Wall Street and Political Corruption

wall-st-water-1100

Transcript:

Two white people, both dressed in business wear, are talking. We’ll call the man on the left “Senator” and the woman on the right “WS.” WS is carrying a huge industrial hose, out of which water is pouring.

Panel 1
WS: Hi, Senator! I’m from Wall Street, and I’d like to give your campaign some water!
Senator: Forget it! I don’t sell my votes.

Panel 2
A close up of WS, smiling reassuringly.
WS: Don’t worry. We only want to give you water and talk to you about our point of view.

Panel 3
WS: Over time, we’ll keep providing water and you’ll keep listening to our views.

Panel 4
WS: At first because you need the water, but then because we’re just so smart and sensible.

Panel 5
WS: And when complex economic bills come up, we’ll be glad to offer advice. We are the experts, after all!

Panel 6
We back away from the close-ups and see a full body view of both people. They are now completely submerged in the water that’s been coming out of WS’s hose.
Senator: I guess there’s nothing corrupt about that…
WS: Nothing at all!

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21 Responses to Wall Street and Political Corruption

  1. 1
    ginmar says:

    Women make up 20 or 30, at most, of the 535-member Congress, but by all means, let’s use female figures in a world where a female candidate has been subjected to vicious sexism. Blaming women all out of proportion to the power they hold in the real world id TOTALLY equal, isn’t it?

  2. 2
    MJJ says:

    Women make up 20 or 30, at most, of the 535-member Congress,

    104 (20 Senators, 84 Representatives).

  3. 3
    Tamme says:

    Still the decision to portray two women is odd.

    I don’t have stats on how many women are corporate lobbyists but I can’t imagine it’s a large number.

  4. 4
    Doug S. says:

    To me, the WS character looks like it could be either sex…

  5. 5
    Sarah says:

    Amp’s comics have always included diverse characters, usually in a way that tries to avoid tokenizing one of them – so, often both characters in a comic will be women, or both POC, or both visibly gender nonconforming. I notice it especially in cases where this isn’t related to the explicit message of the comic (for example, the comics where a marginalized person is speaking about their marginalization to a person with the corresponding privilege). In cases like this, I think including two women in the comic, rather than two men or even one man and one woman, is a deliberate contribution to the effort to normalize woman characters in media. That’s how I read it initially.

    What did make me wonder about the relevance of the characters’ gender was the haircut of the politician character, which resembles Clinton’s. I’m not sure whether I should be reading this as a comic about or even just alluding to her, or not.

  6. 6
    Ampersand says:

    Sarah just said exactly what I was going to say.

    I used to approach “casting” the political cartoons just as Tamme and Ginmar suggest – I would almost always draw the CEOs, high government officials, wealthy power brokers, and right-wing anti-feminist types in my cartoons as white men, because in the real-life USA, most of those folks ARE white men. That approach makes a lot of sense, and I still use it fairly often (such as in this cartoon about antifeminists, in which nearly all the characters are drawn as white men, and the occasional non-anti-feminist characters we see are all women and sometimes POC).

    But because a disproportionate number of my cartoons are about “CEOs, high government officials, wealthy power brokers, and right-wing anti-feminist types,” the result was both that I was hardly ever doing cartoons in which we could see two women or two POC (or both) talking to each other. And that started to bug me, for the reasons Sarah said. When I watch/read media, I like seeing characters other than white men in all roles – heroes, villains, ordinary people, etc. And I also like shows in which we actually get to see women and POC (and WOC) talking to each other. So I began consciously doing more of that in my comics, as in this comic.

    Regarding the hair, it wasn’t intended to be Clinton – I just googled photos of “female politician” and stole the hair from one of the photos that came up. (It was someone I’d never heard of). But that was a mistake on my part. With hindsight, I should have made the Senator a brunette, or nonwhite, to avoid people reading this as a cartoon about Clinton.

  7. 7
    RonF says:

    I didn’t see the WS character as female when I read the cartoon.

    I don’t have stats on how many women are corporate lobbyists but I can’t imagine it’s a large number.

