Can you find the bureaucrat in the quote?
[via New York Daily News - Home - A neighborhood goes up for sale]:
Since 2002, MetLife has removed dozens of units from rent regulation as the leaseholders have died or moved on --making the requisite capital improvements where necessary to justify the rent hikes.
If MetLife sells the buildings, current tenants in rent-stabilized apartments would be protected if the buildings remain rentals -- and be offered an insider's price if it goes condo. If they refuse to buy, they can still remain in their apartments under rent-stabilization laws.
"It's not the owner, it's the apartment" that's rent-regulated, said Peter Moses, a spokesman for the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal.
Peter Moses is an idiot.
Apartments are not living things. They don't sign leases nor do they negotiate them. People do. This is the kind of talk that takes complete responsibility off the shoulders of landlords and takes away complete bargaining power from tenants. And is representative of the tactics of corporate politicians. Take away all resposibility from the capitalists deed by transferring it to capital itself.
Lest you don't catch my drift, let me quote my favorite economist, John Kenneth Galbraith:
"Let's begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes-indeed, deletes-the role of wealth in the economic and social system. And it sheds the adverse connotation going back to Marx. Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces. It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power. They have now a functional anonymity."
Free Market Fraud, Progressive Magazine article, January, 1999.
The Daily News earns points for the most accurate title to date: A whole neighborhood is indeed being put up for sale. They just as fast it looses points for not interviewing me 
