Some 2,800 people have been infected and 81 have been killed by the new coronavirus that began spreading from a seafood market where wild animals were sold for food in Wuhan, China. Public health officials have quarantined 50 million people in the region surrounding Wuhan and report that more than 30,000 people who have had close contact with infected persons are currently under close medical observation.
In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has screened some 2,400 travelers arriving from Wuhan at five major airports. Of the 110 people that the agency is tracking and testing for infection, five have tested positive, 32 have tested negative, and results are still pending for 73 people.
Some evidence has emerged that infected people may be contagious before they show signs of infection. If so, this would make it more difficult for public health officials to prevent further spread of the disease by tracing, tracking, treating, and medically isolating people who may have come into contact with infected folks.
In trying to predict how the disease may spread, epidemiologists are trying to figure out what the basic reproduction number (R0) is for the new coronavirus—that is, the number of people on average to whom an infected person will pass along the disease. For example, the R0 for seasonal influenza is estimated to be around 1.3 people exposed to an infected person. According to CDC data, 35.5 million Americans suffered from flu last year and 34,200 died of it, yielding a mortality rate of around 0.1 percent.
A preliminary study by Chinese researchers suggest that the R0 is around 3 for the Wuhan coronavirus, meaning it’s more contagious than seasonal influenza. That study also noted that by January 24, some 1,287 cases had been confirmed, resulting in 41 deaths. Those raw numbers yield an alarming mortality rate of over 3 percent. (For what it’s worth, the R0 for the Black Death in medieval Europe was also around 3, but the mortality rate after disease onset was close to 100 percent.)
A preprint by British researchers analyzing the epidemic in Wuhan estimated that only about 5 percent of infections had been actually identified by January 24 which suggests that about 26,000 people were then suffering from the disease. If that estimate is correct, a rough calculation would yield a 0.15 percent mortality rate for the Wuhan virus. Parsing the latest reported cases and deaths yields essentially the same mortality rate. The coronavirus mortality rate is a bit above the seasonal flu rate in the U.S., but not hugely so.
Of course, these crude and provisional calculations do not warrant complacency. On the other hand, the speed with which Chinese scientists using modern biomedical technologies identified the virus and subsequently provided public health agencies and researchers around the world with the genetic information needed to track it is heartening. We will soon learn if humanity’s increasing biotechnical prowess combined with vigorous public health responses can prevent Wuhan’s coronavirus from developing into a modern pandemic.
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Monday marks international Holocaust Remembrance Day, which has been designated by the United Nations General Assembly since November 2005 to commemorate and memorialize the 6 million Jews killed in the Nazis’ state-sponsored genocide carried out across Europe during World War II.
The day also marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, which was remembered by world leaders gathered in Jerusalem last week.
75 years ago today over 7,000 prisoners of the German Nazi #Auschwitz camp, including ca. 700 children, were liberated by the soldiers of the Soviet army. 1,689 days of murder, humiliation, suffering, and pain were over. Today we all remember. | #Auschwitz75#OnThisDaypic.twitter.com/af5m1cs83d
In 2018, a shocking survey was released by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany revealing that two-thirds of American millennials didn’t know enough about the Holocaust. In fact, 66 percent of those surveyed couldn’t identify Auschwitz correctly as an extermination camp or a concentration camp.
In 2019, Pew Research conducted a similar study and found staggering results. Pew found that only 43 percent of American adults “know that Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany through a democratic political process.”
Moreover, 45 percent knew that 6 million Jews were killed, and what’s more three in ten said “they are not sure how many Jews died during the Holocaust, while one-in-ten overestimate the death toll, and 15% said that 3 million or fewer Jews were killed.”
These numbers combined with a rise in antisemitic hate crimes begs the question: as we move further away from our history and lose living proof of the atrocity, are we more likely to repeat it.
Many argue that education is the antidote to another Holocaust. I spoke with several university students last week to understand what younger generations, specifically those who are a part of Generation Z, are learning about the atrocities of the Holocaust today and if they believe it could happen again.
