RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations'
Picks of the Week
Dec. 29, 2024 to Jan. 4, 2025

Featured Investigation:
On the March, School Choice
Takes Its Fight
From Red, Right to Blue 

In RealClearInvestigations, Vince Bielski reports how private school choice advocates, flush from success in conservative states, are setting their sights on densely populated blue America, where Democrats, teachers’ unions and rural Republicans are mounting formidable opposition:

• The stakes are getting higher because the choice movement is pushing for "universal" programs like those in 12 red states, where all families, rich and poor, are typically eligible for public funds, even for children already in private school. 

• Such programs essentially create a second publicly funded school system. In Arizona, the first state to adopt a universal program in 2022, the costs have ballooned. 

• In Nebraska, voters killed a new program in November after a campaign ad purported to show school choice supporters storming into a public-school classroom to intimidate children.

• In Texas, school choice initially suffered a defeat at the hands of rural Republican lawmakers looking to protect funding for public schools that also serve as community centers and major employers. But the setback was short-lived: Choice candidates sailed to victory in November.

• Advocates say the stars are aligned to turn swing state Pennsylvania into a school-choice state. Gov. Josh Shapiro is one of the few Democratic state leaders who supports school choice, as do Pennsylvania voters by a wide margin.

Waste of the Day
by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books

Congress Funds 1,264 “Zombie” Programs, RCI
Well-Paid Boston Official Can’t Afford Att'y, RCI
Military Trade Pacts Hurting U.S. Industry, RCI
Storm Relief Spent for a Picnic at the Zoo, RCI
Misspending Grants Was Taken for Granted, RCI

Election 2024 and the Beltway

How Biden Let Iran Rake In
Illicit Oil Cash 
Washington Free Beacon

Biden officials largely ignored intelligence detailing Iraq's central role in a billion-dollar Iranian oil smuggling scheme, giving Tehran what one former U.S. official described as a "free pass" to evade American sanctions and rake in illicit cash. This article reports that officials from the State Department, Treasury Department, and intelligence community received a 45-page report assembled by international intelligence agencies in April and sat for multiple briefs on its material. The report identified Iraq, the world's fifth-largest oil producer, as central to an Iranian "oil and fuel smuggling" operation that significantly expanded in 2022:

Iran generates roughly $1 billion from the smuggling scheme annually, Reuters reported, money that is "directly funding the Iranian threat network," according to the intelligence report. The briefing on that report came just months after Iran-backed terror group Hamas's Oct. 7 attack on Israel, sparking a war that later spread to Lebanon, where fellow Iranian terror proxy Hezbollah launches near-daily missile barrages at the Jewish state. But the Biden-Harris administration apparently did little to act on the intelligence. The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which administers and enforces trade sanctions, responded to the report by drawing up sanctions packages targeting Iraq – but never actually put them in place, according to a former U.S. official briefed on the matter.

The administration's intimate knowledge of the smuggling operation has not been reported. This article reports that the administration’s “lax approach to Iran has allowed the Islamic regime to rake in around $200 billion in illicit funds after Trump-era sanctions nearly bankrupted Tehran."

Other Election 2024 and the Beltway

DOJ Lawyers Heading for Exits, and Protection, Wall Street Journal
Trump Bibles and More: The Rightwing Knick-Knack Racket, Guardian
IRS Failed to Properly Dispose of Sensitive Taxpayer Files, Reason
Chinese Hack Treasury Department, Fox Business
Obama-Farrakhan: Another Suppressed Photo of a Democrat, Townhall

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

Using Instagram
to Groom Children
New York Times

A Louisiana mother and the photographer she hired to shoot provocative pictures of her 12-year-old daughter in a G-string bikini in hopes of attracting followers on Instagram have been charged by federal authorities with crimes related to child sexual abuse material. This article reports that their disturbing behavior is becoming more common:

For the past year, The New York Times has been investigating how a drive for online fame has created a marketplace on Instagram of girl influencers who are managed by their parents – Instagram does not allow children under 13 to have their own accounts – and frequently draw an audience of men. Some of the parents, like the Louisiana mother, develop monetary relationships with the men, selling them images of the girls. Others also offer chat sessions with them and even their worn leotards. Those looking to supercharge their daughters’ online presence sometimes tap into an established network of men, The Times found, many of them convicted of sex crimes or accused of pedophilia, who participate in the grooming of children under the guise of working as social media professionals.

The Times investigation uncovered dozens of men offering services to child influencers as either a business or hobby. Almost all of them declared a sexual interest in minors or fostered relationships, both online and in person, with the children and their families.

