In a Deck of Cards, Finding \'52 Shades of Greed\'

By ALAN FEUER

Just in time for the one-year anniversary of the occupation of Zuccotti Park on Sept. 17, Occupy Wall Street's Alternative Banking group is offering for sale an acerbically educational set of anti-capitalist playing cards.

The 56-card deck - it includes four jokers - has face cards depicting Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary, as the King of Hearts (“Pushed to deregulate CDS”), and Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, as the Jack of Clubs (“Fights aggressively and successfully against bank regulation”). The numbered cards are illustrated with lesser lights from the finance world (Angelo Mozilo, the former chief executive officer of the mortgage lender Countrywide, is the Nine of Hearts) and with technical terms from the Great Recession like Repo 105 (the Eight of Spades) and Shorting Your Clients (Five of Diamonds).

The project, titled “52 Shades of G reed,” started three weeks ago, when the banking group reached out to Marc Scheff, a freelance illustrator in New York, and asked him to do some drawings of “the people and institutions responsible for causing the financial crisis,” Mr. Scheff wrote in a posting on the fund-raising Web site rockethub.com.

Mr. Scheff collaborated with a partner, Daniel Nyari, and soon collected drawings from 28 artists from around the world. “The vision evolved into making a visually dynamic and coherent set of cards with text and illustrations that would give people a snapshot of who the players are in this casino we call the world financial system,” Mr. Scheff wrote.

The deck can be purchased for $5. A poster of the cards is available as well.

On Monday, Mr. Scheff said sales of the initial cards had been so successful that he was planning to produce a second deck. This deck, he wrote in an e-mail, would “focus not on ‘the bad guys' but on resources and tools for people who want help navigating in the current economic environment.”