This time out, some cartoons showing the effects, rather than crashes themselves.

The Merry Go Round, by Harrison Cady, showing the rich partying on the backs of the working poor who support them — an appropriate image for today’s Wall Street, rescued by all of us, and now raking in huge profits, caring not for the massive unemployment they brought about. From Life magazine, 1912.

Click on any picture, to see an enlarged version.

Below, two more cartoons from The Picayune, in the wake of the Panic of 1857… Left, a sick man unable to afford medicine. Right, One of the Unemployed, by Frank Bellew.

During the Great Depression, in June 1932, President Herbert Hoover had protesting unemployed WW I veterans chased out of Washington, D.C., with bayonets and tear gas.

The images below and above, are all from Great Depression-era cartoon pamphlets, sold on the street by unemployed WW I veterans in exchange for change — it was a more dignified method of raising a little money, than outright begging. Similar in concept to the modern Street News sold by the homeless in New York City, some of the pamphlets had prices on them, but, many simply asked for people to pay the veteran selling them, what they wanted.

The above two pages are from the pamphlet Halt Friends! Below left, the cover of Hello Buddy, and, below right, a cartoon by artist Art Young, from yet a different Hello Buddy pamphlet. (The same titles were often re-used, while the covers and interiors would vary. Numerous other titles also existed.)

Click here to find both the prior Wall Street Frauds Make Wonderful Cartoons entries, and related I.T.C.H. posts. This series will continue, while the debate on financial reforms continues in Congress (except Mondays and holidays, on which I already had other material planned).

Series Refrain: Bank frauds and Wall Street swindles, resulting in economic ruin for everyone else, were regular and frequent occurrences prior to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s institution of laws designed to prevent further Great Depressions. These regulations worked until, starting in the 1980s, conservatives began dismantling those protections, stating that we’d be better off with an unfettered and unregulated market, free to do whatever it wants. Wall Street firms swore at that time, that they’d learned the lessons of the Great Depression, and could be trusted to not engage in dangerous practices.

Bull****!

If there is one lesson from the various economic collapses throughout history, it’s that human greed is eternal. There will always be selfish fools, who grab for themselves without care for the damage they inflict on others.

Doug Wheeler

financial reform

BellewSr

NYLife

NYPicayune