Insurers Profit
From Compliant Doctors
ProPublica

Many Americans have faced the denial of mental health treatment by their insurance companies – at times despite vivid evidence of the risk such decisions pose. This article reports that some of those denials are based on the recommendations of doctors whose judgment has been repeatedly questioned by the courts:

The cases, ProPublica found, expose in blunt terms how insurance companies can put their clients’ health in jeopardy, in ways that some judges have ruled “arbitrary and capricious.” To do so, court records reveal, the insurers have turned to a coterie of psychiatrists and have continued relying on them even after one or more of their decisions have been criticized or overturned in court. In their rulings, judges have found that insurers, in part through their psychiatrists, have acted in ways that are “puzzling,” “disingenuous” and even “dishonest.” The companies have engaged in “selective readings” of the medical evidence, “shut their eyes” to medical opinions that opposed their conclusions and made “baseless arguments” in court. Doctors reviewing the same cases have even repeated nearly identical language in denial letters, casting “significant doubt” on whether they’re independent.

This article reports that “some doctors made critical errors, contradicted by the very records they claimed they reviewed, according to thousands of pages of court documents, interviews and insurance records. Ruling after ruling reveals how they failed to meaningfully engage with patients’ families or medical providers or to adequately explain their decisions. And when insurers have faced pushback over why they’re denying treatment, they have sometimes abandoned one rationale and shifted to other grounds to deny coverage.”

South American Waterway Becomes
Cocaine Superhighway
Washington Post

Since it was built in the 1990s, the Paraguay-Paraná waterway has served as a busy route for container ships, barges and other vessels carrying millions of tons of cargo south to Argentina and from there across the Atlantic. But, this article reports, this crucial artery has also become a primary route for shipping record amounts of cocaine to Europe:

The explosion in the global container shipping business has allowed drug traffickers to take advantage of a waterway that just years ago would have seemed illogical – heading south, instead of north, from airstrips in Bolivia to ports in Paraguay to Argentina’s Río de la Plata estuary. It now feeds Europe’s and the world’s growing appetite for cocaine. Since the pandemic, some of the largest drug busts in Europe have arrived on containers that first traveled down this river. Cocaine seizures linked to the Paraguay-Paraná system shot up fivefold between 2010 and 2021, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)….  Just this year, about 78,000 containers have left Paraguayan ports on their way south to Argentina or Uruguay and across the Atlantic, according to customs figures. But the country’s law enforcement was not built to combat transnational organized crime. Paraguay, unlike its neighbors, has virtually no air radars. This makes it easy for traffickers in Bolivia to fly drugs – cocaine produced in either Colombia, Peru or Bolivia – onto illegal airstrips in the northern part of Paraguay, one of the most sparsely inhabited areas on the continent.

In a separate article, the New York Times reports from inside a secret fentanyl lab run by Mexico’s most powerful criminal syndicate:

The lab was hidden in a house right in the city center in Culiacán, on a bustling street full of pedestrians, cars and food stands. There were no smells or fumes outside that would have alerted a passer-by to the large quantities of fentanyl being cooked behind the door. …  The main cook had started working for the cartel at 16, he said, cooking methamphetamine and later fentanyl. While teaching himself how to run a drug lab, he stayed in school, studying oral medicine. The would-be dentist never took up the trade.

Across Africa,
an Intense New Era of War
Wall Street Journal

As wars in the Ukraine and the Middle East command much of the world’s attention, this article reports, an unprecedented explosion of conflicts has carved a trail of death and destruction across the breadth of Africa – which is now experiencing more conflicts than at any point since at least 1946. This year alone, experts have identified 28 state-based conflicts across 16 of the continent’s 54 countries, more than in any other region in the world and double the count just a decade and a half ago:

Older wars, such as the Islamist uprisings in northern Nigeria and Somalia and the militia warfare in eastern Congo, have intensified dramatically. New power contests between militarized elites in Ethiopia and Sudan are convulsing two of Africa’s largest and most populous nations. The countries of the western Sahel are now the heart of global jihadism, where regional offshoots of al Qaeda and Islamic State are battling both each other and a group of wobbly military governments. This corridor of conflict stretches across approximately 4,000 miles and encompasses about 10% of the total land mass of sub-Saharan Africa, an area that has doubled in just three years and today is about 10 times the size of the U.K., according to an analysis by political risk consulting firm Verisk Maplecroft. In its wake lies incalculable human suffering – mass displacement, atrocities against civilians and extreme hunger – on a continent that is already by far the poorest on the planet.