Saturday, November 26, 2005

Violence Against Women A Moral Outrage

Women do not speak of domestic violence - WHO
One in six women worldwide suffers domestic violence - some battered during pregnancy - yet many remain silent about the assaults, according to the World Health Organisation.
"Women are more at risk from violence involving people they know at home than from strangers in the street. There is a feeling that the home is a safe haven and that pregnancy is a very protected period, but that is not the case," WHO director-general Lee Jong-Wook said.

Slain woman 'brought smiles to everyone' family remembers
CBC News
A pregnant teenager found in a Mill Woods townhouse Wednesday night died from multiple gunshot wounds, the medical examiner's office said Friday. A 19-year-old man, who police say had known Olivia Talbot since childhood, has been charged with first-degree murder in connection with her death.

The right wing will now decry this and call for more law and order, but it is their religious morality that is the cause of this violence against women.

Violence against women is the result of patriarchy, of the religious ideology that says women are the chattel property of their husbands, fathers, brothers.

It matters not which religious sect of monothiesm espouses the belief in the Sacredness of Marriage, those that speak of such sacredness are merely excusing their right to 'own' their wives. To do with them as they will, which includes beating and even killing them.

Recently, Mr. Oppal characterized the gang violence afflicting his community in Greater Vancouver as a "cancer." More provocatively, he said the difference in the way many Indo-Canadian families raise sons and daughters is a contributing factor. "There are still a lot of families who celebrate the birth of a boy but don't celebrate the birth of a girl," Mr. Oppal said in an interview. "And you see this reflected in the way they bring up their children. The boys get carte blanche treatment and the result is they grow up to be gangsters in many cases."

It is a moral depravity of these religions of patriarchy, and should be seen as such. While the religionists around the world are quick to denounce the moral turpitude of secular society, we must remember that this so called secular society is the result of humanities revlusion to the moral decadence, political power and its abuse by the theocracies that have ruled our lives.

Every time the religious establishment denounces sex education, womens rights, and humanism in general they are creating the continued conditions of oppression of women.

To say the unborn child takes precedence over the mother and her rights as a woman to choose, is to say she is chattel property.

To fail to have a comprehensive human relations education, sex ed if you like, in our public schools will continue to haunt us with examples like that above.

While denouncing sex education, what the religionist does is throw the baby out with the bathwater. For in having human sexuality education one learns tolerance, one learns about the problems of relationships including jealousy.

We cannot pray away these very real human emotions, nor can one hope they will not occur, they do in all relationships, and in order to mature into a relationship one needs education, including moral education. But that moral education needs to be humanist, to recognize the problems that exist in our relationships with each other and to also honour each other as inviduals not for our social roles.

The moral bankruptcy of leaving sex ed/human relations education to the Church/Temple/Synagouge etc. and to the parents continues to result in the abuse and death of women and children.

Until we recognize womens individuality, to their right to ownership especially over their own persons, and to own property, then violence against women will continue, it is the disease of patriarchy.

The Failure of Christianity

by Emma Goldman

Everywhere and always, since its very inception, Christianity has turned the earth into a vale of tears; always it has made of life a weak, diseased thing, always it has instilled fear in man, turning him into a dual being, whose life energies are spent in the struggle between body and soul. In decrying the body as something evil, the flesh as the tempter to everything that is sinful, man has mutilated his being in the vain attempt to keep his soul pure, while his body rotted away from the injuries and tortures inflicted upon it.

State Capitalism By Any Other Name

In the mercantilist period of Canadian History the State was crucial to the expansion of British Colonial monopolies in Canada, like the Hudsons Bay Company. The State cleared the way for the Private Railway company the CPR to expand westerward, and in order to make sure the CPR did not have a sole monopoly of the rail lines paid for by Canadians, the State created its own railway, CN.

Today the largest institutional investors in Canada are public pensions plans. The three largest are the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund and the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement Fund and finally our national Canadian Pension Plan, CPP. All three of late have been bemoaning the fact that they have had to invest overseas because the Canadian economy does not allow for Public Private Partnerships (P3's).

