Open Thread

Header: possibly interesting books from Acres USA Bookstore March 35% off sale.

Two of the books written by Charles Walters, founder and editor of Acres USA, were about his particular thoughts, views and interpretations of and on economics. One was an economic and social-economic history of the United States . . . basically “how we got here” . . . called Unforgiven . . . the American Economic System SOLD For Debt and War.
Here is the link to it.
https://bookstore.acresusa.com/collections/2025-book-catalog/products/unforgiven

The other one is Raw Materials Economics. The extended little sub-title-masthead statement on the cover says: ” Physical facts, not abstractions, preside over the economic exchange . . . This makes agriculture the flywheel and the balancewheel of the economy.” Here is the link.
https://bookstore.acresusa.com/collections/2025-book-catalog/products/raw-materials-economics

For those who would like to do a little bit of exploratory reading in a similar vein to see if they want to buy these two more extensive go-deeper more-detailed books, here is the NORM ( National Organization for Raw Materials) website which has numbers of little articles on some of the subjects gone over in these two books.
http://www.normeconomics.com/
If clicked on, the homepage screen has a tiny little set of clickable links to articles in the upper left hand corner.

Finally, in the book Unforgiven, Charles Walters wrote about he felt himself very informed and assisted by a book called Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt: the Solution of the Economic Paradox, by Frederick Soddy, a two-times Nobel Prize winning nuclear chemist in Great Britain. Soddy’s deal was . . . ” what would a reality-based economics look like if a reality based person like, say, a nuclear chemist with some physics knowledge were to try building such a theory of economics from the real ground up? Here is a free pdf download of that whole book . . . every single page.
https://archive.org/details/soddy-f.-wealth-virtual-wealth-and-debt-1925/page/n3/mode/2up

The Soddy book is long out of print. So it was very nice of someone to put up this pdf.
But the two Walters books are in print and available at 35% off from Acres USA Bookstore till end of March. I have both books. If anyone gets them and finds themself bored or dissatisfied, they have only lost some money. I feel that I have gained a lot more than the ” some money” I spent on these two books.

Noteworthy reading today:

Rob Urie – On Trump economic prospects and useless Democrats. Urie has a good handle on economic history and razor clarity about US politics. Has become one of my Must Read people, like Ian.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-158461685

And a good one from Y Smith at NCap about how Trump is bungling the negotiations with Russia and Ukraine. Interesting because of perspective it gives on Trump. Also ruefully funny to see how clueless the big dope is at the very thing he leans on to promote himself.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/03/trump-trying-to-retrade-minerals-deal-with-ukraine.html

Second that on Rob Urie comrade.

Let’s do a little deconstructing here.

Robert Zimmerman was never really a fighter for the masses himself. I remember Chomsky writing that he or someone else once asked Dylan about the increasing lack of freedoms for the people and he responded something to the effect of ‘Well, I’ve got my damn freedom, so…” I’m paraphrasing here but that’s the gist of it.

The vast majority of these people with perhaps some exceptions were easily swallowed up by ‘capitalism’ (communism’s co-evil twin). That’s if they were ever serious to begin with. Here, I’ll let Chuck D himself explain how it works:

https://youtu.be/oOLd4sQxfgM?t=1063

So, that’s the extent of our protest right there.

There’s plainly not a lot of ‘righteous indignation’ to be found here. At all.

What you oppose (within the system) you end up maintaintaining. And strengthening. It’s designed this way. There is no other way it could be given its structure.

Can anyone imagine Bob Dylan now living a simple proletarian life and strumming only an acoustic guitar?

If you tried to talk to Bob Dylan or many many of the protest artists of that time about how they themselves have lost their way…Well, they would get very angry at you.

They’re successful beyond perhaps even their own wildest imaginings and there’s no way they’ll ‘give up’ what they have and that’s what would happen if any of them started to speak out. which they won’t anyway.

there aren’t even any more farm aids.

how about a massive poor aid concert?

hands across america?

