Humans are behind a number of species extinctions, but in Uganda it's chimps that are hunting monkeys into oblivion. Chimps in Uganda have been hunting red colobus monkeys, so much so that the monkey's population has dropped 89% from 1975 to 2007. The findings were reported in the American Journal of Primatology this week.

http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/05/chimps-hunting-monkeys-closer-extinction

I watched a few documentaries on the History/Discovey channels over the years and these chimps are far more powerful than we are physically. They will rush through their environment in a a manic hunt for monkeys. The videos of these chimps tearing apart monkeys is really disconcerting.

I mean these simians are literally screaming after their kills brandishing the limbs of the monkeys in an orgy of terror.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTPkmH4hWCs

WALL STREET

I have blogged about the chimps who run our banks and our mortgage companies on several occasions. I know next to nothing about economics to be sure; but I have read hundreds of essays concerning the 2008 downturn which began sometime in 2006.

In 2008 alone the banks lost over half a trillion dollars. http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2008/08/bank-losses-hal.html

And corporations like Goldman not only stole money from its shareholders, management lied about the actual amount stolen. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-14/goldman-reveals-details-of-5-billion-of-crisis-losses-ft-says.html

There were so many repercussions to this crash it is hard to enumerate them all. Pension funds lost huge percentages of their holdings. Corporations lost huge percentages of their holdings overall. Individuals lost on their 401k's and IRAs and...

But we as a nation lost hundreds of billions in taxes.

America got its TARP back but the banks did not even pay taxes on the monies they paid back.

Sure we got 2 or 3 % on investment but since we lost all those taxes, that ROI was almost meaningless.

Yet, in 2008 thirty or so CEO's received half a billion dollars in compensation. Of course there are definitional problems with the concept of 'compensation'. http://seekingalpha.com/article/85806-bank-executive-compensation-and-the-bailout

I mean do these charts include the cost of the limousine services, the stock options, the stocks, the pensions, the full parachutes? Oh and how about the special condo provided so that the head chimps can properly cheat on their wives who have signed all those pre-nups?

Now the rest of management involved in these hedge funds/banks/Wall Street headquarters also did rather well. Citibank lost 6 billion and the top employees for Citibank 'earned' 6 billion... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1081624/Goldman-Sachs-ready-hand-7BILLION-salary-bonus-package--6bn-bail-out.html

And yet you will hit WSJ or some other Murdoch funded cheat sheet and they all attempt to minimize the fact that management was not only stealing from the shareholders; management was sending the shareholders into debt.

Over the last four or five years there have been layoffs by these same banks/mortgage companies/Wall Street entities.

Corporate profits grew 38.8 percent in 2010, the biggest increase since 1950. But while CEOs earned an average of 20 percent more last year, many Americans continued to lose their jobs and benefits. The insecurity of the middle class has a lot to do with how executives are paid. Bonuses pegged to stock prices encourage CEOs to mercilessly outsource and downsize, slashing costs to boost profits. The result is that more corporate leaders are getting paid at the expense of average workers. Here are 10 of the worst offenders http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/05/ceo-executive-pay-layoffs

This chart from MJ is enough to make any monkey mortally ill.

Hundreds of thousands of employes at these institutions were fired. They were sent onto the street and following the recovery of Wall Street, even more monkeys were fired by these management chimps.

Of course as a short cut to tweaking my memory I ran to Taibbi's blog.

Taibbi gives us one anecdote about a monkey eating chimp demanding huge bonuses in 2007 for breaking the law and gambling on the predicted downturn with other peoples' money.

To recap: in October of 2007, Birnbaum was pounding the table for a raise for his great work making a big short bet that year, going so far as to send a written presentation to management pointing out that what he did wasn’t simply a financial precautionary measure, not a hedge, but a balls-out bet. Imagine how sure you’d have to feel about a subject in order to send a memo like that to your company’s top executives.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/testimony-goldman-style-a-tour-through-the-levin-report-20110513

Oh and you have to check out how a mega-corporation like Goldman will screw the lowliest of the low just for fun! I mean it turns out that it steals the tips from the lowly beer servers at baseball stadiums. Goldman could not make that much profit relative to its other felonious activity.

It is like Goldman just does it for the fun of it!

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/goldman-steals-tips-from-beer-servers-20110513

The chimps feel they deserve more.

The chimps feel that they need more.

The chimps will stop at nothing to get more.

All to the expense of the working monkeys.

The narrator exclaims

These blood stained faces might well horrify us.