The irony in this is that the OTP and OMER are jointly funded by unions and the employers, in this case the State. And the CPP is funded directly by Canadian Taxpayers. Today CPP is one of the largest investors in commercial real estate in Canada.

CPP to pay $1B for malls
Quebec City, Sherbrooke: Pension giant's third billion-dollar deal this year

The CPP Board, which invests cash not needed for current pension-fund obligations, stunned the real-estate world this year with two major deals in a span of three weeks. The first deal was a 50% equity stake in the $2-billion takeover of O&Y Properties Inc. that was led by BPO Properties Ltd. Then it spent $1-billion to acquire a 50% interest in 11 properties owned by Oxford Properties Ltd., a subsidiary of the Ontario Municipal Employment Retirement System.
The pension fund's new dominance is symbolized by the fact it now owns half interests in two of the country's largest bank towers, the Royal Bank Plaza and First Canadian Place, both in the heart of Toronto's financial district. The expected price for the shopping-mall portfolio is reported to be in the $800-million-to-$1-billion range and based on a capitalization rate or rate of return of about 6.25%, will offer an extremely low rate of return, which is indicative of the strong demand for retail property. That demand has left pension funds increasingly as dominant players in the field because they can accept a lower rate of return than publicly traded entities.

The push for P3's by the government and the public pension funds are the modern form of State Capitalism in the age of neo-liberalism. Rather than having the State directly own enterprizes or businesses, as is the traditional definition of State Capitalism, the State is the investor in private enterprize. In this case the use of public pension funds is State Capitalism through the back door. Without this investment capitalism cannot function. So whats changed since the days of the CPR? Not much.

Pension fund capitalism

Peter Drucker, one of the foremost business theorists of the 20th century, who died earlier this month, understood all this. He predicted, 30 years ago, that western capitalism was moving towards what he called "pension fund socialism", a kind of economy owned by the workers through the pension funds being reinvested in the economy on their behalf. Back in the 1970s, Drucker thought the money pensions could raise for investment might reignite a golden age of economic growth. As America was ahead of the game in pushing its pensions on to the money markets, he argued, it could claim to be the first truly socialist country in the world.Since then, our economies have become much more reliant on pensions to keep them moving. But there is something strange about how institutional investors are investing those pensions on our behalf. In his book Pension Fund Capitalism, Professor Gordon Clark of Oxford found them guilty of loss aversion: being more worried about losing money than excited about making it.

Liberal's Real Crime of the Week

Lost in the whole fracas of the last couple of days, is the fact that the market leaped at the news that the government was lowering the dividend tax for corporations and reversed its public announcement that it was going to tax Income Trusts.

While the MSM and blogosphere are full of stories on the Harper comments on the Liberals being in cohouts with 'organized crime', this little bit of scandal was relegated to the back pages.

Barry Critchley writes in his Financial Post column yesterday;

"I was talking to some prominent lawyers and bankers and they were up there in Ottawa earlier this week and they were basically told this was going to happen," added the banker, who over the years has won his share of the deals that are up for grabs. "It's all over the street. All the people are talking about who had a heads up and who didn't." The events left the banker wondering whether Ottawa was interested in consultation or more interested in passing on inside information. "The government then tells a bunch of Bay Street insiders what it is going to do so they can profit." Clearly some people had better information than others about what has happening and there is only one place that information could have come from: the nation's capital.How else are we to explain the sharp jump in the price of income trusts over the past few days, a rise that climaxed on Wednesday, the day of the federal government's announcement that there would be no new taxes on income trusts. On Wednesday, the S&P/TSX capped trust index rose by 1.49%, with the bigger business trusts posting even larger gains. For the week ending Wednesday, the index was up by 3.61% .And how else to explain the action in the high dividend-paying stocks, such as BCE, on Wednesday. The stock, which hit a six-month low the previous day --jumped by 4.9% on Wednesday, on twice the normal volume.

CBC is finally reporting on this today on their website.