You never had any hope of truly fighting the power with the Chuck D’s of the world. And if you listen to what was perhaps Dylan’s greatest anthem, ‘it’s alright ma, i’m only bleeding’ – anticipating the rap-hip/hop style – the lyrics aren’t really about doing anything about the conditions Dylan was observing. in fact, he’s sorta calling out the protestors:

‘meanwhile life goes on all around you’

the lyric ‘those aren’t busy being born are busy dying’ has been taken to mean ‘born’ by succeeding within the zeitgeist of the society: making money beyond all what is necessary, careerism. and this is true among the artists themselves though their careerism is one would imagine more satisfying than a career corporate networker. but who knows? it’s all the same.

When is the last time you heard any of these people – from the old sixties/seventies protest artists to the more recent hip hoppers…when is the last time you heard any one of these people say something like:

‘wow, the conditions i’ve been singing/rapping/artisting about have been getting much much worse for more and more of the people yet i’m personally doing much better myself. and that’s the problem.’

Those are the kind of ‘protest’ artists one might look to.

hell, even Jerome powell said during the pandemic that he was upset at seeing the homeless people on his way in to work!

the pump don’t work cause the vandals took the handle

Joni Mitchell wrote ‘big Yellow Taxi’ while visiting Hawaii for a tour and she was evidently saddened by the parking lot she saw from her hotel window.

To my knowledge, she’s never written a more recent song about all the more pavement there is since she wrote the first one.

Unaware? doesn’t care?

But it’s a nice song and it’s been ‘covered’ many times thus keeping the real owners happy.

The Broccoli family recently had to give up rights to the James Bond franchise to amazon.

Chuck D of Public Enemy fame has around 15 million dollars now. Most middle class people in the US who’ve worked their whole lives, ‘done everything right’ and what have you don’t have that money. They might have a couple million dollars at most. And they’ve frankly worked a lot harder than Chuck D.

Ice Cube has 150 million dollars yet he’s a voice/hero of segments of the oppressed.

——–

Prozak Turner – the William Burroughs of hip hop:

https://prozackturner.bandcamp.com/album/high-enough-feat-brother-ali-single

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOLd4sQxfgM&t=384s

And now for something completely different:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecZqSY1jj9I

That Rob Urie was brilliant, I’d read him a couple times before, thanks– A key line for me was “The point: what is rational (efficient) at the level of individual firms is suicidal at the level of national economies.” Yep, but people are so dumb that they believe “a government should be run like a household,” from decades of financial press propaganda.

I’d read the NC piece on the Trump crew bungling “peace” negotiations when it came out. Yes, they lack competence (one thing we can be thankful for) just like the Bidet crew. The Greek Canadian lawyer did an excellent piece on Trumpco blowing this, with John Helmer, who lives in Russia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tHYnaKsqrY The Trump admin is on Ukraine’s side, they will not achieve a peace.

I know that every admin is more fascist than the previous, because that’s what it’s been in real time. The Carter admin may have been nominally less destructive than Nixon’s Crime Cult, Reagan lurched hard toward the war on drugs, the poor and the non-white, and the incipient fascism has accelerated with every administration since. Great to see Joe’s pile-up of deportations reveal the lies of an AOC, but of course Obama was himself “the deporter-in-chief” during his admin.

I might want to respond to some of the music notes here in a separate post. For the time being, I’ll say the World’s future is not “so bright I gotta wear shades.” In fact it’s so dark, we all might as well being wearing blindfolds. Anyway, the MAGA CHUDs all do, as do the Dimmie Cheering section, so I guess the decline won’t be as bad, relatively, for them.

“Success in America? You’d better take a hard look at that.”
Cecil Taylor
Long ago I had the opportunity to hang out with that avant-garde jazz pianist and poet along with Amiri Baraka and other beat poets, playwrights and musicians. (Somewhere I have a notebook filled with quotes and recorded conversations.)

They were aging then and deceased now, but they still believed in the transformative power of music and the written and spoken word to affect change and help uplift consciousness.

Whatever their faults as human beings, I detected no cynicism and an unwavering commitment to their art and social causes.

When I relayed some of my experiences to another poet and writer of moderate success, I received an interesting response. “Those people have more money than you and I ever will .”