The following are some of their answers:
“I have heard that history repeats itself…”
“So far my classes we haven’t talked about that. In all my history classes, we’ve talked about…more like the nineteenth century. What I know about the Holocaust it comes from my parents actually taking me to… I grew up in Mexico, so back in Mexico we have a brand new museum about the Holocaust, but that was actually years ago,” said one student studying International Affairs and Dance.
Her classes, she said, are more “focused on certain topics” and “very condensed into one time period and one topic” citing “American diplomacy” as one of the taught subjects.
She concluded, “I have heard that history repeats itself, definitely. And everyone knows about it – they have the general knowledge of what happened, but they don’t know the specific details, including myself. I can’t say that I know all the details about it, so I just think that being informed is always better, so I would like to see, I guess, more information out there for people who would like to know more about it.”
Could it happen again?….”It’s certainly a possibility”
“It’s not relevant to my major, but I took a United States history class and we definitely touched upon it, but not as much as we could’ve,” said Val, 20, “I’ve been to the museum, but I haven’t really taken a class on it in particular.”
“I think in this day and age, it’s certainly a possibility cause of the political polarization and kind of the demeaning of other human beings that they’re lesser and that’s kind of what our leaders are saying about other human beings and kind of ostracizing people into one group and considering them lesser than another type of person, so I hope it’s not a possibility, but it definitely could be in some way.”
“I don’t think it could happen again…”
“In high school I learned about the Holocaust just through general history. We spent maybe a year on it,” Sebastian, 18, a Business Administration major said.
“I believe the Holocaust is such a widely known event, I don’t think it could happen again maybe something similar but it’s just hard to tell. I think that if people don’t receive the education about the Holocaust that might in the future have people become more susceptible to starting something like that, but I don’t see it happening in the future to come.”
Antisemitic hate crimes are on the rise even “with people talking about the Holocaust now…”
Victoria, 21, a Senior studying political science told me she learned most of what she knows about the Holocaust studying WWII in her courses throughout high school and middle school.
“I know that it was a terrible devastation for the community and it’s definitely something that should still be remembered to this day,” she said.
“I know there’s been a recent surplus in hate crimes. I’m from New York and I actually have a girl that went to my high school that spoke with AP talking about how there’s just been a lot of hate crimes going on and I know there’s a very unfortunate situation where someone was speaking different slurs to her and I believe spit in her face and this is still with people talking about the Holocaust now, so I do think it would only get worse if we don’t keep on remembering it.”
The only student who knew that six million Jews were killed….
“I definitely learned about it in school a lot from history class and I’ve been to the museum a couple times too, so I know a little bit about it, but not like a lot,” said Jin, 19.
Jin was from Korea, so he told me he didn’t have any knowledge of the Holocaust from school. He was, however, the only student that could recall that 6 million Jews were killed in the genocide.
“Nothing to that extent would ever be able to happen again. I have hope.”
Kit, 19, told me he learned about the Holocaust in middle school and high school in various history and anthropology courses. He told me he didn’t think the Holocaust “to that extent” would ever happen again.
He explained, “I think for a number of reasons, I have faith in people… obviously there are antisemitic groups out there, but I just don’t think that with the legislative bodies that we have in place and with the number of good people that I believe are out there. Nothing to that extent would ever be able to happen again. I have hope.”
“I don’t think that we should be outlawing learning about the Holocaust.”
Trenton, 20, learned of the Holocaust in high school and even attended a school trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington.
“I don’t think that we should be outlawing learning about the Holocaust. I went to a speaker here about the Rwandan genocide and he talked about this issue too and how he thinks we should be learning about genocides in general and it should be mandatory curriculum and I think that makes a lot of sense.”
Some 2,800 people have been infected and 81 have been killed by the new coronavirus that began spreading from a seafood market where wild animals were sold for food in Wuhan, China. Public health officials have quarantined 50 million people in the region surrounding Wuhan and report that more than 30,000 people who have had close contact with infected persons are currently under close medical observation.
In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has screened some 2,400 travelers arriving from Wuhan at five major airports. Of the 110 people that the agency is tracking and testing for infection, five have tested positive, 32 have tested negative, and results are still pending for 73 people.
