RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
October 20 to October 26 Featured Investigation: After the Deluge: North Carolina After ‘Thousand-Year’ Storm Hurricanes are not supposed strike places like Asheville, N.C. – 500 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, 2,100 feet above sea level. Nobody told that to Helene. In a richly textured article drawn from dozens of interviews conducted on the ground in western North Carolina, Nancy Rommelmann reports for RealClearInvestigations that even as it wrought biblical devastation, the “once in a thousand years” storm has summoned the better angels of Americans. There had been no local evacuation order even as the storm barreled toward the area, dumping 30 inches of rain on western North Carolina and creating up to 140-mile-per-hour winds. It would bring down untold thousands of trees. It would knock out the electrical grid, cell phone service, and the water supply all at once. In a matter of hours, it would obliterate the everyday security people felt, leaving survivors blinking into a new reality, wondering if they could or should rebuild lives in a place whose fragility had just been betrayed. Matters were soon made worse by politicians, partisans, and conspiracists who tried to use the destruction and death caused by Helene to score political points. While mainstream news outlets suggested the area was being commandeered by armed right-wing militias, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was tweeting, “Yes they can control the weather” (no elaboration as to who “they” were). Because of its unexpected and painful destruction, western North Carolina could have become another symbol of America’s finger-pointing cultural divide. Instead, it has become, by and large, a heroic story of people and government working together as best they could in cataclysmic circumstances. Volunteers rushed in from all over to provide aid and comfort and to help rebuild. “I couldn’t give you an exact number, they’re coming from Arkansas, Pennsylvania, Mississippi,” said one volunteer. “We’re just trying to meet everyone’s needs.” Where some blamed the government for not immediately rushing to the rescue, most people praised the self-reliance of her neighbors. “Hillbillies and rednecks are a community. They want to talk about how Podunk we are and backwards. But no, we got this,” said one resident. “We need outside assistance, obviously. But we came together immediately.” Featured Investigation: Overnight Success: Biden’s Climate Splurge Gives Billions to Nonprofit Newbies The EPA has suddenly become a major grant maker, charged with awarding $27 billion through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund created by President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. James Varney reports for RealClearInvestigations that the regulatory agency’s early efforts are raising questions as it hands out massive sums to several nonprofits with weak track records but strong political connections. After gaining nonprofit status in August 2023, the Justice Climate Fund was awarded $940 million by the Biden administration just eight months later. The Opportunity Finance Network, which in 2022 had revenues of $76 million, received a $2.29 billion award. 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, and Anthony Foxx, who served as Transportation Secretary in the Obama administration. The board of the Coalition for Green Capital, which got the second biggest NCIF award of $5 billion, includes Hugh Frater, who headed Fannie Mae at the end of the Obama administration. Another board member, Cecilia Martinez, was the top “environmental justice official” in Biden’s White House before moving to the advocacy and non-profit sector. The EPA acknowledges it has never handed out such gigantic sums of money, and its Inspector General told Congress last month it marked a “fantastically complex” and “unusual” setup that his small staff would be hard pressed to follow. The EPA describes the Greenhouse Fund as “an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate the adoption of greenhouse gas reducing technologies.” By investing in making residential homes and neighborhoods more “eco-friendly,”, the money will pay dividends in both lower utility bills and higher employment, the agency says. The Fund’s requirements also carry mandates that at least 40 percent of the billions be spent in “low income or disadvantaged communities” or “tribal” lands, and in some cases winners have pledged to spend up to 70 percent of the money in those same areas. Featured Investigation: Peak Waste: Feds Set Record for Improper Payments In just three years the Biden administration has shattered Trump’s record for the most money lost to “improper payments” during a single presidential term – at least $764 billion, or roughly 6% of total spending. Bob Ivry reports for RealClearInvestigations that while the problem of waste and abuse has only grown