'OK Doomer' is not 'OK'; but is Jessica Wildfire a paid influencer? Who knows; she is snide and condescending

See Part 1 for some background to this.

I had seen Jessica Wildfire's Substack several months ago, I think after I first saw her on Medium, and eventually clicked to get it.

A solidly middle-class, maybe even upper middle class, married or partnered woman with, I think, one child or two, per this interview of her, and a GenXer by age, not Millennial, at first appeared to have some smart left-liberal takes on the world. (A Millennial wouldn't pun on Boomers with "OK Doomer.")

Then, I realized otherwise, and her most recent hot take on "we're running out of food" shows why, as her main internal link contradicts herself.

First, per the header, she says you can buy a year's worth of shelf-stable food without panic-buying. She recommends buying from bulk suppliers, along with recommendations that show her socioeconomic level by saying to go buy your own wheat grinder if you're serious about this. (On the socio side of socioeconomic, per Medium, she's a teacher, if she hasn't quit, and not just any teacher; per this piece, she's got a Ph.D.)

Second, if she's referencing places like "Survival Mag" and a website with "prepper" as part of the URL, that also goes to mindset. (Oh, and is she a paid influencer? I dropped a fairly subtle hint to that end in my second comment there. Yeh, she calls herself an "unfluencer" on Twitter, but ... given the amount of hustles she runs, c'mon.)

Third, she said there's reasons to buy from these bulk sites. Why? As I responded:

As for who you're cleaning out? Bulk food sellers have to buy their bulk commodities from the same people as Kroger's one-pound bags. It's just a different middleman. (And, some groceries have bulk food aisles anyway.)

Simple enough, right? 

Now, the biggie. A Mother Jones piece she links undercuts most her panic-mongering, as I noted:

“It’s easy to lose track of the scale of global agriculture,” says Scott Irwin, a widely followed economist and chair of agricultural marketing at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “It’s just massive, and it’s extremely distributed geographically. If you have a problem in one area, at least historically, that will tend to get offset by better than average growing conditions someplace else.” 

“The fact is,” he adds, “as of today, the world has adequate supplies of grain.” ... 

“A couple of days ago, there were headlines saying South Dakota’s corn crop was unusually low this year—and they have a terrible drought—and that Nebraska was a little below normal,” says Daniel Sumner, an economist and director of the Agricultural Issues Center at the University of California, Davis. “But as of the middle of August, USDA was still projecting a normal national corn and soybean crop in the United States. And that’s because Indiana and Illinois and Iowa had relatively good crops, and are much more important in the national total, than Nebraska or South Dakota would be.” ... 

The challenge for crop experts right now is determining whether droughts and other disturbances—and the crop shortfalls they may cause—add up to a predictable trend. That’s especially important because, while productivity might not look bad overall, there isn’t much surplus grain stock thanks to scattered droughts last year and the supply shock of Ukraine’s breadbasket being temporarily locked out of the global food system.

I also noted that MoJo tends to avoid talking about the Ukraine war, and as generally liberal not leftist doesn't discuss Warmonger Joe refusing to listen to the Goldilocks Three Bears plus Pope Francis on a negotiated peace.

At that point, whether she's addicted to generalized anxiety disorder or what, it's clear that she likes writing this. She DID choose the title of her Substack after all.

Next we note that her claims the world is at all-time lows on grain stores is simply not true. Or to be blunt, a lie. We're at 14-year-lows and on wheat only, per the site she linked.

Beyond that, and not meaning to sound American exceptionalist, WE won't run out of food. Prices may continue to go higher, but "run out" isn't happening.

As for a potential railroad strike meaning "we're all going to run out of electricity"? Tosh. First, the electrical grid has redundancies, unless you're in Tex-ass. Second, we're at the start of fall, where, unless you're a pansy-ass, you don't need heat or air conditioning.

And, if we DID actually run out of electricity? Unless you have an electric car along with a house with solar panels, you're up shit creek, unless your gas station has an electric generator for its gas pumps. Of course, that probably itself would require fossil fuel to run ...  And, your bulk commodities supplier ain't shipping anything to you.

So, add this all up, and yes, I wonder if she is a paid influencer for any prepper sites. That's in part because this isn't new; a week earlier, she claimed that "We're on the brink of worldwide starvation," and yes, that was the actual header, not just body copy.

