RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week 
February 5 to February 11, 2023 

Featured Investigation: 
The Left's Little Financial Engine That Could
(Change the World Radically)  

When Amalgamated talks, people listen, Ben Weingarten reports for RealClearInvestigations. The little (and little-known) progressive bank has emerged as a modern-day E.F. Hutton for the wider corporate world given the powerful sources of its money: the Democratic Party, activist groups, and major labor unions.  Weingarten reports: 

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series 

Since 1921, claiming tax losses from so-called wash sales — selling shares of a company then buying them again within a short period — has been forbidden.  But, this article reports, that practice, which allows investors to gain a tax benefit by selling a stock while still maintaining their position in a certain company, is favorite tactic of the very rich. Using information from stolen tax returns, 

ProPublica estimates that from 2014 through 2018, [former Microsoft CEO] Ballmer was able to generate tax losses totaling $579 million without changing his investment portfolio in a meaningful way. The tax savings from these losses amount to at least $138 million. 

This article reports that other wealthy individuals who have generated sizable tax losses through wash sales include: Jim Walton, heir to the Walmart Fortune ($134 million); Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz ($84 million); Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg ($34 million) and WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton ($32 million). ProPublica also reports that “over the past 25 years, investing has undergone a transformation that’s made the law against wash sales toothless. Improved computing, new financial products, cheaper trading costs and a shift away from picking stocks to passively tracking the broader market are the main ingredients of the change.”  

Where Pentagon Saw Boondoggle,
Congress Saw Jobs  
New York Times 

Last year the Pentagon announced that it wanted to cut its losses and save $4.3 billion by retiring eight of its 10 Freedom-class combat ships. Built to last 25 years, this article reports, their average age was only four. They had suffered “humiliating breakdowns, including repeated engine failures and technical shortcomings in an anti-submarine system intended to counter China’s growing naval capacity.” Then politics kicked in. 

A consortium of players with economic ties to the ships ‒ led by a trade association whose members had just secured contracts worth up to $3 billion to do repairs and supply work on them ‒ mobilized to pressure Congress to block the plan, with phone calls, emails and visits to Washington to press lawmakers to intervene. … Within weeks, lawmakers offered amendments to the 2023 Pentagon spending authorization law that prohibited the Navy from retiring four of the eight ships in Jacksonville and the one in San Diego. “These ships are not perfect ‒ no new class of ship is,” said Representative John Rutherford, Republican of Florida, who represents the Jacksonville area and  introduced one of the amendments  after  a meeting with a delegation of Florida officials who had flown to Washington to protest the Navy’s decision. “But they are fulfilling operational needs as we speak.” 

In December, this article reports “spending bill passed by Congress and signed into law by President Biden, stymie[d] the Pentagon’s wishes by allowing only four of the nine targeted ships to be retired.” 

When thinking about the nation’s most liberal universities, Texas Tech is not the first place that comes to mind. So, it is especially telling that job candidate evaluations for more than a dozen applicants to the school’s biological sciences department show that knowledge of and commitment to the goals of diversity, equity and inclusion play an important role. This reported op-ed, which is based on information acquired through a FOIA request, reports: 

Amidst the explosion of university diversity, equity and inclusion policies, Texas Tech’s biology department adopted its own DEI motion promising to “require and strongly weight a diversity statement from all candidates.” These short, written declarations are meant to summarize an academic job seeker’s past and potential contributions to DEI efforts on campus. … One Texas Tech search committee penalized a candidate for espousing race-neutrality in teaching. The candidate “mentioned that DEI is not an issue because he respects his students and treats them equally,” the evaluation notes. “This indicates a lack of understanding of equity and inclusion issues.” Another search committee flagged a candidate for failing to properly understand “the difference between equity and equality, even on re-direct,” noting that this suggests a “rather superficial understanding of DEI more generally.”  

The article, written by John D. Sailer, who is a fellow at the National Association of Scholars, confirms “what critics of DEI statements have long argued: That they inevitably act as ideological litmus tests.”  

In a separate article, Christopher F. Rufo reports for City Journal on documents that show the University of South Florida has adopted a radical “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) program that claims America is a force for “white supremacy,” encourages students to attend racially segregated counseling programs to address their “privilege” and “oppression,” and promotes a variety of left-wing causes, including “reparations,” “defund the police,” and “prison abolition.” 

How Union Helps NFL Avoid
Paying Disabled Players  
Washington Post 

The 2022 NFL season will be remembered, in part, for two shocking scenes: One was the sight of Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa writhing on the field after suffering his second concussion in five days, the other was Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsing with a cardiac arrest, ending a Monday Night Football game. Despite the renewed attention these incidents have brought to the sport’s violence and danger, this article reports:  

... [D]ebilitated former NFL players continue to encounter a benefit plan, jointly managed by the league and union, that fights aggressively to deny claims and repeatedly shirks legal obligations to fairly review cases … Over the past six months, The Post reviewed thousands of pages of medical records, denial letters and other plan documents produced in lawsuits since 2008, the year after former players went to Congress to complain of onerous red tape, biased doctors and a rigged claims process. League and union officials disputed those allegations but promised reforms. In the 15 years since, though, eight players have successfully sued the league’s plan, triggering tense and protracted legal fights that have revealed repeated instances in which the NFL’s plan seized on technicalities, ignored medical evidence and flouted federal judges to justify denying claims.  

Anchorage Mayor Pal
at Center of Scandal  
ProPublica 

Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson and his top aide, Larry Baker, are so close that the mayor boasted to employees that he personally drove to Baker’s home with a gun to help with a trespassing call on Nov. 26. Now, this article reports, the two men are at the center of a burgeoning scandal at Anchorage City Hall, in which numerous top officials have been fired or resigned:

Among the allegations is that Baker and the mayor attempted to use their influence to protect a man accused of domestic violence and pressured Shearer to sign off on millions of dollars of construction work in violation of city code. … [Municipal Real Estate Director Christina] Hendrickson was fired in September 2021, two days after delivering a whistleblower complaint to the city Assembly accusing the mayor of violating the city code. She has  filed a lawsuit  accusing the city of retaliation. 

This article reports that the turmoil at City Hall is affecting the city’s operations, as many departments are hobbled by vacancies. The mayor’s human resources director, for example, resigned  as this story was being prepared for publication. “I can no longer continue to serve in what has become an increasingly toxic, hostile, and demoralizing work environment,” he wrote. 

Coronavirus Investigations 

As medical workers battled COVID-19, an older threat was also on the rise: severe sepsis, a potentially deadly condition that arises when the body, in its effort to fight infection, ends up harming itself. This article reports: 

The bulk of sepsis cases begin  outside of hospitals, but people are also at risk of getting sepsis while hospitalized for other illnesses or medical procedures. And that danger only grew during the pandemic, according to  state data: In California, the number of “hospital-acquired” cases of severe sepsis rose more than 46% between 2019 and 2021. Experts say the pandemic exacerbated a persistent threat for patients, faulting both the dangers of the coronavirus itself and the stresses that hospitals have faced during the pandemic. ... The rise in sepsis in California came as hospital-acquired infections increased across the country ‒ a problem that worsened during surges in COVID hospitalizations,  researchers have found.