RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
March 1 to March 7, 2020

Featured Investigation:
Buried: A Bad Faculty Report Card
on College Sex Abuse

• In the survey last year by the Association of American Universities, you can find hundreds of reported incidents of potentially criminal behavior by faculty and staff -- but only if you know where to look for it, and how to interpret the confusing presentation.
• The results are given not as numbers of incidents, but as percentages such as 0.3% or 0.5% - making them difficult to decipher for students, parents, and others.
• RCI had to turn to an academic statistician to translate: Some 33 female students reported being non-consensually penetrated by a faculty member or instructor -- that is, possibly raped - at just those few elite schools.
• The same method reveals hundreds of other incidents of alleged sexual misconduct by faculty or staff.
• "It's an under-appreciated issue that warrants its own attention," said the expert, William Kidder. "It's more likely to have greater harmful effects on the student victim because of the abuse by someone in power."
• Jennifer Freyd, a victims' advocate, said of the confusing data: "You always have to interpret it in light of what that organization exists to do. The AAU is fundamentally a lobby organization for a set of elite institutions in the USA - it largely exists to protect their interest."
• On some campuses, efforts have been growing to challenge an academic culture long indifferent to student/faculty relationships.

The Election Investigations: Top Articles

Soviet Files Say Kremlin Saw Propaganda Uses in Sanders, New York Times
Steele Speaks Publicly, Hits Mueller Report as Too Narrow, Daily Beast
Was Trump Spied On as Part of Carter Page Wiretapping? The Hill
Brad Parscale, Man Behind Trump Facebook Juggernaut, New Yorker
Donald and Mike: The NYC Backstory, Wall St Journal
Court Orders Deposition of Hillary Clinton on Emails, Benghazi, Judicial Watch
The Biden Financial Family Tree, "Drill Down With Peter Schweizer" (Video)

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

'Locate X' Tech Allows Feds Warrant-Free Phone Tracking
Protocol
How effective is federal law enforcement? Hard to say. Some articles suggest that a sparrow doesn't fall without the feds' notice. For instance, Protocol reports that U.S. law enforcement agencies signed millions of dollars worth of contracts with a Virginia company that tracks the movement of people's cell phones. The product, called Locate X and sold by Babel Street, allows investigators to draw a digital fence around an address or area, pinpoint mobile devices that were within that area, and see where else those devices have traveled, going back months. On the other hand, the Washington Times reports separately that the Department of Justice Inspector General has concluded that the FBI missed opportunities to stop domestic terrorists - including six attacks that killed 70 people - because they failed to conduct follow-up investigations of people identified as violent extremists.

Hectored, China Moves Uighurs to Forced Labor for Nike Supplier
Washington Post
After intense international criticism of the Communist Party's campaign to forcibly assimilate the mostly Muslim Uighur minority by detaining more than a million people in reeducation camps, party officials said last year that most have graduated and been released. But new evidence shows that the Chinese authorities are moving many Uighurs into government-directed labor around the country. This article reports that some have been sent to factories that make goods for global brands, including Nike.

Big Oil, Big Soda Kept Plastics Crisis Secret for Decades
Rolling Stone
There are lots of good reasons to worry about the effects of plastics on human health and the environment - and this article highlights many of them. These include the fact that people around the globe on average ingest nearly 2,000 particles of plastic a week - a credit card's worth. These tiny pieces enter our unwitting bodies from tap water, food and other sources carrying chemicals linked to cancers, hormone disruption, and developmental delays. What the article doesn't do is offer a fair discussion of the many benefits plastics provide - they are cheap and strong - or, more important perhaps, assess the costs and benefits of the products that might replace them. Instead it frames its tale of environmental apocalypse around the battle between the good guys who favor restrictions on plastics and the bad guys of the powerful plastics industry - oil and chemical companies and consumer giants like Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and Unilever that package their products in the stuff.

The Great Wall Street Single-Family Housing Grab
New York Times
In the wake of the Great Recession, savvy investors loaded up on foreclosed properties at a discount of 30 to 50 percent and then rented them out. By 2016, 95 percent of the distressed mortgages on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's books were auctioned off to Wall Street investors, and private-equity firms had acquired more than 200,000 homes in desirable cities and middle-class suburban neighborhoods, creating a tantalizing new asset class: the single-family-rental home. The companies would make money on rising home values while tenants covered the mortgages. This article contends that this is a problem: "Landlords," it declares, "can be rapacious creatures, but this new breed of private-equity landlord has proved itself to be particularly so." But it doesn't provide enough in-depth reporting about the housing market to explain how bankrupt people could have been kept in their homes or maintained foreclosed properties until private individuals were once again able to buy them.

Piled Bodies, Overflowing Morgues: America's Autopsy Crisis
New York Times
Here's a case where it'd be nice if life imitated art: Television shows may be brimming with medical examiners and forensic pathologists, but in the real world there is an acute shortage of experts to perform autopsies. One root of the problem is that the profession offers relatively low pay with a heavy workload - the opioid crisis in particular has increased the number of suspicious deaths. As a result, this article reports, medical examiner's offices with a glut of cases have lost accreditation with the national supervising association. The bodies in their districts are often shipped to other offices — which then become overloaded and risk losing accreditation in turn. There are coverage deserts, huge (mostly rural) parts of America that lack ready access to autopsies or trained death investigators. In Wyoming, bodies often have to cross state lines because there are no forensic pathologists nearby. Chief medical examiners of New Hampshire, New Jersey, Los Angeles County and Cook County, Ill., (all offices serving millions of people) have resigned in protest over intolerable caseloads and insufficient funding and resources. A separate article on the Considerable website says the dead's problems aren't over when they make it out of the morgue because many cities are running out of burial space.

How Insulin Became the Poster Child for Medicare for All
New Republic
Nicole Smith-Holt, a college financial aid specialist in Richfield, Minnesota, got the call on a Tuesday in June 2017. Her son Alec had been found alone in his new apartment, slumped over and ice-cold - dead not from a drug overdose, but a lack of the drug insulin, which was too expensive for him to treat his diabetes. In the decade preceding Alec's death, prices of the most common insulin had risen threefold. Studies have found that around one in four diabetics ration their insulin intake, skipping doses or taking less than prescribed to make supplies last. This article describes the relatively ineffective efforts to reform the market.

The American Restaurant Is on Life Support
The Counter
Applebee's has just announced a new growth strategy that centers on catering and delivery, not restaurants. This article says that reflects a paradigm shift in the food industry being fueled by "a new generation of diners who don't consider seats and service a priority." The good news/bad news here is that the food economy is expected to boom with projected annual sales of $1.2 trillion by 2030, up from a projected $863 billion last year. But this may come at the expense of established sit-down restaurants - 70 percent of which are owned by individuals who may not have the resources to adapt to changing tastes like Applebee's. This long article also reports on several people who are pursuing their restaurant dreams - and are sure they will make it - despite the changing landscape.

The Millennials Who Want to Get Rid of Their Class Privilege
Washington Post
Radical rich kids are often accused of hypocrisy as they rail against injustice while living large. This article reports on a cohort of privileged millennials who are walking the walk - donating a significant amount of money through an organization called Resource Generation, a nonprofit whose slogan is "Got class privilege and want social justice?" Resource Generation focuses on organizing wealthy young people to recognize their unearned privilege, make peace with it, and then relinquish much of it. The 700 wealthy millennials who belong to Resource Group include David Roswell, an Oberlin College graduate whose great-grandfather was a founder of the American Oil Co., or Amoco. So far, Roswell, now 29, has given away about $1.6 million of the $7.5 million he knows he will inherit.