RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
November 27 to December 3, 2022 In an original statistical analysis for RealClearInvestigations, John R. Lott Jr. and James Varney report that each one percent increase in immigrant population in Europe is associated with a 3.6% increase in homicide – a finding that suggests America is missing vital insights through official reluctance to keep politically sensitive data on immigrant crime. Lott and Varney report: As the Biden administration presides over record illegal immigration across the porous southern border, there is almost no prison tracking of immigrant crime. That’s a sharp contrast with Europe. RealClearInvestigations' analysis of European Union and United Nations crime data shows that Europe's elevated crime is strongly correlated with immigration. The data collected by European countries "allows you to look at many different places over time in a way that we simply aren’t able to do looking across U.S. states,” says American criminologist Carl Moody. RCI’s 11-year analysis squares with that of Swedish sociology professor Göran Adamson, whose 2020 study showed a strong tie between immigration and crime. Researchers in Denmark, Norway, and Finland have reached similar conclusions. In Texas, one of the few places in the U.S. where such data is collected, illegal aliens are convicted of homicide 32 percent more frequently than the rest of the population. The rate for sexual assault is 91 percent higher. In Europe the political fallout has been fairly predictable. Voters in Sweden and Italy recently repudiated progressives over the issue in national elections.
Biden, Trump and the Beltway HHS Whistleblower:
Federal Gov’t Complicit
in Migrant Child Trafficking
Project Veritas The U.S. government is placing some unaccompanied migrant children into the hands of human traffickers and is unconcerned about their fate, according to a whistleblower who spoke on camera with Project Veritas. The whistleblower, Tara Lee Rodas, volunteered to assist the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services with the processing of unaccompanied migrant children at the Emergency Intake Site in Pomona, California. “Our sponsors typically are not citizens. They’re not permanent residents. They don’t have a legal presence,” she said. “The sponsor can hold up an ‘Order of Deportation’ to a [migrant] child and say, ‘This is your Order of Deportation. If you do not do what I say, when I say, I’m going to call ICE on you myself.’ We are paying to put children in the hands of criminals.” The whistleblower affirmed that she has questioned federal government bureaucrats about the potential wrongdoing happening within their institutions, and the response has usually been dismissive of her concerns. She believes she has suffered retaliation at work for raising these issues. “I said [to the command center executives], ‘We’re getting ready to send another child [to Austin, Texas],’ and they said, ‘Tara, I think you need to understand that we only get sued if we keep kids in care too long. We don’t get sued by traffickers. Are you clear? We don’t get sued by traffickers.’ So, that was the answer of the United States federal government. HHS did not want this information to get out,” Rodas said. Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway Pot Flop: Biden's Weed Pardons Miss Most New York Times
Biden Admin Making Illegal Migrants Legal ‘Parolees’ Center for Immigration Studies Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Inside Months of Chaos
at LA County's Juvenile Halls
Los Angeles Times Los Angeles County’s juvenile halls have become unsafe and chaotic over the past seven months, this article reports, as authorities have increasingly placed disruptive youths in solitary because of staff shortages – creating more alienation and violence. Dozens of officers are either on long-term leave or refusing to come to work, creating a staffing crisis that has led to increased violence in the halls -- an atmosphere many say is unsafe for the youths the county is tasked with caring for. In the first six months of 2022, the number of times officers used force on youths jumped by 50% compared to the first half of 2021, according to data provided by the probation department in response to a public records request. The number of times that youths were pepper sprayed quadrupled in the same time frame, records show. … Youths, meanwhile, are facing adverse mental health effects from the increased violence and the department’s practice of isolating them to control the chaos. A clinician who spoke to The Times said patients who never exhibited self-harming behavior before have suffered suicidal ideations. They blame the increased use of isolation in recent months. Lawyers say some teens are taking plea deals against their advice just to get out of the halls. A notorious Russian paramilitary organization, the Wagner Group, is freeing hardened rebels held in jail cells in the Central African Republic and deploying them overseas, including in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, two senior military officers in the African country told the Daily Beast: Many of CAR’s high-risk criminals, particularly rebels accused of harming, raping, and killing civilians, are held in military and police cells rather than in understaffed and poorly secured conventional prisons. Although the detainees are under the custody of local forces, Wagner mercenaries—who’ve been active in CAR since the government turned to Russia for help in securing arms and paramilitaries in 2017 – continue to exert influence over the Central African nation’s security agencies. As the Russian government faces growing opposition from its citizens to the war in Ukraine, it is increasingly turning to prisoners as a source of frontline soldiers: The Wagner Group is already using prisoners to fight Russia's war in Ukraine. In July, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner supremo, began touring Russian prisons in an increasingly desperate bid to recruit more soldiers to send into Ukraine. He was later accused of using “pressure” to recruit raped and abused prisoners from Russia’s penal colonies to join the mercenary group’s frontline fighting units, where they are being slaughtered with little training and poor equipment. How the Hospice Movement Became a For-Profit Hustle ProPublica It might be counterintuitive to run an enterprise that is wholly dependent on clients whose doctors say they have six months or less to live, but companies in the hospice business can expect some of the biggest returns for the least amount of effort of any sector in American health care. Medicare pays providers a set rate per patient per day, regardless of how much help they deliver. This article focuses on the claims of Marsha Farmer, a former salesperson for the national chain AseraCare, who said the company set aggressive quotas that forced her and others to solicit patients “regardless of whether they were near death.” Once a prospective patient expressed interest, a nurse would assess whether any of the person’s conditions fit – or could be made to fit – a fatal prognosis. The Black Belt, a swath of the Deep South that includes parts of Alabama, has some of the highest rates of heart disease, diabetes and emphysema in the country. On paper, Farmer knew, it was possible to finesse chronic symptoms, like shortness of breath, into proof of terminal decline. Problems occur when patients live longer than six months. But Farmer’s company, like many of its competitors, had found ways to game the system and keep its money. One tactic was to “dump,” or discharge, patients with overly long stays. The industry euphemism is “graduated” from hospice, though the patient experience is often more akin to getting expelled: losing diapers, pain medications, wheelchairs, nursing care and a hospital-grade bed that a person might not otherwise be able to afford. In 2007, according to Farmer’s calculations around the time, 70% of the patients served by her Mobile office left hospice alive. Coronavirus Investigations How Fintech Firms Fueled COVID Fraud Washington Post Rampant abuse in COVID aid was facilitated by a set of financial companies known as fintechs, jeopardizing federal efforts to rescue the economy and siphoning off public funds for possible private gain, an 18-month probe House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis has found. While fintech companies including Blueacorn, Womply and Kabbage were supposed to serve as middlemen – helping applicants complete paperwork and processing their requests for aid on behalf of banks and other large financial institutions – the report found the digital firms instead became vectors for waste, fraud and abuse. This article reports, Some of the companies involved had never before managed federal aid, the report found. At the height of the pandemic, they failed to hire the right staff to thwart fraud. They amassed major profits from fees generated from the loans – large and small, genuine and problematic – that they processed and reviewed. And they repeatedly escaped scrutiny from the Small Business Administration, putting billions of dollars at risk, the probe found. | 