If you’ve shopped recently, you’ve noticed that food prices are soaring and grocery store shelves are empty. Want steak this weekend? The price of beef has shot up 12 percent in the past year. Want to settle for a roast chicken instead? The price of poultry is up 7 percent. Considering giving up meat altogether? Canned vegetables are up 6 percent. In fact, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that a family of four is likely to spend about $500 more on groceries this year than last year.

Many of the cheaper food items on store shelves cannot even be found anymore. nbc’s Kristen Dahlgren recently reported that 16 percent of beverages, 14 percent of snack foods, and 13 percent of frozen items are out of stock.

This is an effect of supply chain breakdowns caused by the government’s response to the covid-19 pandemic, but it is not the only effect. As airports, dockyards, railways, trucking companies and warehouses remain understaffed, manufacturers are struggling to get their goods to locations where you can buy them. People are waiting weeks for products as mundane as paper towels, prescription drugs and oil filters in what some are calling “the everything shortage.”

When the shortages started, federal officials assured us that they were a temporary side effect of reopening the economy after covid-19 lockdowns. But now U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg admits that the current supply chain problems could last “years and years.”

Isn’t it remarkable how quickly the nation’s economic outlook has deteriorated? Well, it’s not so remarkable to many of the top-ranking officials in the U.S. government. These university-trained economists are not idiots. They knew covid-19 lockdowns would produce long-term shortages, but they decided to shut down the economy anyway, regardless of the consequences.

Such policies would be insane if you were trying to strengthen America and its free market. But they make a lot of sense when you accept the fact that they could be a deliberate strategy for weakening the country, abolishing its free market, and clearing the path for establishing a Communist system.

Millenniums ago, the Bible foretold that the U.S. would be plagued by warfare, famine and pestilence in the end time. The radical left’s push to drive up prices and create shortages is actually leading to the ultimate fulfillment of these sobering prophecies. Now is the time for every American to set his financial house in order and make sure his relationship with God is on a firm foundation!

Record-Setting Inflation

Since the start of the pandemic, the Federal Reserve has injected more than $5 trillion into circulation. That means 1 in 4 dollars currently in use was created within the past two years. Is it any wonder that inflation has hit a 30-year high? The personal consumption expenditure index rose 4.3 percent year-over-year in August, faster than any point since George H. W. Bush was president.

Economics analyst John Williams of shadowstats​.com says that if inflation were still calculated the way it was in 1980, the official inflation rate over the past 12 months would be about 13 percent.

Most Americans blame Joe Biden for the inflation surge. Yet he is unchastened. His administration is pushing for a $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill that will unleash even more inflation. Donald Trump has warned that “inflation is going to ravage our country,” and hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller says he cannot “find any period in history where monetary and fiscal policy were this out of step with the economic circumstances.” But the radical left is not interested in strengthening the economy. They are interested in destroying the U.S. dollar.

The government is nearly $30 trillion in debt, and the Biden administration is proposing that we take on $8 trillion in additional debt over the next decade. The radical thinking underlying this insane spending spree is modern monetary theory, which says the federal government can spend without restraint and simply print more money to cover its debts. Though Bernie Sanders’s economic adviser Stephanie Kelton and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have become the public faces of modern monetary theory, all Democrats (and even many Republicans) espouse this theory in practice.

Modern monetary theory increases the government’s control over people by giving it the power to buy anything it wants by simply creating the money. This quickly destroys the value of the dollar, including the dollars held by private individuals. It is a strategy to exterminate the very spirit of capitalism!

The Everything Shortage

When the pandemic first broke out, reports emerged of farmers smashing eggs, dumping milk, and plowing acres of fresh vegetables and crops back into the soil. Why? They had lost the means to get their produce to market before it spoiled. The customers were out there—people were desperate to buy—but they lived too far away.

About 71 percent of all U.S. freight is moved by trucks, and government-imposed lockdown policies have worsened a shortage of truck drivers in America. Trucking companies laid off 88,300 drivers in April 2020, and the industry still has not recovered. Huge quantities of perishable items like beef, poultry, fish, dairy, eggs, fruit and vegetables have therefore perished. Store shelves are emptier, and prices for the reduced quantities of food that are available keep rising and rising.