    When I worked for a major medical device manufacturer the Sales department, noting that most physicians are male (and even more back when I was working for them *harrumph* years ago), deliberately hired bright, young, attractive women to call upon them. I would not be surprised to see corporate lobbying concerns follow the same strategem.

  8. 8
    Ruchama says:

    I didn’t see the WS character as female when I read the cartoon.

    WS is wearing a skirt and heels and earrings.

  9. 9
    nobody.really says:

    Still the decision to portray two women is odd.

    I don’t have stats on how many women are corporate lobbyists but I can’t imagine it’s a large number.

    Maybe it didn’t use to be a large number.

    I take this cartoon as Amp’s expression that trans acceptance is growing!

  10. 10
    RonF says:

    I didn’t look at the legs and feet of the WS character and missed the detail of the ear.

  11. 11
    Ruchama says:

    I noticed the skirt and heels in the first panel, when I was looking more closely at the hose, trying to figure out what it was.

  12. 12
    RonF says:

    The sex of the two people talking could well be interpreted as a shot at Clinton – which seems legitimate to me, after all, this is a woman who has decried Wall Street in this campaign after taking in ~$23 million in speaking fees to a number of firms that include Wall Street ones.

    But that’s kind of a side issue. Corruption is no less a danger to the Republic if it comes on slowly and insidiously than it is if it is a straightforward bribery transaction, and this cartoon illustrates (see what I did there?) the process well.

    That’s not to say that legislators shouldn’t listen to the viewpoint of the people affected by the legislation they craft. But listening is one thing. Dependence on them is another. And they should give plenty of time and expenditure of expertise on other voices as well, ones that will tend to not be nearly as well organized or represented. Representing them is what legislators are elected for.

  13. 13
    damigiana says:

    I’m not that good at faces, so I tend to identify people by haircut and hair/eyes/skin color, and I also read this as an anti-Clinton cartoon.

  14. 14
    Mandolin says:

    Regarding the hair, it wasn’t intended to be Clinton – I just googled photos of “female politician” and stole the hair from one of the photos that came up. (It was someone I’d never heard of). But that was a mistake on my part. With hindsight, I should have made the Senator a brunette, or nonwhite, to avoid people reading this as a cartoon about Clinton.

    ]

    Can you revise it? This has been really bugging me.

  15. 15
    Ampersand says:

    I’ve revised the cartoon, to make the senator a white man. The original cartoon, for those who want to see it, can be seen here.

  16. 16
    nobody.really says:

    I’ve revised the cartoon….

    Cool. So how do you do that? Do you have to re-draw the whole thing? Or is the whole thing saved in some editable computer format? Or is it partially saved in some computer format (say, before words are inserted), and you can revise the cartoon but then you have to re-insert all the words?

    See, the Trump campaign has hired me to crank out pro-Trump cartoons–and I figured I’d just hack your magic drawing pad and alter some of yours. I’m just trying to figure out how much work this’ll be.

    (Relax; I wouldn’t dream of ripping you off. Of course the cartoons will still be attributed to B. Deutsch, so it’s all good. I mean, what are friends for?)

  17. 17
    RonF says:

    I’ve revised the cartoon, to make the senator a white man.

    Why?

  18. 18
    Ampersand says:

    Ron: To avoid people reading this as a cartoon about Hillary Clinton in particular, rather than about influence-buying in general.

  19. 19
    LTL FTC says:

    But it’s pretty well documented that this sort of critique applies to her, right?

  20. 20
    Ampersand says:

    Nobody Really:

    Cool. So how do you do that? Do you have to re-draw the whole thing? Or is the whole thing saved in some editable computer format?

    I draw all my cartoons 100% in computer. So it was just a matter of selecting and cutting all the Senator figures, then drawing in new Senator figures. The words are on a separate layer, so there was no need to touch them. And, actually, I had drawn the water on a separate layer too, so I didn’t need to alter that.

    From what I’ve heard about Trump and contractors, you’d better make sure you get paid in advance for those cartoons.

  21. 21
    Ampersand says:

    LTL FTC: I don’t know about documentation of this. But yes, I’d expect this critique to apply to Clinton, although not uniquely to Clinton.