Oh, we are looking forward to this one.
Elizabeth Warren is expected to take the gavel of the Senate Banking Committee in January, and somewhere on Wall Street, a room full of very expensive suits just developed a collective case of indigestion.
The old schoolmarm is getting her own classroom.
And we suspect there are going to be some lessons.
Warren has spent years asking bankers, executives, regulators, and assorted financial wizards questions they would rather not answer. She has an irritating habit of reading the fine print, remembering what people said last time, and expecting the numbers to add up. All admirable qualities in a teacher. Considerably less popular qualities in someone questioning a billionaire under oath.
Now she may have the committee gavel, the hearing schedule, and the authority to summon some of those reluctant pupils to the blackboard.
Show your work, gentlemen.
Explain the fees. Explain the bailouts. Explain why the losses belong to the public but the profits remain private. Explain how an industry sophisticated enough to manufacture financial instruments nobody can understand somehow becomes helpless whenever somebody suggests regulating them.
And please, no copying from the lobbyist sitting beside you.
Which brings us to our cartoon.
The guillotine is an old political cartoonist’s favorite. It has been representing the abrupt end of privilege since the French Revolution. Nobody is proposing actual decapitation here. Subpoenas are considerably more civilized, and much better at producing documentation.
But the symbolism is irresistible.
For generations, political cartoonists have been doing exactly what today’s internet calls making memes. Take a complicated political situation, reduce it to one recognizable image, exaggerate the important parts, and let the audience finish the joke. A top hat means a banker. A money bag means greed. A guillotine means somebody’s comfortable arrangement may be coming to an unpleasant conclusion.
That’s what we’re playing with here at the Midway Meme Machine. Political cartoons, visual jokes, memes, whatever we decide to call them. Sometimes a picture can make a point more efficiently than a thousand words of explanation. Sometimes it’s just funny. The good ones manage both.
We don’t expect Warren to fix American finance single-handedly. A committee chair cannot legislate by herself, and an investigation is not a conviction. There are still rules, votes, competing interests, and plenty of people with expensive lawyers.
But after years of watching financial institutions explain why accountability is bad for business, we are positively delighted by the prospect of watching them explain themselves to Elizabeth Warren.
The woman knows her material. She has been preparing this lesson for decades.
Class begins in January.
Recess is cancelled.
And Wall Street had better bring a number two pencil.
