RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week Nov. 24 to Nov. 30, 2024 In RealClearInvestigations, John R. Lott Jr. presents statistics that belie broad claims that illegal immigrants have less involvement with the criminal justice system than native-born Americans. To the contrary, an analysis of the available data suggests that the criminal records of millions of migrants – the ones President-elect Trump vows to prioritize for deportation – are vastly understated. The criminal pasts of illegal immigrants remain largely unknown due to illegal crossings, lax enforcement, and lax data collection by federal and “sanctuary” jurisdictions. In response to a congressional request, ICE reported this summer that it has released 7.4 million “non-detained” noncitizens into the U.S. during the last four decades or so. ICE reports that these include 662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories. These criminals disproportionately entered the U.S. during the Biden administration. Of the 662,566, 435,719 had criminal convictions in their home countries and another 226,847 had pending criminal charges. An analysis based on the very limited reliable data suggests that crime by illegal aliens who entered the U.S. by July 21, 2024, has cost the country some $166 billion. These figures are only suggestive of the extent of crime because they only list the most serious crime committed by each individual. A murderer who also committed a sex offense is only counted as a murderer. John R. Lott Jr. is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. Waste of the Day by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books Fauci Still Gets Chauffeur, Security Detail, RCI $14M in Federal Software at Risk of Attack, RCI Baltimore Wrongly Auctions Woman’s Truck, RCI Triplicated Transport in Atlanta, RCI $3M Spent, Ky. School Halts Construction, RCI Election 2024 and the Beltway The Biden administration is hurrying to finalize more than a dozen green energy loans worth more than $25 billion before President-elect Donald Trump takes office in mid-January: Over the last two months, the Loan Programs Office closed on seven loans worth $5.9 billion, including two that were closed after the election. Those two loans went to EV battery component plants in Michigan and New York. By comparison, the office closed on five loans worth $6.5 billion during the prior 27 months. … Overall, the Loan Programs Office has announced loans worth a total of $37.6 billion for 29 green energy projects since 2022. Officials have been able to close on just 12 of those loans. "This is an egregious abuse of taxpayer dollars," said Tom Pyle, the president of the Institute for Energy Research and member of the 2016 Trump transition team. "Not one additional loan should go out the door between now and the inauguration. President Trump ran on an energy platform that included repealing the subsidies in the IRA and yet Biden is trying to rush this money out the door before he rides off into the Delaware sunset." In a separate article last month, 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. Other Election 2024 and the Beltway Trump Allies Targeted by Bomb Threats, Swatting Attacks, Associated Press Exposed: The Democrat-Tied Dirty Tricks vs. No Labels, Racket News Inside the Dems' Plot to Keep Biden in Office Using Harassment, Daily Mail Ramaswamy’s FDA Crusade Could Boost Biotech – and Himself, Washington Post Christopher Rufo Has Trump’s Ear and Wants to End DEI, Wall Street Journal 4 Democratic Firms Got $600M for Harris Ads, Washington Free Beacon Senate: Biden Admin Spent $2B Imposing DEI on Science, College Fix Biden Surveillance Tools Could Aid Trump Deportations, Associated Press Records Undercut AOC's Claim She Doesn’t Take Lobbyist Cash, Examiner Other Noteworthy Articles and Series OnlyFans says it empowers content creators, particularly women, to monetize sexually explicit images and videos in a safe online environment. But a Reuters investigation found women who said they had been deceived, drugged, terrorized and sexually enslaved to make money from the site: In one prominent case, influencer Andrew Tate, with millions of followers worldwide on social media, is accused of forcing women in Romania to produce porn for OnlyFans and pocketing the profits. He has denied the charges. Generating less attention are cases Reuters identified in the U.S., where some women endured weeks or months of alleged sexual slavery in ordinary-looking homes in quiet communities. The victim sometimes was a fiance or girlfriend, abused to pad the household budget, fund a couple’s retirement or cover children’s expenses, according to accounts in police or court files. … At least two cases detailed in police files involve allegations of forced prostitution. A husband and wife ran a six-state trafficking and prostitution operation before their arrest in a tidy Ohio neighborhood where they were raising two children, prosecutors say. The husband allegedly used OnlyFans