"Ask not at whom the chimp smirks-he smirks at you"
So goes the logo for the website blogging community "The Smirking Chimp".
The following two linked articles, however, raises the question of just who are the chimps.
The Grim Reaper Pays A Visit To Wall Street
Subprime or Subcrime? Time To Investigate And Prosecute
The first involves the overall market plunge over the last week, which was engendered almost wholly due to panic resulting from the more specific problems expressed in the second article.
Chimp indeed. One of the main things that made me realize the human race probably is in the final analysis no more than an animal, albeit a higher evolved one (and that is arguable) is the simple fact they never seem to learn from history, do they?
Here is how real life works. Let's say you have a house that twenty years ago might have been worth 50,000 dollars. The value of your home goes up, up, up, and you mortgage yourself to the hilt, as it continues to go up in value to where it is eventually priced at 500,000 dollars.
Now the market crashes, these hedge funds are worth the paper and ink they are printed on, if that, and you want to come crying and begging for a bail-out.
My question is, WTF? What did you think was going to happen? Did you think if you held onto the house and kept mortgaging it, and all your other assets, the house would eventually be worth 5 million dollars? 50 million dollars? Did you think the motherfucker was just going to keep increasing in value, with no end in sight?
These people never learned from the tech bubble of the nineties, obviously. I bet if you mentioned the Great Depression to them, they wouldn't know what the hell you were talking about. Oh, some of them might have heard of it, but I bet even most of them couldn't tell you jack shit about what it was about, when it was, who the President was when it hit, the causes, or even what century it was.
Some of them probably think the Great Depression is when a birth mother gets post partum depression so bad she drowns her kids in a bathtub.
There is a very compelling section in the novel "Planet Of The Apes" by Pierre Boulle, one that unfortunately was never dramatized in either the first or the latest movie versions.
In this segment, the hero is taken by his intelligent chimpanzee handlers to a place that was remarkably like an Ape World version of Wall Street. Throngs of apes were calling out orders for various stocks, they were climbing ropes and chattering in typical true ape fashion. It became more and more raucous, the noise became deafening, as the apes continued to bark and swing and climb, hopping around and up and down on the floor madly.
In this one and only this one segment of the novel, the apes revealed their true natures-they were, in the final analysis, nothing but fucking apes, after all.
I thought that was quite revelatory, and always wondered why that never made it into either movie version. The author seemed to be putting Wall Street on the same level as something akin to a Wrestlemania event, a kind of setting where people, or in this case apes, just let go of their pretensions, and let flow their more savage natures through an outlet that is expressly for that purpose.
Perhaps Boulle was on to something. More chillingly, perhaps the Wall Street financiers and institutions have figured out a long time ago, that if you cater to mankind's basic human animal instincts-in this case greed (ok, I'll say it-for lack of a better word), you can manipulate the savage horde of beasts to go along with any trend.
Fine, so they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. So should the housing contractors who took advantage of the situation by hiring illegal immigrants, whom they paid peanuts in comparison to what they would have been obliged to pay an American worker-yet they still charged exorbitant prices. How's that for a real kick in the nuts?
Yeah, for sure, there is plenty of blame to go around. Not only should they be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, but there should be new and more strident laws and regulations aimed at hopefully preventing this from happening again, or at the least severely punishing those who perpetrate it.
Otherwise, you just know it is eventually going to happen again. There will eventually be another bubble, and the same kinds of ignoramuses will jump right on the bandwagon, same as always. In some cases, I wouldn't be surprised if many of them will be the same exact people that fell for this latest scam.
And of course, when that as well bottoms out, which of course it eventually will, they will be looking for a bail-out. Just like the people who fell for it now are hoping for a bail-out.
Should there be a bail-out, though?
I look at it this way. Your stupidity harmed more than your own selves. It didn't affect me, but if it continued much longer, I might eventually have ended up in the same boat as a lot of people in other locales-having to pay increased property taxes. Your stupidity in a great many cases caused them to increase in some areas more than should have been the case, thereby causing a real hardship for a good many people that didn't deserve to be caught up in the middle of your ignorance and affected by it.
You also made it harder in other ways, such as for example by making it more difficult for working class Americans to be able to afford a decent home in their price range.
You are as much responsible for that as the Wall Street pimps and the Private Contractor whores. You're just another set of johns that got caught with your dicks hanging out.
Don't expect any sympathy from me.
