RealClearInvestigations'
Picks of the Week
Dec. 15 to Dec. 21, 2024 In RealClearInvestigations, Leighton Woodhouse reports that Rep. Nancy Pelosi and her husband, Paul, turned sour wine into bubbly by tapping millions of dollars of COVID-19 relief to revive their investment in the French-style Auberge du Soleil resort in California's Napa Valley. In some years, the Auberge investment, held for decades by Paul Pelosi, had been a laggard, recording a loss or a profit of between $50,000 to $100,000. But in 2021, Pelosi’s ethics forms show, her family’s income from the resort surged to a range of $1 million to $5 million after about $9 million in congressionally authorized pandemic relief in 2020 and 2021. A RealClearInvestigations analysis found that Pelosi’s profits from restaurants, hotels, and properties, including several Courtyard Marriott hotels, spiked after $28 million in government rescue funds, a total that dwarfs the $2.4 million in Paycheck Protection Program loans previously disclosed by the media. The former House Speaker has gained notoriety over her husband’s well-timed stock trades. During the pandemic, Nancy admonished her congressional opposition for dilly-dallying on relief: “These Republicans seem to have an endless tolerance for other people's sadness,” she said at a press conference in December 2020. Her office did not respond to RCI’s request for comment. In RealClearInvestigations, Bob Ivry examines Donald Trump’s claim that an influx of migrants is a major reason housing prices and rents are soaring across America -- but finds no definitive answers: In a pattern that’s playing out in communities around the country, many migrants have been doubling and tripling up, with as many as two dozen people sharing a rental. While home prices in heartland Logansport, Indiana, for example, have increased 41% since 2019, it’s difficult to find an authority who faults its many newly arrived Haitians for the surge. Logansport's mayor: “Prices have gradually been going up because of the lack of housing in our area, but that started even before the Haitians got here. I don’t think it has anything to do with them.” While there’s no doubt the newcomers are straining communities, notably by committing crimes, their impact on housing is harder to measure because of a lack of data. And real estate is all about location, location, location. Many immigrants have flocked to locations where a little lift in property values wouldn’t be so bad, but rather an indication of a neighborhood comeback. The migrants, an expert said, haven’t even made up for declining growth among the U.S.’s native-born population. Mass deportation doesn’t seem a satisfactory answer to rising housing prices: Bolstering housing means finding workers to build them – typically migrants. Waste of the Day
by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books $267 Million Spent Fighting 'Misinformation', RCI
Another $161B Lost to Improper Payments, RCI
Fixing a Window With a Deluxe Hotel Stay, RCI
Minnesota's Luxury 'Rocket Rider' Buses, RCI
Mismanagement of $50B Opioid Settlement, RCI Election 2024 and the Beltway Democratic lawmakers are trying to hinder a federal watchdog investigation into misconduct within the Biden administration’s $400 billion green energy loan program by demanding a probe of the watchdog, this article reports: The inspector general for the Department of Energy has spent over a year investigating the Loan Programs Office, which has been accused of dishing out billions in government loans to politically connected recipients, including companies teetering on bankruptcy and entities linked to foreign adversaries. Now Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee have taken the unusual step of launching an investigation into the investigators. In a letter last week, Democrats accused DOE inspector general Teri Donaldson of "bypass[ing] competition requirements that exist to ensure taxpayer dollars are not wasted" when she hired an outside law firm, Rabalais & Associates, to assist in her probe. In a separate article published in October, RealClearInvestigations reported that billions in climate grants are going to recently formed organizations run by politically connected Democrats. Just eight months after being formed, for example, the Justice Climate Fund was awarded $940 million. Within a month of gaining nonprofit status from the IRS, a group called Power Forward Communities, which reported 2023 revenues of $100, was awarded $2 billion. The single biggest winner in the awards, which were announced in April, was the Climate United Fund, which is slated to receive $6.97 billion. The fund’s directors include prominent Democrats, such as Phil Angelides, a former California State Treasurer. Energy insiders said the Democrats’ move to target the inspector general was "weird" and indicates that the Biden administration is concerned about what the forthcoming IG report will reveal. Other Election 2024 and the Beltway How White House Ran With a Feeble Biden in Charge WSJ
Georgia Court Removes Fani Willis From Trump Case WSJ
Biden Letting Illegal Aliens Sponsor Illegal Crossers, Center Square
Detective Slams Biden Clemency for Drug Kingpin, Free Beacon
Biden EPA Makes First Climate Change Arrest, New York Post
Undercover Video: Adviser Says Biden 'Can't Say a Sentence', OMG
As VP, Biden Used Private Email for Sensitive Matters, Just the News
House Jan. 6 Report Calls for FBI Investigation of Liz Cheney, Townhall
IG Report Reveals FBI Could Still Be Spying On Congress, Federalist
Famed Iowa Pollster’s Career Ends With Trump Lawsuit, New York Times Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Fight have long been a part of school life. But, this article reports, cell phones have transformed them into performance and entertainment: A New York Times review of more than 400 fight videos from schools in California, Georgia, Texas and a dozen other states – as well as interviews with three dozen school leaders, teachers, police officers, pupils, parents and researchers – found a pattern of middle and high school students exploiting phones and social media to arrange, provoke, capture and spread footage of brutal beatings among their peers. In several cases, students later died from the injuries. Technology has increasingly fostered and amplified every stage of this aggression. The arguments often begin with student cyberbullying – or even perceived online disrespect among friends – which prompts in-person squabbles during school, educators and police officers said. Then classmates start filming and put pressure