to arrange sexual encounters for multiple women and sell porn he ordered them to make. He awaits trial; his wife recently pleaded guilty to related charges. These trafficking enterprises relied on intimidation, violence or false assurances of love to press women into porn and keep them producing, say victims and prosecutors. The alleged perpetrators were mostly men – some accused of beating and raping women, others of tattooing their names and faces on their victims. They filmed in private settings, sometimes holding victims captive for a year or more, the records and interviews show. Between 1946 and 1963, this article reports, lab scientists knowingly exposed at least 1,073 servicemen, dockworkers, lab employees and others to potentially harmful radiation through war games, decontamination tests and medical studies at the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory at San Francisco’s Hunters Point naval shipyard. A review by the San Francisco Public Press of thousands of pages of government and academic records as well as interviews with affected servicemen reveal: ... [T]he lab conducted at least 24 experiments that exposed humans to radiation, far more than past official reviews acknowledged. Safety reports also note dozens of accidents in which staff received doses in excess of federal health limits in effect at the time. Researchers at the lab tracked the exposure of workers trying to clean ships irradiated by an atomic bomb test. Soldiers were ordered to crawl through fields of radioactive sand and soil. In clinical studies, radioactive substances were applied to forearms and hands, injected or administered by mouth. Top US civilian and military officials pre-approved all of this in writing, documents show. The records indicate that researchers gained limited knowledge from this program, and that not everyone involved had their exposure monitored. There is also no sign the lab studied the long-term health effects on people used in the experiments or in surrounding communities, either during the lab’s heyday or after it closed in 1969. This article reports that the Navy’s San Francisco lab was "a major cold war research facility with a unique focus on ‘radiological defense,’ techniques developed to help the public survive and armed forces fight back in case of an atomic attack. It was one node in a nationwide network that encompassed universities, hospitals and national labs that had permission to handle dangerous radioactive material." Morgan Stanley’s wealth-management division, which oversees about $6 trillion of assets, represents close to half the firm’s total revenue and has been a crucial source of profits. The Journal has previously reported that a range of federal agencies and others are probing the bank’s vetting procedures to determine whether it has sufficient anti-money-laundering controls. This article reports that a new cache of internal documents as well as interviews with nearly 20 current and former employees illustrate the day-to-day operations of the bank: The bank wooed clients from countries known for financial corruption and drug trafficking, including Venezuela. Federal investigators are looking into whether the bank allowed accounts to be used for money laundering funds gained through corruption that were connected to a former government minister there. Documents warned the bank’s risk had increased because of its exposure to Russia and a sanctioned Russian bank … [A] 2023 document showed that 24%, or 46,572, of Morgan Stanley’s international wealth-management accounts were designated by the firm as “High/High+” risk for money laundering. The firm also labeled at least 25,000 international E*Trade accounts as being in high-risk areas. This article reports that “at other banks, a financial adviser also meets a prospective client in person to help determine whether their funds come from a valid source; that wasn’t always the case at Morgan Stanley, the documents and interviews show.” If your holidays plans include a trip to New York City, make sure your stocking is stuffed with greenbacks because it’s going to be expensive. The average price of a hotel room in the Big Apple was a record-setting $417 per night in September. The only U.S. destination with higher prices was Maui. This article puts a happy spin on the forces driving the rising prices: “hotel rates overall have climbed as tourists are once again filling the city’s sidewalks, reviving an economic pillar that ground to a halt during the coronavirus pandemic.” It is not until the 25th paragraph that readers are told what’s new: Experts in the hotel industry said that rising room rates reflected an overall increase in hospitality and travel costs in cities across the country but also special circumstances in New York. The number of available hotel rooms has declined following an influx of migrants, who have been placed in struggling hotels. Over the summer, about 11 percent of the 136,000 hotel rooms in the city were set aside for migrants. |