Some evidence has emerged that infected people may be contagious before they show signs of infection. If so, this would make it more difficult for public health officials to prevent further spread of the disease by tracing, tracking, treating, and medically isolating people who may have come into contact with infected folks.
In trying to predict how the disease may spread, epidemiologists are trying to figure out what the basic reproduction number (R0) is for the new coronavirus—that is, the number of people on average to whom an infected person will pass along the disease. For example, the R0 for seasonal influenza is estimated to be around 1.3 people exposed to an infected person. According to CDC data, 35.5 million Americans suffered from flu last year and 34,200 died of it, yielding a mortality rate of around 0.1 percent.
A preliminary study by Chinese researchers suggest that the R0 is around 3 for the Wuhan coronavirus, meaning it’s more contagious than seasonal influenza. That study also noted that by January 24, some 1,287 cases had been confirmed, resulting in 41 deaths. Those raw numbers yield an alarming mortality rate of over 3 percent. (For what it’s worth, the R0 for the Black Death in medieval Europe was also around 3, but the mortality rate after disease onset was close to 100 percent.)
A preprint by British researchers analyzing the epidemic in Wuhan estimated that only about 5 percent of infections had been actually identified by January 24 which suggests that about 26,000 people were then suffering from the disease. If that estimate is correct, a rough calculation would yield a 0.15 percent mortality rate for the Wuhan virus. Parsing the latest reported cases and deaths yields essentially the same mortality rate. The coronavirus mortality rate is a bit above the seasonal flu rate in the U.S., but not hugely so.
Of course, these crude and provisional calculations do not warrant complacency. On the other hand, the speed with which Chinese scientists using modern biomedical technologies identified the virus and subsequently provided public health agencies and researchers around the world with the genetic information needed to track it is heartening. We will soon learn if humanity’s increasing biotechnical prowess combined with vigorous public health responses can prevent Wuhan’s coronavirus from developing into a modern pandemic.
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When the New York legislature passed major changes to the state’s rent regulations in June 2019, critics warned the new law would reduce investment in, and renovations of, rental properties in New York City. Six months later, those predictions are bearing out.
Bloomberg reported this morning that sales of apartment buildings in the Big Apple fell by 36 percent in 2019, and that the money spent on those sales fell by 40 percent. The prices investors were paying for rent-stabilized units—where allowable rent increases are set by the government and usually capped at around 1 or 2 percent per year—fell by 7 percent.
“The fact that there’s no correlation between the amount you put into a building and the amount of rent you can charge has completely shifted investment interest in rent-stabilized buildings,” Shimon Shkury, president of the brokerage Ariel Property Advisors, told Bloomberg.
Shkury was referring to provisions of the state’s 2019 rent regulations that make it much more difficult to pass along the costs of apartment renovations (such as adding a new oven) and major capital improvements (such as adding a new roof) to tenants.
That law also eliminated landlords’ ability to “deregulate” (that is, charge market rates) for rent-stabilized apartments once rents reach certain levels.There are about a million rent-stabilized units in New York City.
In addition to a decline in sales, landlords are reportedly cutting back on the money that they’re putting into the buildings that they do own.
According to a January survey conducted by the Community Housing Improvement Program (CHIP)—a trade association representing owners of rent-stabilized buildings in New York City—69 percent of building owners have cut their spending on apartment upgrades by more than 75 percent since the passage of the state’s rent regulations. Another 11 percent of the landlords in the survey decreased investments in their properties by more than 50 percent.
The new law’s limits on recuperating the costs of renovating apartments mean it is often more financially feasible to leave old apartments vacant.
“A big majority of our housing stock of stabilized units have been occupied between 40 and 50 years. These units require up to $100,000 and sometimes more, to complete a gut rehabilitation. You don’t need to be a genius to understand it makes no sense to invest that much only to get an $83.00 rent increase,” one survey respondent told CHIP.
CHIP, alongside the Rent Stabilization Association, is suing state and city officials over the new regulations.