Also, the subhead on her Substack home page, of "Doomsday Barbie tells it like it is," in addition to being untrue, loudly screams "marketing" at me.

Meanwhile, on her most recent Medium post, she disses preppers and talks about people too poor to afford .... well, too poor to afford stockpiling a year's worth of food at one time, like she recommends on Substack. I noted dissing or cat-clawing of fellow faculty in Part 1. Speaking of, she once had a different Medium site. (She's had one piece from that site picked up by NYU's student blog. See Part one for more details on that.) Per that and the two self-published self-help books she has, she probably figured there was more money in being a doomer than a relationship coach, whether or not she's a paid influencer on top of that. 

Meanwhile, from a site not her own (and it's the only place that gives me a goggling hit for the quote), we have:

“Every day, I carve out time for listening to music alone and reading for a couple of hours. My spouse and I are the same way. We take a couple hours for ourselves that have nothing to do with work in the immediate sense. We go for 30 minute walks, too, either together or on our own, to think and decompress. It’s the cornerstone of stability.”

In other words, you're time-privileged. Unlike the people you diss above.

There's further reason to think that, if not a paid influencer, she's writing her stuff for the money, not the real care. And, that is that she dropped that other Medium site, then switched to her current one, right when COVID took off. Hey, pushing "doom" to late-end Gen Xers? Lots of Medium money in that if you get enough followers.

If she's not a real prepper, she's not being honest about what would be involved with being a real prepper. And, maybe not being fully self-honest.

AND!

Thin skinned.

She deleted both my comments and banned me, but responded to one of them. Technically, I think it's not a deletion but that the banning blocked the visibility on one, that she responded to, and deleted the other:

His information is out of date. If you read literally anything else, you'd see that the USDA has already downgraded expectations for wheat and soy.

I noted it was posted just 23 days ago, and was clearly about WHEAT ONLY anyway, not all grains. And, I said, if it was that out of date, then why link to it in the first place. And, the MoJo piece is from earlier this week.

Anyway, she's out of her league elsewhere, like in international affairs. A Medium piece from six months ago on Putin's invasion of Ukraine had her saying she thought Putin would win. What else she said, along with reading between the lines? A generic #TeamBlue claiming that Republicans were all on Putin's payroll. No look at NATO barking at Russia, as Pope Francis said, nor calls for a negotiated peace, made by Francis and the Goldilocks Three Bears. Simplistic tribalism. And, from what goggling tells me, most her takes on the Russia-Ukraine war are about as bad.

I think I'm banned because of not only challenging her, but wondering about her motives, in my second comment, and mentioning "capitalism."

And, I figured, what the hell, in for penny, in for a pound, so I also asked her on Twitter if she was indeed a paid influencer.

Back to the thin-skinned. Blogger doesn't allow for bans, but it does allow for content moderation. And, whenever someone wants to keep repeating the same argument time after time on the same post, and I think I've adequately refuted it and them, I simply tell them in my comment to their last comment, something like, "You've got one more chance; if you can't come up with something new, that's it." 

But, here, with the ban, I wasn't even given a chance to reply. She replied to one of my two original comments, then banned me. In other words, she didn't want an in-depth discussion, as I see it. (I should add that, beyond calling her out on getting these links wrong, I made the observations about MoJo. Seeing that she's knee-jerk #BlueAnon, that may also have pissed her off.

Whether money-making, anxiety-addicted, or a bit of both? It's hard to let go of that, I guess. Factoring in the Medium piece leads me to keep tilted "money," not that the two are mutually exclusive.

Beyond that? The assumptions she makes that can no longer be challenged. The day after writing that column about turkey supply, I got the latest USDA statistical forecast via the Texas Farm Bureau. So, her assumption was not only unwarranted, per the second part of the header, I take it as snide and condescending. Especially since as of Sept. 1, it said corn and beans were both up from last year. Per this plus the presumably willful errors elsewhere, we've got the bulls-eye fallacy or some similar fallacy or fallacies of informal logic in play, obviously.

And, making it more fun is that Substack offers different lengths of bans, and I got the "100 year" ban. Other options are an hour, a day, a week, a month. 

Thin-skinned.

Update, Oct. 14: Since monkeypox as a new plague possibility has fallen through (in Europe, too) she's now pimping Ebola. Twice. (No prepper tools to fight it involved. Yet.)