But trading in many trusts and dividend-paying stocks became much heavier than usual in the hour or two before the market's close on Wednesday, and share prices rose sharply.Forensic accountant Al Rosen said it looks to him that Bay Street knew the details of Goodale's announcement well before he made it. "Clearly, there was a leak between 2 [p.m. ET] and 4 [p.m. ET]," he told CBC News.

This is a very real organized crime, and the Tories said nary a word about.

Oh sorry the Harper did mention the words 'Income Trusts' in his non confidence speech, but with no reference to the fact that the market leaped on information provided in advance by the Liberals to their Bay Street Cronies.

That is the real scandal of this week.

But since it benefited Bay Street neither the Harper nor Monte Solberg were about to challenge the Liberals over this very real crime of insider trading especially since it was a Tax Break, something they have been ranting about for the last six months.

And clever Paul Martin created a smoke screen, with his faux outrage over the Harpers organized crime comments, with his threats to sue. Lost in the smoke was the Liberal insider trading leak.


Friday, November 25, 2005

Brass Monkey

I got balls this big...go on try and bust me.....
Black lambastes his U.S. 'persecutors'

Another Broken Promise

Ottawa acknowledges Chinese head tax
Great but the bill to actually pay back the Chinese Canadian community will die on the order paper on Monday. But like other pre election promises this didn't stop the Liberals from announcing it as if it was a faite accompli. The Liberals have once again sacrificed the Truth in order to get milage out of Reconciliation.
`Head tax' deal ignites controversy, Liberals sign with Chinese Congress, PM absent and no apology offered

Dead Blog

So I thought I would check out the Globe and Mails pick of the blogs, the usual mix of liberal and right wing bloggers along with the usual MSM suspects, on their website under 'Blog Spotting. Our Favorites'.

I found this blog by CTV Reporter David Akins.
David Akin's On the Hill Working notes by a Canadian politics reporter.

Now Mr. Akin has not posted since July!!! Hello Globe and Mail if this is your favorite well yer outtadate.

Mr. Akin says he is offline for a bit, lets see four months is a bit much in the blogosphere.
Friday, July 22
View Article Administrivia
This blog is offline for a bit and, until it's online again, I've turned off the ability to comment on articles here or provide trackbacks.

Guess no one's checking their links over at the Mop and Pail.

Bouchard's Bankrupt Nationalism

This should come as no surprise except perhaps to those leftists that still see Quebec Nationalism or Soverignty as the road to socialism. In fact Quebec nationalism is merely the creation of another capitalist market to compete with other national capitalisms in North America. In this case Bouchard true to his bourgoies roots as a nationalist and a capitalist, who came out of the Mulroney Tories to create the BQ wanted to move the PQ to the right. A merger of the right wing ADQ with the PQ would be like the merger of the old Reform/Alliance with the NDP. His recent manifesto from the right shows that this is his agenda still. Once again Quebec Nationalism offers nothing to the working class in Quebec except the rule of petit-burgoise shop keepers, carrerists, and opportunists.
The sooner they learn this the better off we all will be, as this is one of the most militant working classes in Canada. A militant working class that could unite the rest of the country in rebellion.

Bouchard eyed PQ-ADQ merger

Quebec — Just before he became Quebec premier, Lucien Bouchard invited the Action démocratique du Québec party to merge with the Parti Québécois after the 1995 referendum on sovereignty, ADQ Leader Mario Dumont says in a book released yesterday.

The statement underscores Mr. Bouchard's conflicting views with his party.

In the book, Mr. Dumont, 35, writes that Mr. Bouchard, who became PQ leader in early 1996, offered him a cabinet position -- which "would have meant the disintegration of the ADQ" -- in a bid to transform the PQ into a moderate nationalist party seeking political autonomy rather than independence.

Car Courtesy Kills

Canadians, with some exceptions, are cautious and polite drivers, which is why this is such a sad tale of self sacrifice. Obviously they need a better traffic infrastructure in Afgahanistan, some traffic lights or at least a traffic cop or two.
Canadian soldier swerved to avoid collision: sources
Ottawa — The accident that killed a Canadian soldier in Afghanistan on Thursday occurred when the driver of his armoured vehicle swerved to avoid a head-on collision with an oncoming car, The Canadian Press has learned.