The Commercial Observer reports that the new rent laws are encouraging small- and mid-sized landlords to exit the market entirely, writing that “many property owners have woken up to a world where their buildings are worth 30 to 50 percent less than they were a year ago.”
All of this conforms with predictions made by the Manhattan Institute’s Howard Husock, who warned that limiting rent increases would lead to less maintenance and to deterioration of existing rental housing.
“The opposite of gentrification—call it shabbification—would emerge, as city housing stock becomes more and more degraded,” Husock wrote last May. “Middle-class and working-class neighborhoods, where rents are often not that high (in some outer-borough neighborhoods, market rents are lower than permitted by law) would be at particular risk.”
New York City does have serious housing affordability issues. But much of that can be blamed on the local leaders’ failure to allow for enough new housing development to accommodate the city’s growth. Rather than issuing market-destroying price regulations, the city authorities should help the city’s tenants with zoning reforms that allow more housing construction. In other words, by letting markets work.
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Iraq Protest Death Toll Soars Past 600 After Fresh Weekend Unrest
Over a weekend which late Sunday witnessed what was presumably Iraqi militia-fired missiles score a rare direct hit on the US Embassy in Baghdad, mass protests across multiple cities against both the Iraqi government and American forces’ continued presence inspired by Shia firebrand cleric and nationalist Moqtada al-Sadr continued. While the protests stalled on Saturday after Sadr the night before appeared to have withdrawn support for the demonstrations, they were unleashed again Sunday with new ferocity which left at least two more protesters dead amid clashes with police.
Large anti-government protests have been intermittent for the past few months; however, the last three days have been particularly intense with at least 15 killed and over 200 injured, according figures produced by Independent High Commission for Human Rights of Iraq.
Fresh Iraq protests over the weekend. Image source: AFP/Getty via CNN.
This brings the total death tollsince protests began in October tomore than 600, according to the commission as well as Amnesty International.
Sadr has both given support to the ‘nationalist’ protests and “million man march” demonstrations which erupted last week calling for an end to American military occupation; however, he’s faced accusations of betraying the protesters to Iran when he briefly withdrew support Friday into Saturday, and given he’s seen as part of the Shiite religious establishment.
His political faction is also the largest bloc in Iraqi parliament. The popular cleric stirred resentment upon announcing Friday that a “temporary halt” in the resistance to US occupation was needed. “We will do our best to prevent taking Iraq to another possible war,” he said.
Leader of Iraq’s ‘Sadrist Movement,’ Muqtada Al-Sadr, via Middle East Monitor.
The most recent protester deaths were in the restive southern city of Nassiriya, per Reuters:
Unidentified gunmen shot dead two protesters in the southern Iraqi city of Nassiriya after security forces began a crackdown on months-long demonstrations against the country’s largely Iran-backed ruling elite.
Iraq has taken to the streets across the country.
Risking their lives to protest their corrupt government.
And further it appears Iraqi police and security forces are back to using live ammunition in the ongoing crackdown:
At least 75 protesters were wounded, mainly by live bullets, in clashes in Nassiriya overnight when security forces attempted to move them away from bridges in the city, police and health source said.
Protests in Baghdad have continued into Monday, in an intensely volatile situation where overlapping aims are present, which includes not only a change in government but demands for the immediate withdrawal of US forces.
Massive protests in Baghdad today calling for withdrawl of American forces from Iraq pic.twitter.com/SONa0aL6sZ
Despite Friday’s anti-American protests being impressive in size, with many pundits claiming anywhere from hundreds of thousands to over a million in the streets mainly in Baghdad, mainstream media in the West downplayed the numbers, with the Associated Press even falsely saying a mere “hundreds”.
Added to the mix is the potential for US military retaliation against the “unruly” Shia militias – as one Iraqi leader called them – for the fresh attacks on the US embassy compound in Baghdad’s Green Zone.
The potential for a consequential disruption in China’s supply chains appears to be vastly under-appreciated.
Despite the current drop in stocks (less than 1.5% as this is written), there’s a tremendous reservoir of complacency about the economic and financial impact of the coronavirus epidemic. The zeitgeist reflects an implicit confidence that the coronavirus will blow over like the SARS scare a few years ago and the impact on the global economy will be essentially zero.
