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07 July 21
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rom its headquarters just blocks from the White House, a small, high-powered team of former ambassadors, lawyers, and Obama appointees has spent the past few years solving problems for the world’s biggest companies.
Less than six months into the Biden administration, more than 15 consultants from the firm WestExec Advisors have fanned out across the White House, its foreign policy apparatus, and its law enforcement institutions. Five, some of whom already have jobs with the administration, have been nominated for high-ranking posts, and four others served on the Biden-Harris transition team. Even by Washington standards, it’s a remarkable march through the revolving door, especially for a firm that only launched in 2017. The pipeline has produced a dominance of WestExec alums throughout the administration, installed in senior roles as influential as director of national intelligence and secretary of state. WestExec clients, meanwhile, have controversial interests in tech and defense that intersect with the policies their former consultants are now in a position to set and execute.
The arrival of each new WestExec adviser at the administration has been met with varying degrees of press coverage — headlines for the secretary of state, blurbs in trade publications for the head of cybersecurity — but the creeping monopolization of foreign policymaking by a single boutique consulting firm has gone largely unnoticed. The insularity of this network of policymakers poses concerns about the potential for groupthink, conflicts of interest, and what can only be called, however oxymoronically, legalized corruption.
WestExec does not affirmatively share its clients, and public financial disclosure forms only offer broad outlines. Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, says that government ethics laws written decades ago aren’t equipped to handle a situation in which a single firm launches 15 senior officials. “Yes, they’re employed by the government, I’ll grant you that. But are they actually working for the American people or not? Where does their loyalty lie?” said Clark. “The private sector can in essence co-opt the public sector.”
“These White House officials are experienced government leaders whose prior private sector experience is part of a broad and diverse skill set they bring to government service,” said a White House spokesperson in a statement. WestExec did not reply to a detailed list of questions for this story.
The firm describes one of its chief selling points as its “unparalleled geopolitical risk analysis,” now confirmed by the saturation of its employees in positions of power. WestExec has also succeeded in getting tech startups into defense contracts and helped defense corporations modernize with tech; it worked to help multinational companies break into China. One of its collaborators is the defense-centered investment group Pine Island Capital Partners, which launched a SPAC, or “blank check” company,” last year. Tony Blinken advised Pine Island and was a part owner. (Michèle Flournoy, another WestExec co-founder, had her nomination to be secretary of defense nixed. President Joe Biden instead nominated Lloyd Austin, himself a former Pine Island partner but not a WestExec consultant.)
What makes WestExec “boutique” is the promise that its executives would have face time with its seasoned policymakers. “We felt other firms brought people in for big names and never got to see the big names,” said one WestExec co-founder in 2020. “Tony is on client calls.”
Blinken, now secretary of state, advised household names like telecommunications giant AT&T, defense contractor Boeing, shipping magnate FedEx, and the media company Discovery as a WestExec founding partner. He worked for Big Tech pillars Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Uber. He helped niche companies like speakers bureau GLG, art seller Sotheby’s, and biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences. Blinken also lists clients that are global investment firms and asset managers, like Blackstone, Lazard, Royal Bank of Canada, and the multinational conglomerate SoftBank — which does extensive business with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He even advised the consulting group McKinsey & Company. Though Blinken left WestExec in July 2020 — after The American Prospect inquired about the relationship — each of these businesses has an international profile that may impact his calculations as he implements Biden’s foreign policy.
Blinken also brought several of his key staff members at the State Department with him from WestExec. His senior adviser Julianne Smith, who listed Boeing and SoftBank as clients, earned $34,000 as a WestExec consultant while holding down a full-time role at the think tank German Marshall Fund. Smith has been nominated to be permanent representative to NATO. (Blinken also brought WestExec executive assistant Sarah McCool to the State Department as his director of scheduling.) Barbara Leaf, a former ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, worked for the firm and advised the National Basketball Association. She went on to serve as Biden’s senior director for the Middle East at the National Security Council. Leaf awaits a vote to be the State Department’s assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs. Meanwhile, consultant Daniel B. Shapiro, Obama’s ambassador to Israel and a “very busy” early member of the firm, according to his colleague, is being floated as a Middle East envoy. The Prospect revealed last summer that one of WestExec’s clients was Windward, an Israeli artificial intelligence company that specializes in ship tracking.
The firm also provided a comfortable place for Biden’s most powerful intelligence chiefs to wait out the Trump administration. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines had her name scrubbed from WestExec’s website early on, but she worked with the firm from October 2017 to July 2020, when she joined Biden’s transition team as foreign policy lead. According to a questionnaire completed before her confirmation hearing, she delivered “strategic advice” on “cyber norms; national security threats; and testing, evaluation, validation and verification of machine learning systems by the Department of Defense” to clients like Facebook, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, and Open Philanthropy. Deputy Director of the CIA David S. Cohen was an early member of WestExec’s “core team” alongside Haines and Blinken. But it’s impossible to know who his clients were, because an exemption for the spy agencies’ officials means that his disclosure is not publicly available.
“That exempts them from public accountability,” said Clark, the ethics expert at Washington University, “and that’s a problem because we can’t necessarily rely on internal controls and external, public disclosure.” A CIA spokesperson declined to share the companies Cohen worked for at WestExec.
Then there’s Chris Inglis, who the Senate recently approved as national cyber director. He earned $15,000 from the firm and worked for internet security outfit CrowdStrike and email encryption company Virtru.