Bit of course. They had patrons and sponsors and people who wanted a piece of them. Hardly household words, Cecil could still fill a concert hall and Amiri was declared poet laureate of New Jersey, or some such title that was later stripped for his stance on 9/11.

Anyway, yes, success corrupts, it goes with the territory. What to do? I’m using those people as examples of artists who maintained commitment and integrity to the revolutionary spirit. My take anyway.

When I quoted lyrics from a young Bobby Zimmerman and others I was speaking to a disappeared time, place and spirit that inspired, influenced and uplifted me.

That is all. I hope the spring season truly brings a sense of renewal and the possibility of new beginnings, no matter the prevailing chaos. Don’t let the bastards get you down.

“This year, due to the termination of grant support for various programs by the United States government, 51% of independent Ukrainian media may cease operations, including from 51% to 70% of regional media.”

“— This was announced by the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Humanitarian and Information Policy, Vice-President of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, Mykyta Poturaiev, who spoke at the First Additional OSCE Meeting on the Human Dimension, dedicated to the role of the media in conflicts and humanitarian crises, Ukrinform reports with reference to the parliament press service.”

Is an unseen hand like the legendary “invisible hand” in terms of its ability to form and shape political events?

If no one reports it, is that like the sound no one is in the forest to hear?

I am not sure if “independent media” means what I might have supposed those words ought to mean.

Who pays for the cacophony that keeps me so ill-informed? and, why? Questions too unlikely to be asked. Or. heard answered.

Most people get tired of living with righteous indignation all the time, that’s why the torch has to be passed from one generation to another. Chuck D is old, he’s not fighting the power because he is the power, so to speak. Like hearing MAGAs in government blaming things on the deep state. Government Magas, you ARE the deep state. Idiots.

Fight the Power still rocks for those of us with some fight left in them. It’s inspiration, not a road map.

Not exactly rap and not exactly a protest song, but here’s something inspired by the Iraq invasion. The “bang” is a double entendre, about sex and also about going to war, for those who need a road map.

Bombs Over Baghdad

Don’t pull the thang out, unless you plan to bang
Bombs over Baghdad, yeah! (Ah, yeah)
Don’t even bang unless you plan to hit something
Bombs over Baghdad, yeah! (Ah, yeah)

I tried earlier leaving a comment containing a link to the Mike Meyers PM Parker political campaign video, and the system vaporised it. Since that link was already hard to find, I will only mention that it existed and may be found with enough work.

I then went on to note that I have read a rising number of American travelers in other countries are putting Maple Leaf patches on their backpacks and coats and etc. If any Canadian travelers were to spot these people, they might have some fun discussing deep and obscure elements of Canadian culture with them to see what they know. Especially if there is an audience.

i listen to all this music too! well, not all of it. i discrminte.

in the fitth grade i had a pair of parachute pants and i was listening to roxanne chante and spoonie gee and the treacherous three. this wasn’t protest music, mind you.

music is music. what fills the soul fills the soul!

i dated a beautiful girl from newark, nj. her name was le’nee. like renee. we met when i was down there gettin’ high near the now-closed baxter terrace. we both cleaned up for a time, but…

i love you le’nee.

i turned le’nee on to yes’ siberian khatru. so that was interesting.

but i digress.

queen latifah is financing new apartments near the now torn-down baxter terrace. this is all in the area of njit and rutgers. njit used to be called newark college of engineering. my dad, a lower middle class kid from next-door elizabeth whose mother, my grandmother, grew up on a farm in nebraska and left a man she was engaged to for my father’s father – a man i never met – who was stationed in nebraska.

it’s hard to keep the kids on the farm.

move to elizabeth and a union job as a toolmaker and grandma was an administrative assistant. the beginnings of tv. cars. factory jobs. being exposed to mass commercialism, unhealthy food…what a life!

and my father went to newark college of engineering.

anyway, queen latifah’s mixed-use apartments or whatever the setup is do have a few set-asides for ‘low income’ but you know how that goes. even those are out of the price range of most these days.