This situation would not have been nearly such a problem two centuries ago, when 90 percent of Americans lived on farms. But today only about 1 percent of Americans live on farms, and studies estimate that “fresh” produce travels an average distance of 1,500 miles from farm to plate.

Other consumer goods like appliances, automobiles, clothing, electronics, furniture, gasoline and office supplies often come from much farther away—even crossing an ocean to get to your home. Most people rarely think about the importance of supply lines, but they are the cardiovascular system of the global economy. One major blockage can send the entire system into cardiac arrest.

You should be deeply worried about a letter sent to the United Nations General Assembly by a group of truckers, sailors and airline workers. In September, the International Chamber of Shipping begged global leaders to restore freedom of movement to workers under lockdown, stating: “Since the outset of the covid-19 pandemic, the maritime, road and aviation industries have called loudly and clearly on governments to ensure the free movement of transport workers and to end travel bans and other restrictions that have had an enormously detrimental impact on their well-being and safety. Transport workers keep the world running and are vital for the free movement of products, including vaccines and ppe [personal protective equipment], but have been continually failed by governments and taken for granted by their officials. … In view of the vital role that transport workers have played during the pandemic and continue to play during the ongoing supply chain crisis, we request, as a matter of urgency, a meeting with who [the World Health Organization] and the ilo [International Labour Organization] at the highest level to identify solutions before global transport systems collapse.”

The industries represented by signatories of this letter account for more than $20 trillion in world trade annually, facilitated by some 65 million transport workers. They are warning that supply chains are in utter chaos.

The trucker shortage is compounded by interruptions in naval shipping. Ports in California, Georgia, New Jersey, New York and Texas are experiencing pileups. On October 19, a hundred ships were at anchor in a holding area waiting to enter the ports of Los Angeles (a backlog almost six times greater than a pre-covid backup). The world is about to experience a shortage of everything from computer chips to construction materials.

Many analysts are warning of a “bottleneck recession” where businesses cannot function properly until the supply chains they rely on are restored. In short, people will have to get used to paying more for less until—and unless—blockages are removed. And for some reason, world leaders seem disinterested in resolving these supply chain problems. In fact, some express enthusiasm about how supply chain collapse has reduced carbon dioxide emissions!

Why Socialists Are Excited

Global food prices have shot up nearly 33 percent over the past year—higher than for most of modern history. In the U.S., food banks nationwide are on pace to distribute 6.5 billion meals to 42 million people this year (20 percent more than the 35 million people who turned to food banks before the pandemic). Yet instead of grieving over millions needlessly facing the specter of hunger because of lockdowns, politicians pushing for a Green New Deal are pleased that gasoline-burning trucks are off the roads, diesel-guzzling ships are off the seas, and jet-fueled airliners are out of the sky.

After global coronavirus lockdowns reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 2.6 billion tons in 2020, Spanish climate change scientist and environmental activist Martín López Corredoira wrote, “Neither Greenpeace, nor Greta Thunberg, nor any other individual or collective organization have achieved so much in favor of the health of the planet in such a short time. A miracle happened ….” He admitted, “It is certainly not very good for the economy in general, but it is fantastic for the environment.”

A professor at University College London in Economics of Innovation and Public Value published an essay recommending more climate change lockdowns: “Under a ‘climate lockdown,’ governments would limit private-vehicle use, ban consumption of red meat, and impose extreme energy-saving measures, while fossil-fuel companies would have to stop drilling. To avoid such a scenario, we must overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently” (Oct. 21, 2020).

A Nature journal piece claimed that lockdowns have mentally conditioned people’s minds to tolerate the imposition of “personal carbon allowances.” It seems the radical left has no motivation or plan to restore freedom of movement to the world. Instead they want to use the supply chain crisis to condition people to the reduced consumption of a socialist world.