Since its founding in 2017, WestExec’s focus has been to enhance the capabilities of defense, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies. It partners with the Silicon Valley venture firm Ridgeline, which describes itself as “mission-driven” — meaning that unlike some tech investors, which avoid working with the military, Ridgeline seeks out military products. Both Cohen and Inglis appeared on Ridgeline’s website, and through that partnership, Blinken invested in the venture group’s many portfolio companies. The obscure startups have kooky names (Agolo, Doodle, Wallaroo, etc.) but are innovating advanced technologies like drones, artificial intelligence, and robots. The alumni of WestExec are deeply engaged in emerging tech, which could lead to conflicts of interest as they take on policymaking roles that affect the contracts the government greenlights.
One of the administration’s most visible faces also worked at the firm. Jen Psaki, now the White House press secretary, was a senior adviser to WestExec, where she did crisis communications for the Israeli facial recognition software company AnyVision and advised the nonprofit Spirit of America.
As companies faced the Covid-19 pandemic’s massive challenges, Lisa Monaco joined Blinken on client calls. As a WestExec adviser, she worked for Boeing and SoftBank. Now Monaco is the U.S. deputy attorney general. Before Matt Olsen earned millions of dollars as a senior official at Uber, he worked early on as a principal for the firm. Biden has nominated Olsen to be assistant attorney general in the National Security Division.
Ely Ratner is developing China policy for the Defense Department as assistant secretary for Indo-Pacific security affairs. At WestExec, according to his Office of Government Ethics forms, “Billable hours were for background white papers without identified clients and most income was passive retainer.” Though he only earned $11,450 at WestExec, he did so while making more than $400,000 at the think tank Center for a New American Security.
Gabrielle Chefitz, a senior associate of WestExec, joined the Pentagon as special assistant to the under secretary of defense for policy. In June, Biden nominated WestExec senior adviser Celeste Wallander to be assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.
WestExec’s consultants are so connected and pedigreed that they often hold down multiple jobs, appointments, and titles. That’s how someone like Elizabeth Rosenberg, a former WestExec senior adviser, can join the Treasury Department as a senior official without much notice. At the end of May, Biden nominated Rosenberg to be Treasury’s assistant secretary for terrorism financing. In her LinkedIn profile, she says she has managed federal initiatives to “promote financial transparency.” Her role at WestExec fell off the bio that the White House released publicizing the nomination.
The U.S. Agency for International Development administrator’s office is also full of the firm’s consultants. Colin Thomas-Jensen “advised WestExec and its clients on due diligence and navigating political risk in Sub-Saharan Africa,” and those clients included Boeing, SoftBank, and Delta Capital Management, a venture capital firm that specializes in financing litigation. In April, Thomas-Jensen joined USAID as national security director. That month, WestExec’s Latin America expert Michael Camilleri began serving as senior adviser to Administrator Samantha Power and as executive director of the agency’s Northern Triangle Task Force. As a WestExec consultant, he advised Blackstone, SoftBank, the Intel founder’s multibillion-dollar nonprofit Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the mineral extraction company Rio Tinto.
And it’s not just international policy that will be shaped by the firm. Erin Pelton, who works in the White House as a senior adviser on domestic policy, provided advisory services to WestExec. And the nominee to be the Department of Commerce’s assistant secretary for industry and analysis, Grant Harris, has a connection to the firm. His personal consulting firm Connect Frontier, which advises companies and organizations working in developing markets, hired WestExec.
Even Bidenworld’s backbenchers are entangled in the firm. The Biden-Harris transition team was advised by WestExec consultants Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Puneet Talwar, Jay Shambaugh, and Cristina Killingsworth. Further, the firm’s members oversee influential nonpartisan federal commissions: Robert O. Work at the National Security Commission for Artificial Intelligence and John Costello at the Cyberspace Solarium Commission.
“West Exec’s advisors have worked together at the highest levels of government, navigating and anticipating the impact of international crises on decision making — we can provide the same insights and strategies to business leaders around the world,” Blinken said in an early pamphlet advertising the firm.
A half-year after Blinken’s return to government, the pamphlet is still featured on WestExec co-founder and managing partner Nitin Chadda’s LinkedIn profile. It’s a reminder to potential clients about the firm’s enduring proximity to power.
January 6 at the Capitol. (photo: Ken Nashimura/Getty Images)
Immediately after the riot Republicans continued to object to election results – and efforts to restrict voting and push the big lie have only grown in the six months since
ours after the US Capitol was secured against a violent insurrection on 6 January, the Senate reconvened in a late-night session to move ahead with certifying Joe Biden’s electoral college victory. It was a dramatic moment designed to send a clear message: democracy would prevail.
“To those who wreaked havoc in our Capitol today, you did not win. Violence never wins. Freedom wins,” the then vice-president, Mike Pence, said as senators reconvened. “As we reconvene in this chamber, the world will again witness the resilience and strength of our democracy.”
“They tried to disrupt our democracy. They failed,” Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, said on the Senate floor.
But while the attack on the Capitol failed on 6 January, the attack on US democracy has continued unabated. It continued immediately after the riot, when Republican lawmakers continued to object to the electoral college results in that late-night session, and has only grown in the six months that followed.
“We saw the makings of the big lie between November and January, but the consequences of the big lie seem much worse now, six months later, than even in the midst of the big lie leading up to January 6,” said Ned Foley, a law professor at the Ohio State University.