so there is no way to ‘build wealth’ whether an italian developer, an irish developer, a jewish developer, an arab developer, or a black developer. there is still massive poverty all around this area but they are just throwing whatever they can up piecemeal based on ‘what the market will bear’ with no real city planning to speak of whatsoever.

but ya know, they don’t talk about this on 88.3 wbgo – a decent jazz station based in newark. and i haven’t heard mayor ras baraka talk about it either.

you’re not allowed to talk about anything being public and you’re not allowed to harken back to the way things were so as to see that there are things from the past that need to be implemented today. there is no institutional memory of this. wbgo has become npr’ed and pbs’ed. neoliberal everywhere including these cities.

want me to tell you about the mayor of philly? neoliberal. atlatnic city? neoliberal

corrupt…as…hell

———-

the point of looking at the money was simply to illustrate what goes on. it’s not particularly profound anyway. everybody knows this.

imagine fred hampton doing this is all i’m sayin. like, there’s nothing ‘grassroots’ about anything like there was back then. or nothing remains so for long.

we need more mutual aid societies. a lot more.

the revolution will not be televised, internetized, nor smartphonized. please be on your best behavior.

they no longer gotta sic dogs on ya
long as the bodega turns starbucks on ya

what happened to starbucks unionizing? waiting for the courts to tell you us we can?
how about amazon?

what happened to the general strike? nick at the ‘revolutionary black network’ and that milieu of the left were talking about it a while back. now maybe 2028?

is this how things used to work? i know it’s a slow-grinding process and you never really win ‘fighting the good fight’ but you keep on pushin’ because we gotta keep on keepin’ on.

but is anybody pushing the way they used to in the old days? does anybody remember how?

2028?

so, there is a genocide in the middle east and on the russian border among other places and also everyone’s social security is going to be taken away and medicaid and ‘health care’ is almost gone and the entire country is being looted and privatized and immigration raids and AI chatbots replacing everything and more and more human beings without a place to call home and on and on and on and on

shouldn’t we all be marching on washington right now?

let’s plan a general strike for maybe 2028?

——-

i’m going to go to this: https://www.mobilize.us/mobilize/event/766520/ if i can get there and talk to people about all this. i mean, come on man.

i figure we should be up and rolling by next month with the general strike. i’m on it.

music, incidentally, should be as pure as possible. on this there can be no debate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNUxfkXUNO8

—–

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI0cfzAF4as

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydAANC7sl0Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEjISINkR24

Pretty much all the pop music from the 60’s for kids has been documented as being engineered by the CIA, for the purposes of distracting from The War and blurring the appeal of (proper) Leftism (socialism, communism, anarchism) which often comes with pacifism. Many if not most of the performers were either old-money (trustworthy) or military kids. If you look closely, you will not see a true leftist in the bunch. Zappa was a military kid himself who supported the Vietnam War (he changed on wars later) and hated hippies and marijuana. His drug was black coffee. I was always troubled by the words of “For What It’s Worth.” While commonly understood in my era (70’s) as protest song, it makes fun of people protesting. Actually, it is an anti-protest song, and David McGowan gives the history of this and the whole 60’s ‘soft rock’ era in “Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon” (Laurel Canyon, above Hollywood, I lived nearby btw). Basically it’s all “fake,” (and I mention Zappa because he’s the best….but still fake…and the others are far more fake). McGowans blog was far longer back in the day. Dylan’s Blood on The Tracks may have been best pop album CIA ever produced, had ghostwriters and was assembled incredibly fast as a distraction from current events.

yep. essentially all true although they weren’t all immediate sons/daughters of military or monied family. others get pulled in simply by virtue of their musicianship.

zappa smoked three packs a day and when he got cancer he and his wife made a song mocking it. he didn’t like working with people who were fuc*ed up and couldn’t play. he didn’t mind what people did so long as it didn’t affect their ability to play.

hells angels for protection in haight ashbury

the music seems designed to firecely de-holisticize and individualize. opposite of ravi shankar’s the whole secret of music is playing around with one note.

the grateful dead were intentionally never political. ok, us blues. but they said they never wanted to get caught up in the politics. made no bones about their being apolitical.

it’s hard to come to terms with all i’ve learned. the music is a part of you from a very young age. seventies love songs and AM radio baby.

going graceland?

