(The Center Square)–With the general election ballots already mailed out and the race drawing national attention, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and City Councilmember Nithya Raman faced off in a tense debate Tuesday night.
The live broadcast was hosted by NBC4 and Telemundo 52, both based in Universal City in the Los Angeles area.
Addressing a large, undecided voter pool, the two leaders sparred over their records on homelessness, public safety, emergency response and the city’s economic future ahead of the 2028 Summer Olympic Games. At one point, Bass apologized for her absence when the Palisades Fire erupted.
Homelessness emerged as the primary battleground of the evening.
Bass defended her administration’s record, pointing to programs like Inside Safe as the driving force behind a reported 11% reduction in overall homelessness and a 50% drop in veteran homelessness.
“I declared a state of emergency,” said Bass, a Democrat, former congresswoman and California Assembly speaker. “We have reduced homelessness by 11% … Street homelessness declined for the first time in the city of Los Angeles.”
Raman, a Democrat who was endorsed by Democratic Socialists of America, sharply countered Bass’ narrative. She pointed out that recent figures show the crisis ticking back up despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent. Raman criticized the mayor’s signature program for lacking transparency and proper oversight.
“Under this mayor’s leadership, we have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into an incredibly expensive program, Inside Safe, which has been unaccountable to the public, for which she has refused audits,” Raman argued.
Public safety and law enforcement also dominated exchanges. Bass went on the offensive regarding Raman’s council voting record, arguing that her opponent had consistently voted against police officers and the removal of homeless encampments near sensitive areas like schools.
“The first job of a mayor is public safety,” said Bass. “She has consistently voted against police officers.”
Raman pushed back, highlighting her focus on community trust and defending immigrant communities against federal actions. Raman criticized the city’s handling of cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and expressed deep concerns regarding mass surveillance technology, such as automated license plate readers.
“This city used to be the gold standard in terms of non-cooperation with immigration enforcement,” said Raman. “Now, under this mayor, we’ve actually lost trust from our immigrant community.”
The candidates also clashed over the city’s crisis response, particularly following the fallout from recent emergencies like the Palisades Fire and the Lineage Warehouse fire in Boyle Heights. Raman criticized Bass’s absence during critical moments, framing it as a systemic failure of leadership.
“If there is another emergency, you will not have to ask, if I am mayor, where our mayor is. I will be on the front lines,” Raman vowed.
Bass expressed remorse over past response challenges while emphasizing structural reforms, new leadership within the fire department, and steps taken to fast-track housing construction and community assistance.
“I am so profoundly sorry that I was not in my city when my city needed me,” said Bass, who was in Ghana for a presidential inauguration when the devastating Palisades Fire started on Jan. 7, 2025. “We have done a lot to fast track the building.”
With working families and industry professionals struggling amid a local jobs slump in entertainment, both candidates later addressed how to bring work back to Los Angeles. Raman pressed for a fully staffed municipal film office featuring personnel with direct production experience rather than relying on part-time bureaucratic oversight, while advocating for uncapped state tax credits similar to competing regions.
“This is an issue that’s personal to me,” said Raman. “My husband is a writer. We see the decline of the industry impacting our own household and our community every single day.”
Bass highlighted her longstanding legislative history fighting for film tax credits in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., pointing to her appointment of a film czar and local fee reductions to ease the burden on local productions.
“The industry is personal to me, too,” said Bass. “I have families that are directly involved. As a matter of fact, going back two generations.”
In their closing statements, both candidates made final pitches to convince undecided voters. Raman framed her campaign as a necessary pivot toward a functional, transparent government.
“We cannot afford another four years of decline, of mismanagement, of excuses,” Raman said.
Bass countered by emphasizing stability and experience, particularly with the 2028 Olympic Games fast approaching.
“Now is not the time to turn the city over to Nithya Raman,” said Bass. “We have just 640 days away from the greatest sporting event in U.S. history.”
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.