on quarreling students to brawl. Students later share and comment on the fight clips, further humiliating the victims and sometimes triggering additional fights. This article reports that such violence has overwhelmed many schools, some of which are facing negligence lawsuits from parents and an exodus of teachers. In turn, dozens of districts have sued social media firms, saying that the platforms’ “addictive” features caused compulsive student use, disrupting learning and burdening school resources. In a critical assessment, Ira Stoll on Substack faults the article because "just two half sentences toward the bottom of the story mention immigration," though the school in question has lately absorbed an "immigration boom": There’s no explanation of why, if it is the phones causing the fights rather than the immigration, the brawls aren’t breaking out in the hallways of Phillips Andover Academy, or Weston High School, where students also have phones, but there are fewer immigrants. In a separate article, the New York Times reports that many schools are using artificial intelligence to monitor the communication of students to detect signs of self-harm and suicidal ideation. Movies such as “The Wolf of Wall Street” have made images of Wall Street’s rank-and-file blowing cash on illegal drugs and nightlife common tropes in American culture. But now, this article reports, young bankers are more often using drugs to enhance their job performance: Especially for entry-level bankers at the analyst and associate level – who work long, tedious hours and fiercely compete for higher-level jobs with big pay days – prescriptions for stimulants such as Adderall and other ADHD drugs have become commonplace. Jonah Frey, who worked as an investment banker in healthcare for Wells Fargo in San Francisco, said one colleague would sometimes snort lines of crushed up Adderall pills from his desk in the bullpen—the common area where junior bankers sit and work together. “Nobody blinked an eye,” he said. Others use nicotine pouches such as Zyn to excess, or consume energy drinks. One banker who worked in Houston between 2017 and 2019 described his colleagues drinking Monsterbombs” – an extra-strength 5-hour Energy shot dropped into a glass filled with Monster Energy, chugged in one go. The caffeine payload was the equivalent of nearly five cups of coffee at once. This article adds that: A Wall Street Journal investigation in August about Bank of America’s treatment of young bankers put a spotlight on long hours that violate its policies and cause health problems. One junior banker died in May after putting in over 100 hours a week for about a month to finish work on a $2 billion acquisition. After the article’s publication, Bank of America and the wider industry said they would crack down on overwork. Morgan Stanley, for example, now asks junior bankers to report their hours and will intervene in some cases to make sure they don’t go over 80 hours a week. As a child growing up poor in the mountains of Mexico’s Sinaloa state, this article reports, Javier dreamed of becoming a player with the notorious Sinaloa Cartel. Now in his late 30s, he occupies a critical role in the syndicate, albeit one with little glamour. Javier purchases Chinese-made fentanyl ingredients and smuggles them to drug labs in Mexico, where cartel cooks turn them into the synthetic opioid that is ravaging U.S. communities: Chemical brokers such as Javier, known as “intermediarios,” don’t garner the headlines of Mexico’s fabled narcotics kingpins. Yet they are the indispensable link between East and West. Any given day might find them arranging payoffs to corrupt Mexican officials; ginning up a dummy company to import chemical precursors; hauling cash to local currency exchanges to close an offshore deal; or ferrying fentanyl-making ingredients to a remote manufacturing operation. … Javier and other nimble brokers have helped elevate Mexico into the world’s leading illicit fentanyl producer. A senior U.S. official likened them to “attachés” for drug cartels. Their work has contributed to the misery on America’s streets, where more than 400,000 people have died from synthetic opioid overdoses over the past decade. Having largely failed at getting China to clamp down on its mammoth chemical industry which dominates production of ingredients used to manufacture synthetic opioids, the U.S. is seeking to disrupt the chemical supply chain in Mexico, this article reports. That is also proving difficult. There may be hundreds of players in Mexico such as Javier feeding the fentanyl pipeline. U.S. and Mexican anti-narcotics officials said it’s impossible to know the exact number. Some of these brokers are specialists within their own cartels, others are independent, but most operate below the radar of authorities. This article reports that the fall of Bashar al-Assad overturned the most profitable drug-smuggling network in the Middle East, exposing the former Syrian regime’s role in manufacturing and trafficking pills that fueled war and social crises across the region. Captagon, a methamphetamine-like drug that has been produced for years in Syrian labs, helped the Assad regime amass huge wealth and offset the impact of punishing international sanctions, while also allowing allies such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia to profit from its trade. Quote: Days after they ousted Assad in a lightning offensive last week, rebels circulated videos from industrial-scale manufacturing and trafficking facilities inside government air bases and other sites affiliated with former top regime officials. … Used by everyone from taxi drivers and students working late hours to militia fighters seeking courage, Syrian-produced captagon helped drive a demand for drugs across the Middle East, especially in Saudi Arabia, and became a source of international tension between Syria and its neighbors. The disclosures provide evidence of what had long been alleged: that the Assad regime was the driving force behind an estimated $10 billion annual global trade in captagon, which in recent years has become the drug of choice across the Middle East. Assad used the funds to sustain its rule and reward loyalists. In a separate article, the New York Post reports that CNN has egg on its face after celebrating correspondent Clarissa Ward for freeing a disoriented man from a notorious prison in Syria. Turns out the person Ward rescued was “a notorious member of Bashar al-Assad’s forces known to torture those who refused to pay him off, according to a shocking local fact check.” | 