Military sources said the LAV-3 — its inherent tippiness exaggerated by armour plates added recently to protect soldiers from explosions — rolled over after a civilian car with no headlights suddenly appeared out of the dark.

"It was a reaction by a driver who at the last second had to make a move to avoid a collision with an oncoming car that had no headlights on."

Now had this been an American military patrol the civilians would have been crushed.

Prehistoric Vaudville






Yoiks the Flintstones had it right.

OL' JOKE: CAVEMEN WERE CRACK-UPS


November 25, 2005 -- Take my loincloth — please! Cavemen invented slapstick — predating the Stooges and Groucho by a mere 2 million years.

Our ancestors laughed to relieve stress from continuous hunting and gathering, say Binghamton State University biologists David Sloan Wilson and Matthew Gervais.

A study of cranial evidence found that cavemen communicated through slapstick before language evolved.

Scientists from Binghamton University, New York, have revealed that cavemen invented slapstick humour two million years ago, with their funniest visual gag being something like 'tripping over a rock'.

Nearly four million years ago they turned to humour to relieve stress from all that hunting and gathering - and were grunt-like 'play panting'. It took another two million years before their face muscles developed enough for laughter. They perfected slapstick to communicate feelings before proper language evolved.

"Laughter was used for a number of things including conveying embarrassment," The Sun quoted Professor David Sloan Wilson as saying.

And after that humour became a subversive antinomonialistic activity of humans facing oppression, thus the creation of the carnival, the Saturnalia, and April Fools. To embarass and make fools of self appointed leaders.

Which is why the Marx Brothers are a sheer anarchist delight. Surrealism itself is found in the art of humour and silliness of the Marx brothers, especially in there word play which was based on the very real immigrant experience that they portrayed on screen.

I sent the club a wire stating,
PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION.
I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB
THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER.
Groucho Marx


"Don't you know what duplicates are?"
"Sure. There's five kids up in Canada."
"Well, I wouldn't know about that.
I haven't been to Canada in years."
Groucho and Chico Marx in A Night at the Opera

One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas.
How he got in my pajamas, I don't know.
Then we tried to remove the tusks. The tusks.
That's not so easy to say. Tusks.
You try it some time.
As I say, we tried to remove the tusks.
But they were embedded so firmly we couldn't budge them.
Of course, in Alabama the Tuscaloosa,
but that is entirely ir-elephant
to what I was talking about.
Groucho in Animal crackers (Movie)

Minister: "We need to take up the tax"
Groucho: "I'd like to take up the carpet."
Minister: "I still insist we take up the tax."
Groucho: "He's right -
you've gotta take up the tacks
before you can take up the carpet."
Groucho in Duck Soup (movie)

Coming out of Vaudville onto the Silver Screen the mayhem and disorder of the Marx Brothers with their disrespect for all authority reminds us of the Rennisance Carnivales that Mikhail Bakhtin deconstructed and revealed their lusty subversive nature. Not merely a bazaar or market place, the carnivale was the topsy turvy world of rebellion against the established order.

Rabelais and His World

Bakhtin highlights the happy activities of the commoners during the Renaissance - a subject matter and time period as intriguing as it is unexamined in popular literature. Few books can claim to be more captivating than one that describes the intimate details of the folk carnivals during the Renaissance. The Renaissance was a time of rebirth for much of Europe. The carnival culture that surrounded the Renaissance rebirth externalized this gaiety.