In state capitols across the country, Republicans have weaponized lies about the 2020 election to push laws that make it harder to vote. They have embraced amateur inquiries into election results that have already been audited. And they have enacted measures that make it easier to remove local election officials from their posts, opening up the possibility of partisan meddling in future elections.
A quarter of Americans, including a staggering 53% of Republicans, believe Donald Trump is the “true president”, a May Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
“The fact that the January 6 insurrection didn’t scare us and prompt many Republicans to start aggressively rejecting those claims, and instead Republicans continue to embrace those claims as a justification for imposing additional restrictions means that our democracy remains in real trouble,” said Franita Tolson, a law professor at the University of Southern California.
While Donald Trump and his allies failed in their effort to get local election officials to overturn the election, Republicans across the US have moved to make it easier to overturn future elections.
After Aaron Van Langevelde, a Republican appointee on the Michigan board of canvassers, refused to block the certification of his state’s election results, Republicans declined to reappoint him to a new term. In Georgia, Republicans stripped the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, of his role as chair of the state elections board after Raffensperger, a Republican, pushed back on Trump’s claims of fraud. Under a new law, the legislature will appoint the chair of the board, which now has the power to remove local election officials from their posts.
In Arkansas, Republicans passed a new law authorizing a legislative committee to investigate election complaints and allows the state’s board of election commissioners to take over running elections in a county if the board believes there is an election violation “would threaten either a county’s ability to conduct an equal, free, and impartial election, or the appearance of an equal, free and impartial elections”. In Iowa, Republicans enacted a new law that imposes new criminal penalties on election workers for failing to adhere to election law.
The most visible effort to undermine the election results continues in Arizona, where the Republican state senate authorized an unprecedented inquiry into ballots and voting equipment in Maricopa county, the largest in the state. The effort, funded by Trump allies, is being led by a firm with little experience in election audits and whose founder has expressed support for the idea that the election was stolen. It also comes after two previous county audits affirmed the results of the 2020 race.
Even as experts have raised alarms about the Ariziona inquiry, which includes far-fetched ideas like looking at ballots for bamboo fibers, Republicans in other US states have embraced it. There are calls for similar reviews in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan, among other places.
Republicans have also continued the ethos of the 6 January attack by enacting measures that make it harder to vote after a presidential election that saw the highest turnout in nearly a century. In Georgia, the same new law that allows for interference in elections also requires voters to provide identification information both when they request and return a mail-in ballot. The same law also curtails the availability of mail-in ballot drop boxes, allows for unlimited citizen challenges to voter qualifications, and prohibits volunteers from distributing food and water while standing in line to vote.
In Florida, a state long praised for its widespread use of mail-in ballots, Republicans enacted a measure that significantly limits drop boxes and requires voters to provide identification information when they request a mail-in ballot. Iowa Republicans also passed a law that cuts the early vote period by nine days, and requires polls to close earlier.
In Montana, Republicans tightened voter ID requirements, made it harder for third parties to collect and so voters can no longer register at the polls on election day – a move that will probably have a big impact on the state’s sizable Native American population. In Arizona, where mail-in voting is widely used, Republicans changed a state policy so that voters could no longer permanently remain on a list allowing them to automatically receive a mail-in ballot for every election.
While Republicans ultimately weren’t successful in blocking the certification of Joe Biden’s win, there are still deep concerns that it could succeed next time.
The Electoral Count Act, the law that governs the counting of electoral votes, appears to authorize state legislatures to step in and appoint electors in the event of a failed election, but offers no guidance on what would constitute such a scenario. If there is a dispute between the houses of Congress over a state’s slate of electors, the same federal law defaults to whichever group of electors has been certified by a state’s governor. Republicans are poised to take control of the US House in 2022, a perch from which they could wreak havoc when it comes time to count electoral votes.
Federal law also says that Congress isn’t supposed to second-guess the certification of electors as long as states reach an official result by the so-called “safe harbor” deadline about a month after election day. But when members of Congress and senators objected to the electoral college results in January, Foley noted, there was little discussion of that deadline, which every state except Wisconsin met in 2020.
Foley, the Ohio state professor, has been worried about the ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act long before 2020, warning that Congress was ill-equipped to resolve a legitimately disputed close election. He has urged Congress to revisit and clarify the law before the next election crisis.
But last year, he was alarmed at how far Trump and allies took their fight over the election, even with little evidence of fraud.
“As I look ahead to 2024, I think the pathology that’s going on culturally with respect to acceptance of defeat, the inability to accept defeat, that is really, really dangerous,” he said. “That seems new in a way we haven’t seen.”
Sha'Carri Richardson competes in the Women's 100 Meter on day 2 of the 2020 U.S. Olympic Track & Field Team Trials. (photo: Andy Lyons/Getty Images)
eps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) sent a letter to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency encouraging the group to rethink sprinter Sha'Carri Richardson's one-month suspension for recreational marijuana use.
What they're saying: "We urge you to reconsider the policies that led to this and other suspensions for recreational marijuana use, and to reconsider Ms. Richardson’s suspension. Please strike a blow for civil liberties and civil rights by reversing this course you are on," Ocasio-Cortez and Raskin said.
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- "The ban on marijuana is a significant and unnecessary burden on athletes’ civil liberties. [The World Anti-Doping Agency] categorizes tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main active chemical in marijuana, as a prohibited competition substance. However, according to WADA’s own medical director, Alan Vernec, '[t]here is no evidence for cannabis use as a performance-enhancing drug.'"