Communist dictators like Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong deliberately starved millions to death in artificially created famines that cemented their control over their populations. Judging by their patterns of actions, many world leaders today have similar designs. The UN has admitted that coronavirus lockdowns have pushed almost 320 million people into malnutrition in a single year. Yet leaders worldwide are still considering making these lockdowns permanent.

Analysts have found that the world’s 2,365 billionaires enjoyed a $4 trillion boost to their wealth during the pandemic, while 150 million middle-class people fell into the lower class. When you follow the money, it becomes evident that global elites are pushing lockdowns for the same reason they are printing money: to make a newly enlarged lower class dependent on the government!

Economic Pestilence

The Prophet Ezekiel describes a modern-era global catastrophe that begins with a siege against the Anglo-Saxon nations and their economies. This siege lasts about 13 months and destroys the might and power of America (Ezekiel 4:4-5, 9-13). The current supply chain crisis is not part of the 390-day siege that Ezekiel prophesied, but they are a shot across the bow alerting the American people to just how fragile their supply chains are. Right now, many of the shortages America is suffering from are the result of radical socialists deliberately trying to reduce America’s consumption and increase people’s reliance on the federal government. But soon foreign nations will deliberately target the United States, making it impossible for U.S. leaders to end the suffering even if they wanted to.

A trade siege as debilitating as the one described in Deuteronomy 28:52 and Ezekiel 4 would cause the price of food to spike higher than it has ever been in American history. This acute food shortage will, in turn, fuel discontent, rage, rioting, looting and violence in cities across America.

A prophecy in Ezekiel 5:12 reveals that one third of the population of America will die from famine and violence caused by civil war. “The pestilence, or plague of violence, will cause many health problems that lead to famine,” Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry writes in Ezekiel—The End-Time Prophet. “Sewage disposal will be disrupted. Gas lines will be broken. Jobs will be lost. Society will unravel, and the collective panic will bring a stock market disaster! It will get so bad that violence and famine will take millions of lives! … The worse the violence and burning become, the worse the famine will get. The worse the famine becomes, the more intense the violence will get. It becomes a vicious cycle.”

As Alfred Henry Lewis stated in 1906, “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.”

America is riven by deep political divisions right now, but the average citizen can afford to ignore them, or maybe just complain about them, as long as he can continue to buy groceries. But once supply chains break and people lose access to food, things will quickly get violent. This violence will lead to more supply chain breakdowns, which will lead to more violence and more breakdowns.

The world’s costliest civil war, in terms of lives lost, was the Russian Civil War that created the Soviet Union. Roughly 1.5 million combatants were killed in battle and another 8 million civilians died from raids, famine and disease. The Russian Empire lost more than 5 percent of its people in this war of revolution. And it was started by a man with “progressive” economic ideas: Vladimir Lenin.

Yet Ezekiel says America’s coming civil war will be many times worse. Ezekiel 7:14-15 say, “They have blown the trumpet, even to make all ready; but none goeth to the battle: for my wrath is upon all the multitude thereof. The sword is without, and the pestilence and the famine within: he that is in the field shall die with the sword; and he that is in the city, famine and pestilence shall devour him.” This passage indicates that many people in the country may survive the pestilence and famine resulting from supply chain collapse in America’s big cities, but will then face foreign invasion.

You can already see the fault lines of a seismic conflict forming. On one side, Satan is using radical-leftist politicians and their allies in the mainstream to inflame race and class hatreds. On the other, working-class Republicans and evangelical Christians are trying to defend America’s constitutional system of government. But neither side is willing to accept Ezekiel’s warning that God is cursing the nation.

These curses are coming only because the American people have changed God’s judgments into wickedness and sinned against His statutes more than the countries around them, who have never had a history with God like America has (Ezekiel 5:6).

But God also reveals how individuals can be protected from this disaster.

Ezekiel 33:10-11 state, “Therefore, O thou son of man, speak unto the house of Israel; Thus ye speak, saying, If our transgressions and our sins be upon us, and we pine away in them, how should we then live? Say unto them, As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel?” Our people must turn from evil and repair our relationship with God. National survival depends on national repentance!