Bakhtin's point of departure is François Rabelais, a French writer in the 16th Century. Pre-Bakhtinian writers previously dismissed Rabelais' work as vulgar. Bakhtin has dusted off the pages of Rabelais' long misunderstood novels and transformed them into the most illuminating works the study of folk culture has seen. Bakhtin insists that within the scatological writing of Rabelais exist the necessary evidence to discover the history of folk humor, as well as the shocking practices of the Renaissance carnival.
Rabelais wrote Gargantua and Pantagruel between 1532 and 1552

The immediate goal of Rabelais and His World is to uncover the peculiar language and practices of the carnival environment. Bakhtin is quick to distinguish the carnival culture of old from the holiday culture that exists now. The carnivals that exist today pale in comparison to the unbridled lusting, crazed bingeing, and even physical mutilation that occurred in the carnival environment of days past. The carnival that Rabelais wrote about is quite unlike the modern carnival. In fact, so distinct are they that they share little more then just their common name. The Renaissance carnival culture involves the "temporary suspension of all hierarchic distinctions and barriers among men and of the prohibitions of usual life." (p15) Those that lived the carnival immersed themselves in the frolicking physical mutilation, bingeing and primordial gaiety that was the carnival.

Bakhtin divides the carnivalesque into three forms: ritual spectacles, comic verbal compositions, and various genres of billingsgate or abusive language. Although Bakhtin separates the forms of the carnivalesque, they are often conjoined within the carnival.

Mikhail Bakhtin analyzes the folk culture using an immense array of evidence from both historical and literary sources. Literary references that express the emotive and descriptive aspects of the carnival are legitimized by historical accounts that document carnival events, such as the marketplace cries of street salesmen. Because the material Bakhtin deals with is both unusual and often offensive to modern demands of literary taste, historical sources serve to legitimize Bakhtin's scholarship to those who might otherwise doubt Bakhtin's scrupulousness. Bakhtin surely recognized the risk that many people would disrespect his work. Undaunted by this worry, Bakhtin published this book to further the study of a crucial part of human social development, namely the development of humor and sarcasm; a study that has been mostly ignored by both literary and historical scholars.


George Orwell maintained we didn't know when humour began but he identified it as social embarassment, as upsetting the social order. With the discovery of prehistoric humour, we can say that he was right, and it was as true then as it is now.

George Orwell

Funny, but not Vulgar

A thing is funny when — in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening — it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution. If you had to define humour in a single phrase, you might define it as dignity sitting on a tin-tack. Whatever destroys dignity, and brings down the mighty from their seats, preferably with a bump, is funny. And the bigger they fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better fun to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at a curate. With this general principle in mind, one can, I think, begin to see what has been wrong with English comic writing during the present century.



Capitalism=Climate Change

The apologists for capitalism, including the President of the US and the President of the Christian Broadcasting Network, keep calling global warming and climate change junk science to avoid the uncomfortable conclusions that capitalism kills.

While climatologists use the euphamistic 'human acitivity' lets note that the activity is the industrial revolution, the origins of capitalist society. Since capitalism is rapacious in its need to constantly expand and make a profit, it is capitalism and its child industrialization that have created global warming, along with cancer, and other environmental problems that affect us as individuals and as members of the global community.

Humans have existed for thousands of years with appropriate levels of technology that did impact on the environment as Engels points out in the essay below.

However this is nothing like the impact that capitalist transformation of agriculture and its industrial modernism have had in the last 100 years. As this irrefutable evidence from the Anarctic proves.

Core Evidence That Humans Affect Climate Change

  • Ice drilled in Antarctica offers the fullest record of glacial cycles and greenhouse gas levels.

  • By Usha Lee McFarling, Times Staff Writer

    An ice core about two miles long — the oldest frozen sample ever drilled from the underbelly of Antarctica — shows that at no time in the last 650,000 years have levels of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane been as high as they are today. The work provides more evidence that human activity since the Industrial Revolution has significantly altered the planet's climate system, scientists said. "This is saying, 'Yeah, we had it right.' We can pound on the table harder and say, 'This is real,' " said Richard Alley, a Penn State University geophysicist and expert on ice cores who was not involved with the analysis.

    A long term research effort known as the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica, or EPICA, recovered the new ice core from a site in East Antarctica called EPICA Dome C.


    The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man

    Frederick Engels 1876

    Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that with these farinaceous tubers they were at the same time spreading scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature -- but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.