Have all the risks already been fully discounted? Here are some of the reasons why the assumption that this will have little effect on the U.S. economy and stock market may be misguided:
1. Patient One (the first reported case of 2019-ncov) on 31 December was unlikely to be the person in which the mutation enabling person-to-person contagion occurred. The latest genetic analysis suggests the virus first mutated into its present form sometime between late October and late November.
It’s thus highly likely the virus had already been spreading for at least a month before 31 December. The symptoms of this new virus are not that different from typical flu strains, so why would authorities spend the time and money searching for a novel flu in a patient? The only reason authorities become involved would be a cluster of flu/ pneumonia patients dying.
Hundreds of thousands of people die of the flu every year, between 12,000 and 50,000 in the U.S. alone, so the death of a patient with flu-like symptoms is not uncommon enough to trigger an official investigation.
This line of reasoning suggests there was already an expanding pool of virus carriers long before officials discovered the new virus and began acting to limit its spread.
If this is the case, then the virus may have spread outside Wuhan before officials reacted.
2. This virus is a new type, and this makes it especially dangerous as humanity may have limited immunity to viruses that are sufficiently different from existing variations.
There are several bits of evidence that this novel flu is both contagious and dangerous. One is that health workers have caught the flu from patients despite all precautions and anecdotal evidence that the disease has spread from one family member to everyone else in the household.
The other is the relatively high death rate. Based on data from Chinese authorities (likely incomplete) , about 3% of the patients have died. The great flu pandemic of 1918-19 killed about 2.5% of its victims, and since it was highly contagious, it’s estimated 50 to 60 million people died in that pandemic–often young healthy people.
3. The incubation period for this flu may be up to 14 days, and someone who has it may be asymptomatic (display no symptoms) for 5 or 6 days. This means screening passengers for fever is essentially useless.
Even more alarming, the new virus doesn’t always cause a fever, making screening for fever even less effective.
Despite these data points, the American populace is being assured that screening is effective and so it’s perfectly safe to travel as usual. This complacent confidence appears to be unfounded.
4. The Chinese populace is highly mobile within China and the world. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese work in other nations, and a significant percentage of these offshore workers returned home for Lunar New Year and will be returning to their jobs in the U.S., Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, the Mideast, etc. next week.
To assume that none of these returning workers are asymptomatic carriers of the flu is a stretch.
5. Researchers are busy developing a flu shot to offer some immunity, but if this virus is virulently contagious, the question becomes: can authorities outrace the spread of the virus? Realistic estimates of how long it will take to develop and test a vaccine are 6 to 7 months, and that’s if everything works perfectly, i.e. the virus doesn’t mutate, etc. Producing hundreds of millions of doses and administering the vaccine to hundreds of millions of people will take additional time.
6. The implicit model for this coronavirus in the mainstream is SARS, which was isolated and contained. But this new virus may be much more contagious and so the relatively rapid and successful isolation of SARS may be a misleading model.
7. Authorities seem to prioritize “don’t panic” messages, as if fear of this flu is irrational. But fear of a risk that cannot be assessed with any confidence is entirely rational. The smart strategy is to lay low and wait for more evidence on the nature of the risk.
8. The potential economic impact of this virus is grossly underestimated. The Chinese economy is particularly vulnerable now for a number of reasons. In essence, all the low-hanging fruit of rapid development have been picked, and adding more debt to boost building and consumption is no longer as effective now that debt has soared.
The world has depended on China’s skyrocketing consumption for growth for the past 30 years. Should China’s economy actually contract due to the knock-on effects of the virus, the global economy will soon follow.
How fear triggers a domino-like effect in an economy is poorly understood. In an economy that’s already teetering on recession, quarantines, disruption of travel and commerce and a generalized “circle the wagons” response to uncertainty will push the precarious economy over the cliff.
Once tourists cancel trips, incomes plummet and businesses are forced to close. There’s no guarantee that they will re-open after months of recession.
If you fear catching a potentially life-threatening flu, you’re unlikely to go shopping for a new car or furniture; you’ll put that off if at all possible.