Update, Oct. 20: She now is strawmanning "mansplaining doomsplaining," all without directly quoting the man/men any man who allegedly said any of this. Sounds like she's worried about her capitalist grift and brand being hurt, like when she blocked me from commenting.

Update, Nov. 2: She has now called out people writing "anti-doomer clickbait," attacking them mainly for their alleged monetization liust. If you read through the piece, it's psychological projection 101 about how and why she writes doomer clickbait. Add in that she's afraid this IS cutting into her own monetization and there  you go.

Update, Nov. 24: She now claims no college prof she knows goes without a second job. She's at a state university and not an adjunct. That said, she DOES use the word "teachers," and as I posted there, and documented here, she's got a history of conflating K-12 teachers and college profs. (She'll probably block me at Medium, too.)

#Piketty: A liberal Frenchman ignorant of unions? Or not quite so liberal?

Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman via Salon
(Credit: Reuters/Charles Platiau/Anton Golubev)

Or a left-neoliberal trying to pose as an actual liberal?

Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century" has gotten a lot of touts. That goes even as far as Counterpunch. So, it has to be true liberal, right?

Well, Thomas Frank notes one big absence. I'd not read the book yet, but in hindsight, his review points out what all the other reviews missed.

Frank, like others, praises the analysis, while astutely noting, although without quite as much depth as Counterpunch, that Piketty's not new, nor alone.

I was puzzled at first by the extraordinary success of Piketty’s book; despite his commitment to cant-free prose, it is not an easy read. Besides, most of what Piketty tells us has been told to us before, many times over, in a three-decade long parade of forgotten treatises and sad New York Times stories on downsizing and deindustrialization.

Going beyond that, he also touts Piketty for slapping around most of his fellow economists.

One of the best things about Piketty’s masterwork is his systematic demolition of his own discipline. Academic economics, especially in the United States, has for decades been gripped by a kind of professional pretentiousness that is close to pathological. From time to time its great minds have grown so impressed by their own didactic awesomeness that they celebrate economics as “the imperial science”— “imperial” not merely because economics is the logic of globalization but because its math-driven might is supposedly capable of defeating and colonizing every other branch of the social sciences. ...

Piketty blasts it all to hell. His fellow economists may have mastered the art of spinning abstract mathematical fantasies, he acknowledges, but they have forgotten that measuring the real world comes first.

However, on the prescriptions side? Frank points out that Piketty's French souffle just fell in the oven.

Yes, he talks about a wealth tax, which all other reviews have noted.

But, in an "emperor has no clothes" moment, Frank also points out that Piketty, a native of a country where even the farmers are unionized, doesn't have bupkis to say about boosting worker organization rights. 

Frank kind of buries the nutgrafs of a critical review three-quarters of the way down. But, I'm moving it up:

Turning to the problem of income inequality here in the United States, there is an even simpler solution (than a wealth tax), by which I mean a more realistic solution, a solution that builds on familiar American traditions,that works by empowering average people, that requires few economists or experts, that would involve a minimum of government interference, and that proceeds by expanding democracy and participation rather than by building some kind of distant and unapproachable global tax authority: Allow workers to organize. Let people have a say on the basic issues affecting their lives.

Piketty’s biggest blind spot is that he has virtually nothing to say about labor unions. He starts Chapter 1 of “Capital” with an anecdote about a bloody strike in South Africa and he returns to that same tragic episode at the very end of the book, but in between he addresses the matter almost not at all. Piketty talks a good game about democracy, but like other economists who have made inequality their subject, he prefers solutions that are handed down from the lofty heights of expertise. (My emphasis.)

As I said, the man's a native of a country where the farmers unionize. It's a blind spot, or worse.

That's why I use the phrase "left-neoliberalism," which I've talked about occasionally before. Click on that tag, at bottom, for more related posts.

Hey, France is full of technocrats. Christine Lagarde runs the International Monetary Fund, one of the holy of holies places of neoliberal technocrats. And, arguably, François Mitterand found the "Third Way" long before Bill Clinton or Tony Blair.

Calling this a blind spot might be charitable — and not just a little. I mean, per the sentence of Frank's that I bolded, isn't this the stereotypical neoliberal approach? Let us technocrats work out the solutions?

Frank then goes on:

It is not a coincidence that labor’s rise in the 1930s happened at the same time as the One Percent’s fall from grace, nor is it a coincidence that labor’s long decline has been almost a mirror image of the One Percent’s recovery of its nineteenth-century heaven. ...