    And, in fact, with every day that passes we are acquiring a better understanding of these laws and getting to perceive both the more immediate and the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional course of nature. In particular, after the mighty advances made by the natural sciences in the present century, we are more than ever in a position to realise, and hence to control, also the more remote natural consequences of at least our day-to-day production activities. But the more this progresses the more will men not only feel but also know their oneness with nature, and the more impossible will become the senseless and unnatural idea of a contrast between mind and matter, man and nature, soul and body, such as arose after the decline of classical antiquity in Europe and obtained its highest elaboration in Christianity.

    It required the labour of thousands of years for us to learn a little of how to calculate the more remote natural effects of our actions in the field of production, but it has been still more difficult in regard to the more remote social effects of these actions. We mentioned the potato and the resulting spread of scrofula. But what is scrofula compared to the effects which the reduction of the workers to a potato diet had on the living conditions of the popular masses in whole countries, or compared to the famine the potato blight brought to Ireland in 1847, which consigned to the grave a million Irishmen, nourished solely or almost exclusively on potatoes, and forced the emigration overseas of two million more? When the Arabs learned to distil spirits, it never entered their heads that by so doing they were creating one of the chief weapons for the annihilation of the aborigines of the then still undiscovered American continent. And when afterwards Columbus discovered this America, he did not know that by doing so he was giving a new lease of life to slavery, which in Europe had long ago been done away with, and laying the basis for the Negro slave trade. The men who in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries laboured to create the steam-engine had no idea that they were preparing the instrument which more than any other was to revolutionise social relations throughout the world. Especially in Europe, by concentrating wealth in the hands of a minority and dispossessing the huge majority, this instrument was destined at first to give social and political domination to the bourgeoisie, but later, to give rise to a class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat which can end only in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the abolition of all class antagonisms. But in this sphere too, by long and often cruel experience and by collecting and analysing historical material, we are gradually learning to get a clear view of the indirect, more remote social effects of our production activity, and so are afforded an opportunity to control and regulate these effects as well.

    This regulation, however, requires something more than mere knowledge. It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and simultaneously a revolution in our whole contemporary social order.

    All hitherto existing modes of production have aimed merely at achieving the most immediately and directly useful effect of labour. The further consequences, which appear only later and become effective through gradual repetition and accumulation, were totally neglected. The original common ownership of land corresponded, on the one hand, to a level of development of human beings in which their horizon was restricted in general to what lay immediately available, and presupposed, on the other hand, a certain superfluity of land that would allow some latitude for correcting the possible bad results of this primeval type of economy. When this surplus land was exhausted, common ownership also declined. All higher forms of production, however, led to the division of the population into different classes and thereby to the antagonism of ruling and oppressed classes. Thus the interests of the ruling class became the driving factor of production, since production was no longer restricted to providing the barest means of subsistence for the oppressed people. This has been put into effect most completely in the capitalist mode of production prevailing today in Western Europe. The individual capitalists, who dominate production and exchange, are able to concern themselves only with the most immediate useful effect of their actions. Indeed, even this useful effect -- inasmuch as it is a question of the usefulness of the article that is produced or exchanged -- retreats far into the background, and the sole incentive becomes the profit to be made on selling.

    Classical political economy, the social science of the bourgeoisie, in the main examines only social effects of human actions in the fields of production and exchange that are actually intended. This fully corresponds to the social organisation of which it is the theoretical expression. As individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken into account. As long as the individual manufacturer or merchant sells a manufactured or purchased commodity with the usual coveted profit, he is satisfied and does not concern himself with what afterwards becomes of the commodity and its purchasers. The same thing applies to the natural effects of the same actions. What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees-what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock! In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite the opposite in character; that the harmony of supply and demand is transformed into the very reverse opposite, as shown by the course of each ten years' industrial cycle -- even Germany has had a little preliminary experience of it in the "crash"; that private ownership based on one's own labour must of necessity develop into the expropriation of the workers, while all wealth becomes more and more concentrated in the hands of non-workers; that [... the manuscript breaks off here ...]