———-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEp0aKCsrig

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l32VTUsTCqI

@Miss Jennings,

Yes, best to start slow and small. Maybe prepare just enough soil space in a bright sunny area for 2 or 3 tomato plants and a sunflower maybe. If the process itself turns out to be fun enough that you would want to expand in small increments so as to preserve the fun, then you can expand very slowly and carefully.

And if you enjoy reading books about this subject in the meantime, that is good to do too, even if not actively physically gardening at the time.

If “sharing” were called “barter”, anti-sharing people might not feel so bad about doing it at the small individual and neighborhood scale.

Here is a possible vision for people to consider considering: one foot in the Forced Market Economy and one foot in the Free UnMarket Countereconomy.

According to petal at NC there are printed ‘Hands Off blah blah blah’ signs that include NATO in the messaging. I didn’t see even that level of stupidity in the cookie-cutter websites.

different clue, thank you for the suggestions! Tomatoes definitely. Very good soil and conditions for it here.

There was something known as a ‘Jersey tomato’ growing up that had a very specific taste which is hard to describe but which has since all but disappeared. I think the college ag depts got too crazy into hybridizing stuff for larger industrial ag (which is well before the rise even of the GMO stuff).

This ‘larger industrial ag’ is in fact much smaller than what we have today. They made everything sweeter and designed for machines. Human-driven machines. Smaller tractors. Now there are these huge ag machines that take up more than two lanes of highway when they’re moving them about on said highways.

I imagine they would like to have everything farmed by huge robotic machines. But the machines aren’t capable of the epidermial sensitivity required for healthy whole food.

give me spots on my apples but leave me the birds and the bees

Anyway, I will post updates. I am planning to get some blueberry bushes – it’s a sandy/loamy soil here – and I’d like to get some of the ‘wild’ variety which require less maintanence and are less sweet (I of course put ‘less maintenance’ before even the health benefit of less sweet and getting my system slowly adpated to, dare I say, almost entirely ‘natural’)

There is a ‘common mulberry’ tree in the yard which I gathered the berries from and put on my cereal for the first time last year. I still ended up buying a lot more berries in the store but at least I did it. I would always miss the somewhat small window to ‘get’ them. You have to get ’em right when they’re ready to fall for optimum taste and nutrition. I ended up both picking and gathering off the ground. This year I’ll put something down ahead of tme. That’s the plan.

None of this kind of thing is done in the area I live in. Trees like this are aesthetic to people, but at least many people around here have gardens. Suburbia is weird like this. The small yard here also has pokeweed! I let a lot of the stuff grow in the back. I cut the lawn, that is part of the deal of my staying where I am rent free. The owner, a friend, is rarely here. There is a fence around the entire backyard which on the one hand I don’t like because I’d rather achieve privacy via nature but on the other hand it has allowed me to let things grow back there and just see what comes up. A lot of different things grow each year and i have pictures and have identified some but I haven’t made it a way of life to any degree which the mind requires to in order to really both remember and work going forward. I would like to get rid of the lawns entirely!

A person can spend hours reading Ran Prieur! I’ll never get anything done.

“Dylan’s Blood on The Tracks may have been best pop album CIA ever produced, had ghostwriters and was assembled incredibly fast as a distraction from current events.”

Phil Ochs wrote a lot of Dylan’s stuff. Ochs was cointelpro. He was in Chile when Allende was overthrown, or just prior to, and he was right there when JFK was killed.

A quick search yielded no specific articles about Blood on the Tracks specifically. But there are plenty of names to play with simply from the Wiki page. Interesting the interplay between the record companies, the return to Columbia via the marriage-ending relationship with the Columbia employee. According to that biographer anyway.

The stuff of movies.

So, they began work in September ’74 at Rabinowitz’ studio for a planned December release but Dylan wants it redone so it goes out end of January ’75. The war ends three months later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_on_the_Tracks

Dylan’s family/early life history:

‘Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman (his Hebrew name is Shabtai Zisl ben Avraham) iin St. Mary’s Hospital on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota. Dylan’s paternal grandparents, Anna Kirghiz and Zigman Zimmerman, emigrated from Odessa in the Russian Empire (now Odesa, Ukraine) to the United States, following the 1905 pogroms against Jews.