- "Sports leagues have also evolved in their regulation of marijuana use by athletes. In recent years, Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, and the National Football League have all removed penalties for marijuana use."
- "We are also concerned that the continued prohibition of marijuana while your organizations allow recreational use of alcohol and other drugs reflects anti-drug laws and policies that have historically targeted Black and Brown communities while largely condoning drug use in white communities."
"Their decision lacks any scientific basis. It's rooted solely in the systemic racism that's long driven anti-marijuana laws,"
Ocasio-Cortez said in a tweet
But, but, but: Asked about the decision on Saturday, Biden replied: "Rules are the rules," according to a White House pool report.
- "And everyone knows what the rules were going in. Whether they should remain that way is a different issue. But the rules are rules, and I was really proud of the way she responded," he added.
Catch up quick: Richardson was suspended by the USADA and disqualified from the Olympics' 100 meter race after testing positive for cannabis. The runner said she took the substance to cope with her biological mother's death, who passed just days before the Olympic trials.
- WADA claims marijuana can enhance an athlete's performance because it "reduces anxiety, allowing athletes to better perform under pressure and to alleviate stress experienced before and during competition."
India Walton's victory in the Buffalo Democratic primary tells a tale of two cities. (photo: India Walton for Mayor)
s clichéd as it sounds, Buffalo’s historic June 2021 primary, in which democratic socialist India Walton won a major upset over four-term incumbent Byron Brown, is something of a tale of two cities. And it’s the same tale that Buffalonians have discussed for generations: the “East-West divide” carved by Main Street through the heart of the city.
According to Anthony Armstrong, founder of Make Communities and coauthor of the Racial Equity Dividend report for Buffalo-Niagara, the “‘Main Street divide’ is real, and it is stark.” The predominantly African American East Side of Main Street is the product of decades of redlining and disinvestment. West of Main Street, by contrast, is made up of many of the city’s most walkable, amenity-rich neighborhoods like Elmwood and Hertel, which are both disproportionately white and affluent, in addition to the city’s most racially diverse neighborhoods.
At first glance, the primary appears to have broken mostly along these lines. The map below depicts Buffalo’s election districts according to which candidate won a plurality or better of votes cast. Data was obtained from the Erie County Board of Elections’ (BOE) results portal on June 30, 2021, and joined to Erie County’s election district spatial data layer in a geographic information system. Seemingly for economy, the BOE occasionally combines data from nearby election districts when reporting results. The following map accounts for all such combinations.
The highlighted line that runs from the Allentown and Fruit Belt neighborhoods to the northeastern boundary of the city is Main Street. With a handful of exceptions, Democratic voters located West of Main Street who turned out in the primary went, on balance, for Walton; those who turned out East of Main Street went, on balance, for Brown. One notable exception to this pattern occurs in the Fruit Belt, where Walton cofounded and directed the Fruit Belt Community Land Trust and predictably performed well with voters. Other exceptions include, for Walton (from north to south), University Heights, Schiller Park, most of Genesee-Moselle, the northern half of Lovejoy, parts of Broadway-Fillmore, parts of Seneca-Babcock and the First Ward, and most of Seneca-Cazenovia. For Brown, exceptions west of Main Street include Black Rock, Riverside, and West Hertel in the north, and the Waterfront Village area west of the Lower West Side.
Now, it’s too early for most data analysts to access the voter file that we could use to map individual voters and explore the distribution of exactly who turned out and where they live (I requested the file from the state BOE and am awaiting a reply). Nor do we have reliable exit-poll data to describe voters who turned out for each candidate. But, if we can’t statistically profile each candidate’s voters, we can at least describe characteristics of the geographic areas that each candidate won to get a sense for who might be supporting whom.
The remainder of this post does some relatively basic profiling using census block-group level data for 2019. The objective is to paint an initial picture of how the “tale of two cities” narrative is reshaping Buffalo’s political landscape, and what it might mean for November and beyond.
Takeaway #1: Historically Reliable Strongholds for Brown Failed to Turn Out
Taken together, the areas won by Walton contain roughly 49.5% of Buffalo’s total population. By that measure, we might make the naive statement that Walton and Brown each won about half the city. Of course, not all Buffalo residents can participate in a Democratic primary. Looking to the most recent voter registration data from the New York State BOE, areas won by Brown enjoy a sizeable enrollment advantage among registered Democrats. Active Democratic voters in Brown-won territory outnumber their counterparts in Walton-won territory by nearly 23,000 (161,756 to 138,915).
One way that Walton overcame this enrollment disadvantage was with an aggressive ground game, bolstered by her “strong community presence, bold ideas, and the backing of electoral experts,” through help from Democratic Socialists of America activists and especially from within the Working Families Party political apparatus. Combining those ingredients into a tight and well-organized campaign got voters to the polls, plain and simple. Turnout in Walton-won districts was 3 percentage points higher (21.5%) than the lackluster participation in Brown-won territory (18.5%). In a recent interview with Geoff Kelly for the Investigative Post, University at Buffalo professor Henry Louis Taylor Jr suggested that low turnout in former Brown strongholds amounted to a protest. To Dr Taylor, “There were people in the black community who couldn’t stomach Brown but didn’t believe India could win . . . so they just stayed home.”
