Economic Meltdown Funnies

An important part of fight for laws and regulations that will end abusive lending is building a broad popular understanding of the real causes of the financial crisis. To the extent that the financial industry and its allies can convince the American people that the problem was greedy borrowers (rather than greedy lenders) and misguided goverment regulation (rather than the almost complete degregulation and desupervision of the financial industry), the prospects for real solutions are diminished.

The battle over writing the history of our current financial crisis is taking place on many fronts, including scholarly journals, Congressional hearings, radio and TV, opinion pages of newspapers and, of course, the blogosphere. And now our friends at Jobs for Justice and the Working Group on Extreme Inequality have turned to a different medium: the comic book. In words and pictures, Nick Thorkelson and Chuck Collins place the rise of predatory lending in a much bigger context, and identify the real culprits. Not everyone likes the comic book format, but for those who do, the Economic Meltdown Funnies is definitely worth a look.