Trade negotiations are heating up around the globe, and all eyes are on America’s factories. New international deals and tariff threats have been making headlines, but there’s another story unfolding on the factory floor. Marlin Steel CEO Drew Greenblatt shares a view many Americans might not hear in most news reports: now is a bright moment for the nation’s manufacturing workers, and the outlook is more optimistic than you might think.
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America’s Race to Secure Trade Deals Before Tariffs Hit
Countries everywhere are scrambling to sign new trade deals as a major deadline approaches. President Trump has set a Thursday cutoff for steep, reciprocal tariff increases. If countries don’t strike agreements in time, their exports to the U.S. could face stiff new costs. Several nations have already moved into action, eager to avoid those tariffs and keep trade moving.
Last week, the administration reached a high-profile trade agreement with the European Union. Other countries are at the table too, working to lock down deals before the deadline hits. This rush isn’t just about paperwork and press releases. It’s about real dollars, jobs, and supply chains for manufacturers around the world.
Tariffs are more than a buzzword. They raise the cost of foreign-made goods, pushing companies to rethink where they build products. For global manufacturers, shipping goods into an unpredictable American market suddenly looks risky and expensive. With every new policy tweak, the ripple effects grow.
Key reasons the trade talks matter right now:
- Tariffs could make foreign goods up to 15% more expensive for American buyers.
- Major economies like Germany, Japan, and the UK face tough decisions about where they locate factories.
- The U.S. market remains critical for many exporting nations.
As negotiations come down to the wire, American businesses are watching closely. The stakes aren’t just international—they are shaping decisions in hometown factories and on Main Street.
A Manufacturer’s Take: Drew Greenblatt and the Changing Economy
Drew Greenblatt, CEO of Marlin Steel, has a first-hand view of these changes. Marlin Steel makes wire baskets, and their factory in Baltimore is busy. The company leader recalls a visit back in 2016, when he said he was rooting for deregulation and a business-friendly climate. A few years later, he sees his outlook paying off.
Last week, the U.S. posted a robust 3% GDP growth. However, there was also a jobs report that fell flat. Greenblatt recognizes both numbers, but he keeps his focus on the long-term trend. In his view, the new wave of trade policies and tariff threats is reshaping global manufacturing in ways that favor American workers.
He describes what’s happening: with increasing tariffs and operating costs abroad, factory owners in places like Germany, Japan, and England are rethinking their plans. High local taxes, soaring energy bills, and now fresh tariffs on exports to America are pushing companies to reconsider where they build. For many, the answer is clear. Building in America and serving American customers makes more sense than shipping across oceans and paying extra tariffs.
As Greenblatt puts it, this “is going to be a great time for American factory workers.”
When international companies bring factories to the U.S., they offer good jobs to local workers. The benefits go beyond just job creation at the new plant. Local suppliers also win. From boxes to pallets to the steel baskets Marlin produces, a whole ecosystem grows.
Local suppliers stand to benefit:
- Box manufacturers provide packaging for finished goods.
- Pallet companies ship parts and products to customers.
- Marlin Steel supplies custom baskets to support production lines.
Greenblatt calls this moment a “fabulous time for American factory workers”—one that reaches far beyond the employees who clock in at the plant each day.
He also challenges the wider media narrative. In his view, the media isn’t giving enough credit to these positive developments on the ground.
Marlin Steel is not waiting on the sidelines. The company is actively hiring, growing, and investing for the future. Greenblatt makes it clear that now is not the time for hesitation. Instead, Marlin is adding staff and purchasing new equipment across its three operating locations: Indiana, Michigan, and Baltimore.
The decision to expand isn’t just about optimism. It’s a direct response to what he sees as a true reindustrialization of America. The company is “leaning in,” with new investments fueling more jobs and production capacity. It’s the kind of manufacturing success story that doesn’t make front-page news but is changing lives in local communities.
The media, Greenblatt argues, isn’t telling this story. To him, mainstream coverage fails to capture the optimism and drive that he sees in the country’s manufacturing sector.
Factory jobs are not what they once were in the American imagination. The average wage for an American factory worker today is above $80,000, with strong benefits packages that include health care and retirement plans like 401(k)s. These positions support families and build local economies. In Greenblatt’s words, “We need more of these jobs in our country.”
Three top reasons Marlin Steel is optimistic about hiring and growth:
- Rising demand from U.S.-based manufacturing as more companies “build here, rather than dump goods here.”
- Company expansion across multiple states creates new opportunities for skilled workers.
- Quality factory jobs now offer strong salaries and benefits, making them attractive long-term careers.
Manufacturers like Drew Greenblatt experience the impact of these trade shifts daily. His plants are hiring, expanding, and adapting to a changing market. He insists this real-world story deserves more attention.
“The media is missing what’s happening. It’s such an optimistic good time for a factory worker. These are good jobs—we’re talking about health care, 401k, and strong wages. We need more of these jobs in our country.”
Factory jobs today support families, drive community growth, and help renew pride in American industries. Stories from leaders like Greenblatt offer a crucial angle often “missed” in wider coverage.
As new tariffs and trade deals reshape how and where products are made, American factory workers stand at a turning point. Companies like Marlin Steel are expanding, hiring, and planning for a stronger future. Many foreign companies are moving production stateside, which means a fresh wave of jobs and opportunity.
While mainstream outlets may focus on political battles or bumpy jobs data, the real change is happening inside America’s factories. If these trends continue, the coming years could mark a new chapter for high-quality manufacturing jobs and local suppliers across the country. For now, Greenblatt and his team are ready, eager, and waiting for tomorrow’s opportunities—one steel basket at a time.
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.