The disappearing middle class? This is labor’s grievance par excellence. The minimum wage? Labor is always the loudest voice calling for an increase.

Frank admits that re-empowering organized labor is not the totality of the solution, either. He does note that it needs to be more of the solution in union-gutted America than in Europe.

Speaking of, Piketty apparently doesn't know a lot about America in general.

Frank also notes that this lack of knowledge is part of a bigger pattern of potholes in the book:

Unfortunately, Piketty’s enthusiasm for disciplines other than economics is more theoretical than anything else.

And, for someone claiming his book is as much history as economics, his American chocolate cake fell in the oven even more than his French souffle.

Whenever Piketty moves away from numbers and tries to describe life in the United States, things go wrong in a hurry. The worst example first: Piketty tells us that, unlike the French, Americans feel “no nostalgia for the postwar period” because our economy didn’t grow rapidly in those years. ...

Piketty’s command of American political history is, quite simply, abysmal. He announces that the U.S. “never became a colonial power,” which would be news to the people of the Philippines, not to mention the Sioux. ...

There are numerous other examples in Piketty’s enormous book of this weird blind spot concerning all things American; indeed, you could write an entire review just cataloguing them.

Bad, indeed.

At Counterpunch, Jack Rasmus gets at some of those same  union-related issues via a back door of sorts. Here's his key point on this issue:

Explaining inequality—not just reporting it—requires an analysis of how these various ‘forms of wages’ have been reduced in recent decades and especially since 2009. That deeper analysis leads to explanations of trends of destruction of unions and thus the higher union wage, the growing trend of outright ‘wage theft’ by businesses, the avoidance of paying overtime pay by reclassifying millions of workers as ‘exempt’ instead of hourly paid, the atrophying of the real minimum wage, the wage reduction effects of free trade, the shift to contingent labor, and all the reasons why the total unemployed (in and out of the labor force) are rising steadily and are chronically longer term jobless. Add to this the analyses of the many government policies introduced in recent years and decades that reduce the deferred, social, and future wage and underestimate the real wage.

Exactly. And, the noted destruction of unions has been part of the cause of the rest of this. But not all of it.

Compared to much of Europe, and especially Piketty's France, the word "union" has become a four-letter word to more and more vanishing middle-class Americans.

Well, folks that didn't happen out of nowhere. Since there is class war in America, the "unions are ebil" meme came out of the mouths of people who had reason to fear unions. And, it was easily sold. You're not middle class if you're in a union, you're working class. Plus, in traditional industrial unions, people who were promoted from line jobs to management were encouraged to leave unions for that reason. Probably, though I don't know for sure, back in the 1960s and ’70s, white folks promoted from line jobs to management were encouraged to leave their unions for other reasons, but that's another story.

In short, by missing the union part of the equation, Piketty is missing half the class warfare part of the issue.

And the need to re-empower labor, and workers' desire for that, was shown on May 15 by an international fast-food employees' strike. (That said, in details of the strike, I think $15/hr, without a phase-in of seven or so years, is too high. Even then, it might be a bit much. The $10.10 of Beltway rounds, with a four-year phase-in, AND a COLA clause as part of that, sounds about right to me.)

And, given that unionized French farmers have driven their tractors into the streets of Paris before, I can't believe this is totally accidental. So, thanks to Thomas Frank triggering some thought, I doubt I'll read Piketty's book.

The Velveeta is Too Damn Scarce in a #cheesepocalypse #fail

Image of food-like substance at The Consumerist.

Pardon me for not being sufficiently alarmed that we might (or might not) be facing a shortage of a food-like substance that might (or might not) be artificially ginned up by Kraft just in time for the Super Bowl.

Curious how there's no shortage of actual cheese, isn't it? Curious how there's also no reported shortage of generic Velveeta.

Both the Yahoo story above and The Consumerist, which led me to it, note that ginned-up food shortages around times of their highest purchase, aren't new.

But, just to prove this intersection of cheap economic manipulation is exactly that, there's only one person right for the job.

Matt Yglesias, author of a book-like substance called "The Rent is Too Damn High."

"The Velveeta is Too Damn Scarce!" Matt Yglesias journeys into the heartland to look for Sons of the Boboes, singing "Vibrating Velveetawurst" and looking for Trigger's remains. Oh, and he uncovers David Brooks' still half-smoked joint. Brooks, unlike Clinton, did inhale. But, when he realized that Boboes' dime bags always cost less than $10, he promptly put the joint back down and walked away.