through the years, a pioneering effort to claw back money lost during COVID – the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee – may help address this longstanding problem. Problem is, funding for that agency is set to expire. Created with a five year lifespan by the Trump-era CARES Act in2020, the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee has identified 135 times more improper payments than it has spent. The Accountability Committee’s secret sauce is cross-agency partnerships. Right now, the federal government’s primary watchdogs, the inspectors general, have no authority to investigate outside their own departments. The government-wide pandemic anti-fraud programs helped break down those silos. It worked, for example, with the Social Security Administration to ensure that applicants for aid had properly matching social security numbers – and were alive. The watchdog determined there were 69,000 examples of questionable identification that had been used to obtain $5.4 billion in pandemic relief. Even as funding for the Accountability Committee is set to expire, the inspectors general of every Cabinet level department are beseeching Congress to apply the same fraud-prevention and detection tools to all federal spending. Since 2003, when the government first started tracking improper payments, it is estimated that they have added up to more than $2.7 trillion. Waste of the Day by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books Is NY Program Designed To Waste Money?, RCI States Are $811 Billion In Debt, RCI California's $20M Subsidy to “Joker 2”, RCI New Hampshire Renovated Half a Bridge, RCI Chicago Group Funded Despite Sex Allegations, RCI Election 2024 and the Beltway Small Think Tank Has Big MAGA Influence, New York Times Woodward: Dem Donors Worried about Biden's Brain in 2023, Legal Insurrection Billionaire Network Funding ‘Stop the Steal’ 2.0, Wall Street Journal Border Agents: Biden-Harris Hiding Migrants Before Election, New York Post Biden-Harris Allegedly Hid Docs to Justify Fossil Fuel Limit, Washington Free Beacon Did Harris Game Law School Admission Program?, Daily Signal Harris Advisors Hope to "Kill Musk's Twitter", Substack Hard Target: U.S. Agencies Fund, and Fight With, Elon Musk, New York Times Harris Plagiarized Testimony, Made-Up Sex Victim, Washington Free Beacon White House Involved in Georgia's Case Against Trump, Fox News How Pro-Israel Lobby Shapes D.C. We Tracked Every Dollar., Intercept Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Climate Change Not Why Natural Disasters Cost More Washington Post Since 1980, the number of weather disasters that have done more than a billion dollars in damage has grown dramatically. When the toll is tallied from hurricanes Helene and Milton, they will become the 397th and 398th entries in the database. While climate change is routinely cited as the driver of these rising costs, this article reports “the truth lies elsewhere.” Over time, migration to hazard-prone areas has increased, putting more people and property in harm’s way. Disasters are more expensive because there is more to destroy. The billion-dollar disaster dataset is “quoted a lot and people use it as a way of saying that climate change is already influencing what we see. And yet, unless you get the economics right, you can’t really justify that,” said D. James Baker, the physicist and oceanographer who led NOAA from 1993 to 2001, the longest tenure as administrator in the agency’s history. Baker and others say disputing whether global warming’s influence can be found in the disaster data is not the same as questioning whether climate change is real or whether society should switch from fossil fuels. “We know that climate change is real. We don’t see it in the [economic] losses yet,” said Laurens Bouwer, an expert on the assessment of climate risks and a lead author on five reports by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the advisory body through which scientists reach consensus on climate change. Hedge Funds Betting Against Green Future Bloomberg Not seeing much green in America’s green future, Wall Street is betting against renewable energy, this article reports. Despite vast green stimulus packages in the US, Europe and China, more hedge funds are on average net short batteries, solar, electric vehicles and hydrogen than are long those sectors; and more funds are net long fossil fuels than are shorting oil, gas and coal, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of positions voluntarily disclosed by roughly 500 hedge funds to Hazeltree, a data compiler in the alternative investment industry. This article also reports that managers in the $5 trillion hedge fund industry say the reason for their strategy is obvious: clean energy and green technology stocks have lagged far behind the broader market. Deep-pocketed institutions are concluding that many climate investments won’t pay off as quickly, or as lucratively, as