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Anna Anthropy, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form: Short ode to the potentials of single-authored videogames made using readily available software, often for free or donation-funded distribution. I have to admit that it’s not a genre that I’ve ever been fannish about or see myself getting fannish about, but I recognize the emotions and commitments, and if videogames are a major method of communication then absolutely we need not just the blockbusters but everything else.
Eliot Spitzer, Protecting Capitalism Case By Case: Released as a free ebook as part of Spitzer’s campaign, this is a fullthroated defense of going after corrupt business practices that steal billions through largely unnoticed means; the only shocking thing is that this position needs a defense.
Perhaps the most interesting to me was Spitzer’s complete willingness to embrace everything else about neoliberalism, including speaking of public schools with the same scorn as he had for the big banks—public schools are monopolists, you see, and “Competition is the elixir of capitalism.” I didn’t realize that our aim in providing education was actually to have the schools compete to outdo each other in … what exactly? Profit? He just asserts that charter schools have spurred traditional public schools to do better, which as Diane Ravitch documents is not what the evidence shows. Conceptually, the biggest problem with saying “capitalism is awesome because competition is the best way to get good outcomes, so we need regulation to preserve competition” is that one has to wonder: against whom does government compete? Intergovernmental competition is problematic because of the ways in which local governments can easily slough off various externalities onto each other—something he explicitly recognizes both with respect to private companies and even with governments, when he discusses his campaign to get the midwestern states to stop sending their pollution over New York’s skies.
Not entirely unrelatedly, Spitzer divides crimes that are undeniable, that no one disputes occurred, and crimes that are more unclear. White-collar crime is in the latter category, but he puts rape and homicide in the former—it’s loose talk on his part, but it’s loose talk from a position of privilege not afforded most women or, for example, Trayvon Martin.
That said, Spitzer’s zeal to bring down the thieves of Wall Street is commendable, and the various abuses he describes blood-boiling. A simple side note to all the financial system’s ticklike behavior on the body politic: the head of the New York Stock Exchange paid himself 99% of the NYSE’s net income, comprising over 50% of fee increases charged to members. He didn’t think he’d done anything wrong (though he did hide some of the compensation from the board), and when Spitzer left, the remaining regulators ultimately let him off the hook. As he says, “Corporations may be people, but we haven’t yet figured out how to sanction them as people.” Among his sensible suggestions: in cases of financial malfeasance, the sanctions have to include the (ir)responsible people at the top losing their jobs. (He also points out, correctly, that conservative antifederalist arguments aren’t really arguments for state control: the moment he and other state regulators started in with their wonderful experimentation and variation, it turned out that uniform national preemption was absolutely required to leave the financiers alone to work their equity-stripping magic.)
Eliot Spitzer, Protecting Capitalism Case By Case: Released as a free ebook as part of Spitzer’s campaign, this is a fullthroated defense of going after corrupt business practices that steal billions through largely unnoticed means; the only shocking thing is that this position needs a defense.
Perhaps the most interesting to me was Spitzer’s complete willingness to embrace everything else about neoliberalism, including speaking of public schools with the same scorn as he had for the big banks—public schools are monopolists, you see, and “Competition is the elixir of capitalism.” I didn’t realize that our aim in providing education was actually to have the schools compete to outdo each other in … what exactly? Profit? He just asserts that charter schools have spurred traditional public schools to do better, which as Diane Ravitch documents is not what the evidence shows. Conceptually, the biggest problem with saying “capitalism is awesome because competition is the best way to get good outcomes, so we need regulation to preserve competition” is that one has to wonder: against whom does government compete? Intergovernmental competition is problematic because of the ways in which local governments can easily slough off various externalities onto each other—something he explicitly recognizes both with respect to private companies and even with governments, when he discusses his campaign to get the midwestern states to stop sending their pollution over New York’s skies.
Not entirely unrelatedly, Spitzer divides crimes that are undeniable, that no one disputes occurred, and crimes that are more unclear. White-collar crime is in the latter category, but he puts rape and homicide in the former—it’s loose talk on his part, but it’s loose talk from a position of privilege not afforded most women or, for example, Trayvon Martin.
That said, Spitzer’s zeal to bring down the thieves of Wall Street is commendable, and the various abuses he describes blood-boiling. A simple side note to all the financial system’s ticklike behavior on the body politic: the head of the New York Stock Exchange paid himself 99% of the NYSE’s net income, comprising over 50% of fee increases charged to members. He didn’t think he’d done anything wrong (though he did hide some of the compensation from the board), and when Spitzer left, the remaining regulators ultimately let him off the hook. As he says, “Corporations may be people, but we haven’t yet figured out how to sanction them as people.” Among his sensible suggestions: in cases of financial malfeasance, the sanctions have to include the (ir)responsible people at the top losing their jobs. (He also points out, correctly, that conservative antifederalist arguments aren’t really arguments for state control: the moment he and other state regulators started in with their wonderful experimentation and variation, it turned out that uniform national preemption was absolutely required to leave the financiers alone to work their equity-stripping magic.)
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