More seriously? Yglesias really cares about as much about service workers as Kraft does about making real cheese and Brooks does about talking about real people. And, as for the "Sons" part? Maybe Brooksie did something after that joint toke that we don't know about. I mean, put a beard on him, and put him next to Matty Y and ???

God, I love the look of being snarky to multiple entities in the afternoon! Thanks, Lt. Col. Kilgore.

AP joins the economic fearmongering team

The AP story saying that, if the current recession last past April, it will be the longest in post-World War II history technically isn’t in accurate, but does a lot of “bending “ of reality.

It compares the current recession with 1981-82 only, failing to note that that recession was itself the second, and sharper trough of a double-dip recession that started in 1980.

That’s why on tags for this blog, you’ll always see “1980-82 recession.” I’m guessing, as I’ve blogged before, that AP writer Deb Riechmann is under the age of 40, perhaps under 35.

The story also ignores that, although the primary trough technically ended in 1982, serious job losses continued into 1983.

Economic fearmongering at TPM

It HAS TO BE an age-related thing, with bloggers and other online-heavy folks, presumably under the age of 35, or at least under the age of 40, totally ignorant of the 1980-82 recession, even to the point of seemingly salivating at the chance of using the “D” word. Paul Kurtz at Talking Points Memo is the latest guilty party.

Yes, it is true that, in terms of raw numbers, the U.S. economy lost the most jobs since 1945. But, even that is long after the Depression.

But as a percentage decline, it’s nowhere near as bad, considering the population of 305 million today is almost double that of 1945.

In fact, per CNN’s own graph, the 2008 losses aren’t as bad as 1982, as percentage of total population; it’s 8.5 percent for last year vs. 9.5 percent in 1982.

Tis also true that the unemployment percentage is going up, but it is nowhere near as bad as the last real recession, of 1980-82.

If you're not over 40, you may not remember the "double-dip" 1980-82 recession. But can we hold off saying this is the worst crisis since the Depression?

Now, it is true, as Kevin Phillips has so well noted, that unemployment calculation methodology has been, to be blunt, "fudged" since 1982. That said, some of the fudging had been done before then, as Phillips has also written.

And, as Phillips also has noted, fudging numbers has been a bipartisan affair, with Democrats back to JFK "trimming" on unemployment and the GOP "trimming" on inflation.

That said, as I note, there's a full percentage point difference between 2008 job losses and 1982. Even with allowance for fudging, I don't think you can say problems now are significantly worse than they were then.

I’ve said it before: Sometimes, whistling past the graveyard is nothing but false optimism. But at other times, becoming too afraid of the “graveyard” is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And, at least for now, I think the MSM is too much in “self-fulfilling prophecy” mode.

Also,2008 losses were less bad than two different consecutive years from the last serious recession.

First, per information from Jim Glass, about which I wasn’t sure and hadn’t checked, CNN, et al, doubly blew it, as has WM poster "Joe Friday."

Turns out 1983 was a worse year for job losses, by percentage of workforce, than both last year AND 1982.

Yes, the "augmented unemployment rate," of part-timers, discouraged and semi-discouraged, plus traditional unemployment, may be at 13.5 percent.

I found further relevant data back to 1970 at Brad DeLong's site going back to 1970, data about the employed as a percentage of the total workforce, just to further confirm what I've already said.

The ratio was .60 in 1982 and about .63 this year.

Adjusting for that, jobs lost to number of civilian employed, as percentage, was worse yet in 1982, at 15.67 percent, than the 13.45 percent last year, thus strengthening my argument.

Yes, there are other ways of skinning the cat, but per the job-loss measure which, as I said, is not fudgeable, 2008 wasn't as bad as 1982. Nor as bad as 1983; I noticed

Now, 2009 may well be worse. I'm not denying that. But, let's not yet get too much into doom and gloom.

Otherwise, folks like Mr. Kiel exemply why, although I'm on the demographic borderlands between Baby Boomers and Gen X, I don't want to be considered part of either group.

I am certainly not in the older end of the Boomers... the folks who screwed this up in the first place and inflicted narcissism on the future.

BUT... I'm not in the often-solipsistic mindset of Gen X, especially the younger part of that cohort.

Frankly, I think those of us born about 1961-66 are parts of a "lost generation."