they’d hoped. Abortions Increase in Most Every State New York Times In nearly every state that has sharply curtailed access to abortion, the number of women intentionally terminating their pregnancies increased between 2020 and the end of 2023, according to the most comprehensive account of all abortions by state since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. In the 13 states that enacted near-total abortion bans, the number of women receiving abortions increased in all but three, according to the study. Some women traveled to clinics in states where abortions were legal. Others ordered abortion pills from U.S. doctors online, after doctors in other states started writing prescriptions under shield laws that protect them when they provide mail-order pills to patients in states with bans. … Nationwide, the study also found that abortions have continued to rise. There were roughly 587,000 abortions in the first half of this year, an increase of more than 12 percent from the same period in 2023. “It’s a surprise to everyone,” said David S. Cohen, co-author of the coming book “After Dobbs: How the Supreme Court Ended Roe but Not Abortion” and a law professor at Drexel University. “I think most people thought there would be creativity and determination that would still get a lot of people abortions once Roe v. Wade was overturned. But I don’t think anyone thought it would stay the same, let alone go up.” UN Stood Aside as Ethiopia Aid Was Looted Reuters U.S. officials are describing 'industrial level' theft of grain sent to fight famine in Ethiopia by both armies waging that nation’s civil war as well as black market thieves. Meanwhile, this article reports, the UN agency that is supposed to oversee the shipments, the World Food Program, has cleared itself of wrongdoing, pointing the finger for problems at the hungry. The WFP was warned by its own staff and other aid organizations as early as 2021 about food diversion occurring throughout the country, four UN workers and diplomats told Reuters. They said the WFP chose to look the other way amid the civil war then tearing the country apart: It feared the Ethiopian government might retaliate by limiting the number of trucks delivering aid to embattled Tigray. … Some U.S. officials privately accuse the UN food body of being untrustworthy. An internal WFP investigative report, seen by Reuters, cites a May 2023 cable from Washington’s top U.S. diplomat in Ethiopia at the time: “The scale and depth of diversion” in areas where the WFP managed food relief “calls into question WFP’s ability to be a faithful and principled” partner for distributing food in Ethiopia. While largely absolving the Ethiopian government and WFP’s own employees of responsibility in the diversion of aid, the UN agency’s internal report took aim at the starving people. Aid-diversion incidents were largely driven by food-aid recipients, the report says. The hungry resold some of their rations and obtained extra food fraudulently by registering their families multiple times, the report claims. Some aid recipients in Ethiopia told Reuters they do sometimes sell some of their food rations, but out of desperation. “I got aid because I have health conditions,” said Leelity Gebreegizabher, a single mother of two in a camp in the town of Shire. “A local official helped me to get 15 kilos of food so that I could sell some of it to buy medicine.” What Drugmakers Hid During Alzheimer’s Trials New York Times By 2021, nearly 2,000 people whose genetic profile suggested they were at heightened risk for Alzheimer’s had signed up to test a new drug to combat the disease. These subjects, however, were also more vulnerable to brain bleeding or swelling if they received the drug. While the drugmaker, Eisai, disclosed this possible side effect, this article reports that it did not fully disclose the risks to participants. In all, 274 volunteers joined the trial without Eisai telling them they were at an especially high risk for brain injuries, documents obtained by The New York Times show. One of them was Genevieve Lane, a 79-year-old resident of the Villages in Florida who died in September 2022 after three doses of the drug, her brain riddled with 51 microhemorrhages. An autopsy determined that the drug’s side effects had contributed to her death. Her final hours were spent thrashing so violently that nurses had to tie her down. Another high-risk trial volunteer died, and more than 100 others suffered brain bleeding or swelling. While most of those injuries were mild and asymptomatic, some were serious and life-threatening. The Times uncovered similar issues in a clinical trial involving an Alzheimer’s drug manufactured by Eli Lilly. The drugmaker “also chose not to tell 289 volunteers that their genetic profiles made them vulnerable to brain injuries, The Times found. Dozens experienced what Lilly classified as ‘severe’ brain bleeding.” The FDA has approved both drugs for wider use. |