Then if you read about layoffs and recession, you decide the car and furniture can wait indefinitely.
This is how the transition from complacency and confidence to fear and caution ripples through the economy, as the initial impact unleashes knock-on effects that increase caution which then reinforces reduced spending and investment.
9. Confidence in the truthfulness and effectiveness of authorities is already low in China, and this loss of confidence will likely spread to other nations as people awaken to the authorities’ obsession with “keeping the economy going” by discounting the risks with false assurances that “everything is under control.”
When people realize everything is not under control and they’ve been misled to grease the wheels of commerce, the legitimacy of the state may come into question: if they downplayed the flu, putting me and my family at risk, why should I trust them about anything else? The epidemic has the potential to trigger a political crisis as well as a severe economic slump.
10. The potential for a downward spiral of confidence is high as authorities will be pressured to increase their reassurances that all is well at every new wave of evidence that the virus is spreading despite their efforts. Doubling down on “don’t panic” as the virus spreads will eventually backfire and unleash the very panic they feared.
11. Global stock markets are at all-time highs or near-term highs, on the euphoric belief that central bank stimulus will push stocks higher essentially forever. The virus has to potential to refocus attention on sales, profits and future risks, and that could change the general mood from complacent confidence to uncertainty, which is Kryptonite to market confidence.
The virus might be the needle that will pop all the speculative bubbles, regardless of central banks’ stimulus.
12. History suggests that this virus may rise in two waves. The initial wave may die down and everyone sighs with relief, assuming it’s like SARS: everything’s fixed, risk is back to zero. Restrictions are eased, travel bans lifted, etc. Then the second and much more virulent wave rises, catching everyone by surprise.
13. The potential for future mutations which increase the lethality of the virus are not being factored into current risk assessments. Assuming the virus will retain its current configuration is a leap of faith.
The potential for a consequential disruption in China’s supply chains appears to be vastly under-appreciated. Again, the working assumption is that any disruption will be temporary and everyone in China will be back to work as usual in a few weeks. The market has yet to discount the possibility that China’s supply chains will be disrupted for months, with all the ripple effects that would generate throughout the global economy.
The market also has yet to discount the possibility that China’s consumption could crater (buying an iPhone 11 is no longer a priority, etc.) and knock-on effects in its currency and debt markets could disrupt global financial markets, potentially triggering insolvencies in overleveraged companies not just in China, but in the developing and developed economies as well.
While it’s too early to predict global depression, it’s also too early to predict a rapid return to pre-epidemic normalcy.
Here are some informative science-based links on the coronavirus, courtesy of longtime correspondent Cheryl A.:
When the New York legislature passed major changes to the state’s rent regulations in June 2019, critics warned the new law would reduce investment in, and renovations of, rental properties in New York City. Six months later, those predictions are bearing out.
Bloomberg reported this morning that sales of apartment buildings in the Big Apple fell by 36 percent in 2019, and that the money spent on those sales fell by 40 percent. The prices investors were paying for rent-stabilized units—where allowable rent increases are set by the government and usually capped at around 1 or 2 percent per year—fell by 7 percent.
“The fact that there’s no correlation between the amount you put into a building and the amount of rent you can charge has completely shifted investment interest in rent-stabilized buildings,” Shimon Shkury, president of the brokerage Ariel Property Advisors, told Bloomberg.
Shkury was referring to provisions of the state’s 2019 rent regulations that make it much more difficult to pass along the costs of apartment renovations (such as adding a new oven) and major capital improvements (such as adding a new roof) to tenants.
That law also eliminated landlords’ ability to “deregulate” (that is, charge market rates) for rent-stabilized apartments once rents reach certain levels.There are about a million rent-stabilized units in New York City.
In addition to a decline in sales, landlords are reportedly cutting back on the money that they’re putting into the buildings that they do own.
According to a January survey conducted by the Community Housing Improvement Program (CHIP)—a trade association representing owners of rent-stabilized buildings in New York City—69 percent of building owners have cut their spending on apartment upgrades by more than 75 percent since the passage of the state’s rent regulations. Another 11 percent of the landlords in the survey decreased investments in their properties by more than 50 percent.