Now that Walton has demonstrated she can win, and Brown has committed to staying in the race as a write-in candidate through November, reaching those disaffected or “protest” nonvoters could be one of the keys to winning the general election. At the same time, retaining and building on the momentum generated in areas with higher turnout will be necessary for Walton to withstand the pressure of a well-funded, newly motivated candidate with universal name recognition. Toward those ends, it might be useful for observers watching the race to know a little more about who lives in each of these “two cities” that are about to choose the next mayor of Buffalo, and potentially reshape the Western New York political landscape for years to come.
Given the limited data available to me at the moment, below I look at how Buffalonians are split between Walton-won and Brown-won territories. I examine these splits for just a handful of demographic and socioeconomic variables, before synthesizing the results and speculating on their implications for Buffalo’s future.
Takeaway #2: Districts That Walton Won Contain a Majority of Buffalo’s Renters
To begin, consider housing tenure. Housing has been one of Walton’s signature issues since her campaign launch. Among her “first 100 days” campaign promises is to sign a tenants’ “bill of rights that would install a tenant advocate and institute rent control.” It’s a message that ought to resonate with renters, especially in Buffalo, where the housing cost burden is perpetually high and convincing evidence exists that tenants are being exploited. The graph below shows how Buffalo’s households are divided into Brown- (left) and Walton-won (right) territory by housing tenure. Somewhat expectedly, the majority of Buffalo’s renter households (53.4%) are situated in spaces where Walton won. That’s not to say that Walton won the majority of renters who turned out to vote (though there’s no reason to doubt that’s the case); instead, it’s saying she won in places where the majority of the city’s renters live.
(Note to the reader: All of the following graphs show how certain population or household subgroups within the city are divided between Brown- and Walton-won areas. The graphs can be easily understood by summing bars of the same color. In the tenure example, when the 53.42% value for renter-occupied units in Walton-won territory is added to the 46.58% value for renter households in Brown-won territory, we account for 100% of renter households. That’s how it’s possible to say, for example, that most of Buffalo’s renters live in spaces won by Walton.)
Takeaway #3: Walton Won in More Racially Diverse Neighborhoods
The next graph performs the same type of analysis for race-ethnicity. The eight main population subgroups tracked by the census and included in the figure are (1) White, (2) Black, (3) Hispanic, (4) Asian, (5) Indigenous, (6) Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, (7) “Other,” or identity with one race not represented in the census’s available categories, and (8) Multiple racial identities (“Two or more races” in census records). Except for subgroup (3), all persons represented in the chart identify as “Not Hispanic” when asked about their ethnicity by the Census Bureau. Members of group (3) — Hispanic persons — also identify with one or more racial groups when responding to the census; however, they are included only in category (3) here to avoid double counting.
Whereas only 35% of Buffalo’s (non-Hispanic) black or African American population lives in areas won by Walton, Walton-won territories contain the majority of residents from all other racial and ethnic groups. At face value, the graph therefore suggests that Walton lost in many segregated, relatively homogenous African American neighborhoods, but won in more diverse and multiracial communities. One way to test the validity of that claim is to measure the degree of racial-ethnic diversity in Walton-won versus Brown-won territories.
There are numerous ways to accomplish this goal. I’ll focus on just one popular diversity index that measures the probability that two persons selected at random in the same area belong to different racial-ethnic groups. The index ranges from 0 — when a neighborhood is completely homogenous — to 100, when every person in a neighborhood identifies with a different racial-ethnic group. I collected values of this index for all census block groups in Buffalo and assigned each block group to Walton-won or Brown-won territory based on the block group’s geographic center point. The graph below shows the resulting median block-group diversity index values based on the winning candidate. Matching expectations, the median diversity index in Walton-won territories is 57.8, 1.6 times greater than the median value of 35.5 in Brown-won areas. (For those who care about such things, the difference is highly statistically significant, meaning that it cannot be explained by chance alone.)
Takeaway #4: Walton Won in Districts With Millennial Majorities, but Lost in Districts Where Most Older Residents Live
The next graph shows how Buffalo residents split between Brown- and Walton-won territory when grouped by age. Age groups are summarized using the following generational labels:
• Generation Alpha (born 2017 or later)
• Generation Z (born 1999 to 2016)
• Millennial (born 1981 to 1998)
• Generation X (born 1965 to 1980)
• Baby Boomer (born 1946 to 1964)
• Over 75 (born 1945 or earlier)
Of these categories, Millennials are currently the largest age cohort in Buffalo, making up about 28% of the population. They are followed by Gen Zers (23%), Baby Boomers (20%), Gen Xers (18%), persons Over 75 (6%), and, finally, members of Gen Alpha (4%). Thus, despite being the principal city in an aging region, more than half of Buffalo’s residents are forty years or younger.
The relevance of age comes into play when considering Walton’s unapologetic use and embrace of labels like “socialist.” According to Gallup, attitudes toward socialism differ wildly by age. Among Millennials and Gen Zers, socialism is as popular as capitalism; but the term is strongly negative for Gen Xers, Baby Boomers, and persons over 75. While I’ll return to this point shortly, observe below that spaces that Walton won contain a majority of Buffalo’s Millennials, but disproportionately few members of older generations. Put another way, if national trends apply to Buffalo, then the city’s older residents, who are most likely to hold negative views of socialism, are relatively concentrated in spaces that voted for Brown. That’s probably not a coincidence.
