school shooting in Parkland, Fla., BlackRock stripped retailers that sell guns from some of its environmental, social and corporate governance-focused exchange-traded funds. BlackRock has said its positions are about long-term returns, not politics.
The Wall Street Journal has it mostly wrong. The three big asset managers have always used their influence over social issues. That is their goal. It’s why they’re so adamant about pushing Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) guidance upon the thousands of companies they partially own. This is ALL about politics. The profits they create for themselves and their clients have always been a secondary consideration.
What American patriots need to realize is that these asset management companies see the ultimate goal of control over the direction of the world. They will be the primary beneficiaries of The Great Reset when public-private partnerships become the norm in all facets of governance. The problems we’re seeing rising in the world around us are mostly manufactured. BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street are at the center of all of it, from the looming food and energy crises to the open borders to Neo-Marxist globalist policies being implemented across the globe.
The only question we really need to answer is whether they are the puppets or the puppetmasters. At this point, it really could go either way.
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.