His maternal grandparents, Florence and Ben Stone, were Lithuanian Jews who had arrived in the United States in 1902. Dylan wrote that his paternal grandmother’s family was originally from the Kağızman District of Kars Province in northeastern Turkey.

Dylan’s father Abram Zimmerman and his mother Beatrice “Beatty” Stone were part of a small, close-knit Jewish community. They lived in Duluth until Dylan was six, when his father contracted polio and the family returned to his mother’s hometown of Hibbing, where they lived for the rest of Dylan’s childhood, and his father and paternal uncles ran a furniture and appliance store.’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Dylan

But this album, or any of its songs specifically, really have that much impact on distracting the masses?

I don’t know that Blood on the Tracks was really ‘pop’ in 1975. It didn’t get much radio play initially anyway and the radio play it did get was probably more niche programming. Commercial radio, no doubt, but not what the masses were hearing by and large.

I know it’s google but they give the best immediate visual/text illustration:

https://www.google.com/search?q=1975+pop+songs

My mother used to listen to WNEW out of NYC while preparing breakfast for us in our little ranch house in NJ. William B Willams the DJ in his magic ballroom.

Bob Dylan said something like ‘thank god for jerry and the boys…they play my music better than I do.’

Yes, yes I know. The Grateful Dead are guilty. I’ve seen Bobby talking about his conversations with Buffalo Bill Quinn, founder of the OSS. Bob Weir always looks like he’s tripping. He has scary dark eyes sometimes. Empty eyes.

Bob starts with the obligatory ‘The conspiracies aren’t true…there’s no virgin sacrifices there!” ha ha ha and everyone has a good laugh and then he moves on to talking about important entrepreneurs and businesspeople and movers and shakers before ending with the coup de grace to all proles in the audience about his convo with OSS founder Quinn:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0UMENa_IAg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wilson_Quinn

My friend’s brother used to ‘plug in’ to the soundboard at shows. So not just audience tapes but soundboard quality. Although that didn’t necessarily translate to great sound.

——-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru9efQketsA

Early 80’s sped-up Dead. The cocaine years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojQTA8z5reQ

——-

I don’t like ‘these people and country are smelly’ and of course we here in the US are now being advised to have backyard animals for food! Ah the irony. Too bad so many innocent people have to die. Anyhow, there’s a lot here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tixOyiR8B-8

—–

Just this last one I was thinking about. Louisville ’74 is generally regarded by many in grateful dead fandom to be the best version. ‘heads’ – a term i don’t care for – can be very discriminating which is fascinating because most non grateful dead people across the board generally think the music – particularly its live versions which both the band and most fans prefer – most non-fans think the music sucks. And i don’t listen to most of it these days. even on pot. but the point here is that I love this version with Branford Marsalis. This and the ’75 version when they hadn’t played live most of the year are my favorites. Good recordings of both. But first here’s a really thoughtful interview with Branford. I hope to be this mature some day:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnnoHPFMs3U

——–

This is pure unadulterated improvisational genius:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk7odWtx1c8 (Jerry and Branford are feeling each other throughout, needling each other, making musical love so to speak, as is the entire band)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UANnXUskz1I

So is this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZOkyQx3jIw

@mago,

I have been through New Jersey a few times and just barely in it a time or three. It is a very big state for its size.

They grow more than just chemical plants in New Jersey. Parts of it were very high quality fruit-vegetable growing lands and some may still be. The Rutgers tomato was developed in New Jersey at Rutgers University. The Pine Barrens is one of three small areas where the Pine Barrens tree frog still survives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Barrens_tree_frog

Professor White at Rutgers University has been doing very groundbreaking research on bacterial endophytic rhizophagy by plants.
https://sebsnjaesnews.rutgers.edu/2018/09/prof-james-white-researches-how-plants-harness-microbes-to-get-nutrients/

So . . . more than just chemical plants.