Takeaway #5: Walton Won in Well-Educated, Mixed-Income, and Affluent Neighborhoods
Finally, let’s consider education and income together, since the two characteristics tend to be highly correlated. The first of the two immediately following charts shows that supermajorities of the city’s college- and graduate-school–educated residents live in areas won by Walton. At the other end of the spectrum, about 54% of the city’s adults who lack any high-school education live in Walton-won districts. These patterns fit with national surveys showing that positive views of “socialism” peak at the top and bottom ends of the educational attainment spectrum.
That being said, adults with no high-school education constitute the smallest educational attainment group in Buffalo, at only around 5% of persons twenty-five years or older. College- (17%) and graduate school–educated (13%) adults are much more numerous, combining to make up 30% of persons twenty-five years or over. Consequently, profiles of Walton-won territory will naturally take on more attributes of these latter (highly educated) groups relative to the former.
As a case in point, the second figure below shows how households split between candidate territories with respect to household income. Linking the findings to educational attainment, which correlates directly with income, supermajorities of households at the upper end of the income spectrum — earning $100,000 or more per year — live in Walton-won districts. Notably, Walton-won districts also contain simple majorities of moderate- and middle-income households earning $35,000–$50,000 and $75,000–$100,000. However, most households that earn below the city’s median household income (currently around $37,000) live in spaces won by Brown.
That result is somewhat surprising given Walton’s unambiguous advocacy for low-income and working-class persons and families, though an explanation might lie in the aforementioned age structure of the population in the low-income districts where Brown won.
On that note, the city that Walton won appears, at face value, to be a younger, more racially diverse, well-educated, mixed-income Buffalo, where residents have a greater tendency — whether by choice or necessity — to rent their homes.
Rounding out the tale, the city that Brown won is a comparatively segregated, predominantly African American Buffalo, situated almost exclusively east of Main Street, where somewhat older residents with lower educational attainment (on average) live in relatively low-income households, which they have a greater tendency to own rather than rent. According to Taylor, it’s a city disconnected from the Buffalo that many claim to be in renaissance: whatever “renaissance” has happened or is happening, he suggests, “hasn’t benefited poor people of color or the neighborhoods where they live.”
Takeaway #6: Walton’s Victory Might Signal a Break in Buffalo’s Main Street Divide
Taylor’s characterization of the conspicuously low turnout in Brown-won territories (and historically reliable Brown strongholds) as a “protest no-vote” is, to me, not only a sharp analysis but also a potential sign of what’s to come.
For one, Buffalo is changing, and it offers hope that left-wing political coalitions can win through a progressive social program that unites working people across racial and geographic boundaries. Voters in the city that Brown won made room for an emerging shift in Buffalo’s political landscape. Now it is up to this new coalition to deliver the goods for them.
Thirty years ago, writers in the Buffalo News referred to Main Street as “Buffalo’s very own Berlin Wall.” That wall was erected and fortified using decades of neoliberal policies and development strategies. Perhaps the election of a democratic socialist mayor will help the two Buffalos become one.
With more than 600,000 dead and millions more recovering from infections, US health care will be affected by Covid-19 for years to come. (photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
Covid-19 put American health care even further behind other wealthy nations.
ake a long enough lens — say, 25 years — and it seems as though health care in America is inarguably getting better.
People are living longer than they did a quarter century ago. The burden of disease, a metric that includes premature deaths and disability, has dropped. The number of avoidable hospitalizations and hospital errors is lower.
But below those rosy numbers is the truth: American health care has been falling behind other countries in the developed world for decades.
Life expectancy has increased, but by less in the US than in the wealthy nations of Europe and Asia. The improvement in disease burden has likewise been less impressive than that of comparable countries. Meanwhile, to achieve those mediocre results, the United States continues to spend more money on medical care than any other country in the world; while health spending in the US isn’t going up faster than in other countries, it was higher to begin with and continues to increase. We’ve maintained a sizable lead in health care spending while getting outcomes that are worse than countries that spend less.
And all of that was true even before the United States experienced one of the worst Covid-19 outbreaks in the world.
Kaiser Family Foundation researchers recently warned of a “further widening of the gap” between the US and other countries as a result of the pandemic. Life expectancy in the US had already stagnated in the last few years, driven by a rise in drug overdoses and suicides; now Covid-19 will shorten it further. Disease burden had been trending upward in the US while dropping elsewhere; the Covid-19 pandemic is likely to widen that disparity too.
You could say the trajectory of American health care before, during, and after the pandemic is like that of an individual vulnerable patient: It was sicker to begin with, hit hard by Covid-19, and will be dealing with the lingering effects for a long time.
The US was already falling behind the rest of the world on health care
When it comes to getting value for money in health care, America slowly but perceptibly fell behind other developed countries over the last 25 years.
It starts with life expectancy, the bluntest measure of how well people are served by their health system. Life expectancy in the developed world has steadily improved over the past few decades, driven primarily by major breakthroughs in the treatment of heart disease and other cardiovascular problems, which rank near the top among causes of deaths in wealthy nations.
But not as much in the United States as in other countries. According to a KFF analysis of health care trends from 1991 to 2016, Americans saw their life expectancy rise by 3.1 years during that period — a meaningful improvement, to be sure, but substantially less than the 5.2 years gained in comparable countries.
And in the US specifically, that progress has stagnated in recent years. With tens of thousands of people dying of opioid overdoses every year and a sustained increase in the number of suicides, American life expectancy actually started tailing off in 2014, according to a 2019 analysis published in JAMA. The gap between the US and other wealthy countries was already growing before Covid-19 struck.