The new law’s limits on recuperating the costs of renovating apartments mean it is often more financially feasible to leave old apartments vacant.
“A big majority of our housing stock of stabilized units have been occupied between 40 and 50 years. These units require up to $100,000 and sometimes more, to complete a gut rehabilitation. You don’t need to be a genius to understand it makes no sense to invest that much only to get an $83.00 rent increase,” one survey respondent told CHIP.
CHIP, alongside the Rent Stabilization Association, is suing state and city officials over the new regulations.
The Commercial Observer reports that the new rent laws are encouraging small- and mid-sized landlords to exit the market entirely, writing that “many property owners have woken up to a world where their buildings are worth 30 to 50 percent less than they were a year ago.”
All of this conforms with predictions made by the Manhattan Institute’s Howard Husock, who warned that limiting rent increases would lead to less maintenance and to deterioration of existing rental housing.
“The opposite of gentrification—call it shabbification—would emerge, as city housing stock becomes more and more degraded,” Husock wrote last May. “Middle-class and working-class neighborhoods, where rents are often not that high (in some outer-borough neighborhoods, market rents are lower than permitted by law) would be at particular risk.”
New York City does have serious housing affordability issues. But much of that can be blamed on the local leaders’ failure to allow for enough new housing development to accommodate the city’s growth. Rather than issuing market-destroying price regulations, the city authorities should help the city’s tenants with zoning reforms that allow more housing construction. In other words, by letting markets work.
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Ken Starr, a member of President Donald Trump’s impeachment legal defense team, argued during Trump’s Senate trial today that the process must be “powerfully bipartisan” to be legitimate.
“Those of us who lived through the Clinton impeachment, including members of this body, full well understand that a presidential impeachment is tantamount to domestic war,” he said.
Starr didn’t just live through Bill Clinton’s impeachment. He was the independent counsel whose investigation led to the charges levied against the former president. The House impeached Clinton in December 1998 on two counts of perjury, one count of obstruction of justice, and one count of abuse of power pertaining to his affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
It was not bipartisan.
On the first three articles, just five Democratic House reps defected from party lines and voted alongside Republicans. On the last article, only one did. A heavier bipartisan consensus actually cut against impeachment, with five Republicans voting against article one, 28 against article two, 12 against article three, and 81 against article four.
So was Starr bringing up the Clinton case in a “lessons learned” manner, suggesting that it shouldn’t have been pursued at all? Not really.At most, his arguments today seemed to oscillate between a defense of the Clinton impeachment and a repudiation of it.
“The nation’s most recent experience, the Clinton impeachment, even though severely and roundly criticized, charged crimes,” Starr said—and those crimes were committed “beyond any reasonable observer’s doubt.” Trump’s impeachment, he said in contrast, risks being “dominated by partisan considerations” because his articles contain no formal accusations of criminal misconduct.
But later, in a puzzling pivot, he seemed to say that not even criminal allegations merit the boot: “The very divisive Clinton impeachment demonstrates that, while highly relevant, the commission of a crime is by no means sufficient to warrant the removal of our duly elected president.”
Meanwhile, Starr’s 2018 book Contempt declared that “Abuse of Power stood at the center of The President’s behavior.”
This confusion may explain why the former independent counsel chose to focus instead on President Richard Nixon’s impeachment inquiry when he drove his point home.
“In an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote of 410–4, the House of Representatives authorized an impeachment inquiry” into Nixon, Starr noted. “It bears emphasis before this high court: This was the first presidential impeachment in over 100 years.”
The next one would come two decades later, with Starr at the helm.
Yet the removal of Richard Nixon was a fairly partisan affair too. “Contra Starr, presidential impeachments have always been partisan,” notes the Cato Institute’s Gene Healy. “Even in the Nixon near-impeachment, a majority of Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee voted against every article.”
Partisanship is a powerful drug. Whether Trump deserves a guilty verdict has nothing to do with the political animus surrounding the process—something Starr should be acutely aware of.
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