Likewise, disease burden had steadily improved until a recent downturn separated the US from other countries. The reasons for the improvement were the same: better medical treatment for chronic diseases. But once again, America did not improve to the degree that comparable countries did, seeing a 12 percent improvement versus an average of 22 percent elsewhere. In the United States, the burdens from disease of the heart, lung, kidney, and liver — as well as from diabetes — remain stubbornly high compared with the rest of the developed world.
And the reasons for America’s recent stagnation are the same, too: Suicides and drug overdoses, plus a rise in the number of young people with chronic health conditions, are robbing people of years of healthy living.
The same pattern holds for medical errors. They have been declining in the US over the last 25 years but are still more common in America than in comparable countries. Avoidable hospitalizations and adverse drug events are down, but not as much as in wealthy European or Asian nations. Americans are roughly twice as likely to experience an error in their medical care as their counterparts the world over.
One metric — known as mortality amenable to health care — combines all of these characteristics and grades a country’s health system on how well it prevents deaths from conditions that should be treatable with timely access to health care. The US ranked behind the biggest countries in Europe, as well as Japan, as of 2016.
A country like Taiwan, which performed much worse than the US on the same metric 30 years ago, is now nearly its equal.
And for those middling outcomes, the US still spends more on health care than other countries: nearly 18 percent of its GDP versus about 11 percent, on average, in comparable nations. Health spending has been rising at the same rate in the US and its peers over the last few decades, and yet those other countries have seen more improvement in their health outcomes.
They are, in other words, getting more value out of their health systems than the US.
“One could conclude that the comparable ... countries’ value improvement was greater,” the KFF researchers wrote in 2018, “even though they started at a higher threshold in terms of better outcomes and a lower percentage of GDP consumed to achieve it.”
One possible explanation for America’s poor performance: We underinvest in social spending and overspend on medical care compared with other developed countries. If you combine social services spending and health spending, the US and its peers actually spend about the same amount of money, a little more than 30 percent of their GDPs. But spending in those other countries is more slanted toward social services, while America spends more on medical care.
America’s underinvestment exacerbates disparities between haves and have-nots: 18 percent of Americans live in poverty versus 10 percent in other wealthy countries. We know that people with lower incomes have structural challenges — access to healthy food, clean water, and fresh air, for starters — that lead to worse health outcomes. When they get sick, they have a harder time finding a doctor and affording their medical care.
“Economic inequality is increasingly linked to disparities in life expectancy across the income distribution, and these disparities seem to be growing over time,” wrote the authors of a 2018 review of relevant research in Health Affairs. Poor health also tends to lead to lower incomes, creating a feedback loop known as the “health-poverty trap.”
And those disparities — between rich and poor, white and Black — only worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Covid-19 will have long-term consequences for American health
The gap between the US and other wealthy nations is expected to grow because of the pandemic. America has lost more than 600,000 people to Covid-19, the highest confirmed death toll in the world. Adjusting for population, the US has lost more people on a per-capita basis than most of the European and Asian countries to which it is compared.
Official death counts can be somewhat arbitrary because they depend on testing to identify cases. Excess deaths — the number of deaths from all causes above what would be expected in an ordinary year — are considered by experts to be a more reliable gauge. On that metric, too, and adjusting for population, the United States is one of the worst performers among wealthy nations.
“The outsized effect of the pandemic on the U.S. will likely widen the existing gap in mortality rates between the U.S. and peer countries,” wrote the authors of an October 2020 analysis on Covid-19 death rates and life expectancy.
America is also likely to experience a higher disease burden (that’s the years of quality life lost to premature death and disability) as a result of its pandemic failures. People under 65 in the US have died from Covid-19 at higher rates than their peers elsewhere.
A prolonged mental health crisis may linger after a year of disrupted social lives and isolation. More than 4 in 10 Americans reported experiencing symptoms of anxiety or depression in 2020, according to US census surveys.
Health spending actually slowed down in 2020, a historic aberration, as people postponed medical care during the pandemic. But medical spending did not slow down as much as the rest of the economy: As of October 2020, it had fallen 0.5 percent versus a 1.8 percent contraction overall. So even as spending dropped, health care likely consumed an even greater share of America’s GDP than in years prior.
And the short-term drop in spending could have long-term consequences. Last year, 24 percent of Americans said in a census survey that they did not get needed medical care during the pandemic, with 33 percent saying they delayed care. To give one example, cervical cancer screenings dropped about 80 percent from normal levels in spring 2020, and while they rebounded later in the year, they were still 25 percent down by the end of September.
While patient volume generally has recovered, we still don’t know what the long-term effects of people missing care or receiving belated diagnoses will be. And there are tens of millions of people recovering from a Covid-19 infection; as many as 15 million of them may struggle with “long Covid” for the foreseeable future, according to a new analysis in the New England Journal of Medicine that called long Covid-19 “our next public health disaster in the making.” Those direct health aftershocks from the pandemic will be yet another burden on the US health system long after the coronavirus itself starts to subside.
Long-term spending trends were already prompting health plans to push more of the cost of health care onto patients. Deductibles and worker premiums have been increasing for years.
Post-Covid-19, at least as a relative share of the economy, health care is eating up even more of the country’s resources. America’s health outcomes have been set back by the pandemic, and the spending crunch is intensifying.
Haitian President Jovenel Moïse. (photo: AP)
unmen assassinated Haitian President Jovenel Moïse and wounded his wife in their home early Wednesday, inflicting more chaos on the unstable Caribbean country that was already enduring an escalation of gang violence, anti-government protests and a recent surge in coronavirus infections.
Claude Joseph, the interim prime minister, confirmed the killing and said the police and military were in control of security in Haiti, where a history of dictatorship and political upheaval have long stymied the consolidation of democratic rule.
While the streets of the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, were quiet Wednesday morning, some people ransacked businesses in one area. The country appeared to be heading for fresh uncertainty ahead of planned general elections later this year. Moïse, 53, had been ruling by decree for more than a year after the country failed to hold elections and the opposition demanded he step down in recent months.
Former President Michel Martelly, whom Moïse succeeded, said he was praying for first lady Martine Moïse, calling the assassination “a hard blow for our country and for Haitian democracy, which is struggling to find its way.”
Joseph said Martine Moïse, 47, was shot and in a hospital. He condemned the president’s killing as a “hateful, inhumane and barbaric act.”
“The country’s security situation is under the control of the National Police of Haiti and the Armed Forces of Haiti,” Joseph said in a statement from his office. “Democracy and the republic will win.”
In the statement, Joseph said some of the attackers spoke in Spanish but offered no further explanation. He later said in a radio address that they spoke Spanish or English.
A resident who lives near the president’s home said she heard the attack.
“I thought there was an earthquake, there was so much shooting,” said the woman who spoke on condition of anonymity because she fears for her life. “The president had problems with many people, but this is not how we expected him to die. This is something I wouldn’t wish on any Haitian.”
The U.S. Embassy in Haiti said it was restricting U.S. staff to its compounds and that the embassy would be closed Wednesday because of ’’an ongoing security situation.″
The White House described the attack as “horrific” and “tragic” and said it was still gathering information on what happened. U.S. President Joe Biden will be briefed later Wednesday by his national security team, spokesperson Jen Psaki said during an interview on MSNBC.
“The message to the people of Haiti is this is a tragic tragedy,” she during a previously scheduled interview on CNN. “And we stand ready and stand by them to provide any assistance that’s needed.”
Haiti’s economic, political and social woes have deepened recently, with gang violence spiking heavily in Port-au-Prince, inflation spiraling and food and fuel becoming scarcer at times in a country where 60% of the population makes less than $2 a day. These troubles come as Haiti still tries to recover from the devastating 2010 earthquake and Hurricane Matthew that struck in 2016.
Opposition leaders accused Moïse of seeking to increase his power, including by approving a decree that limited the powers of a court that audits government contracts and another that created an intelligence agency that answers only to the president.
In recent months, opposition leaders demanded that he step down, arguing that his term legally ended in February 2021. Moïse and supporters maintained that his term began when he took office in early 2017, following a chaotic election that forced the appointment of a provisional president to serve during a year-long gap.
An Indian laborer drinks water from a mobile tanker after planting saplings as part of an annual tree plantation campaign on the outskirts of Prayagraj, in northern Uttar Pradesh state, India, Sunday, July 4, 2021. (photo: Rajesh Kumar Singh/AP)
Lawmakers, government officials and volunteers from social organizations swarmed riverbanks, farms, forests, schools and government buildings, planting saplings at designated spots. The effort spans 68,000 villages and 83,000 forest sites in northern Uttar Pradesh state.
India has pledged to keep a third of its total land area under forest and tree cover, but a growing population and increasing demand for industrial projects has placed greater stress on the land.
Social organizations planted a large number of “peepal” trees (Ficus religiosa) in Lucknow, the state capital, which is recovering from a devastating surge of coronavirus infections.
“This tree is known to release maximum oxygen. So this plant is the ‘need of the hour,’ as we are reminded of its importance after facing the oxygen shortage crisis when the outbreak was at its peak,” said Shachindra Sharma, an activist.
India, a country of nearly 1.4 billion people, crossed the grim milestone on Friday of more than 400,000 people lost to the coronavirus. That number is thought to be a vast undercount because of a lack of testing and reporting.
New cases are on the decline after exceeding 400,000 a day in May, but authorities are preparing for another possible wave and are trying to ramp up vaccination. India on Sunday recorded 43,071 new infections in the past 24 hours, raising the total cases to 30.5 million. Uttar Pradesh state reported 128 new cases in the same period.
“We are committed to increasing the forest cover of Uttar Pradesh state to over 15% of the total land area in the next five years. In today’s campaign, over 100 million trees will be planted,” said Manoj Singh, a senior state forest official,
Since the launch of the tree-planting drive four years ago, the forest cover of Uttar Pradesh — home to 230 million people — has gone up by more than 3%, compared to the national average of 2.89%, said state Forest Minister Dara Singh Chauhan.
The long-term survival of trees planted in such mass campaigns remains a concern. Usually, only 60% of saplings survive, with the rest succumbing to disease or lack of water, he said.
However, Chauhan said the survival rate of saplings in the past four years has gone up to 80%, thanks to better care and methods such as geotagging trees with QR codes in order to monitor their growth.
India’s federal government is encouraging all 28 states to expedite tree-planting drives to increase forest cover, part of commitments made at the 2015 climate change summit in Paris. The government designated more than $6.2 billion for tree planting across the country, in keeping with its pledge to push India’s forest cover to 95 million hectares (235 million acres) by 2030.
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