A Fortunate Terror-Free Christmas for 2010

On the morning of December 20, 2010, British police arrested 12 men in a large-scale counterterrorism operation at a time when there have been growing concerns about threats of terrorist attacks across Europe. The Wall Street Journal reported that: "The arrests represent one of the largest counterterror operations by U.K. authorities in recent years... Recent months have seen a number of terrorist-related arrests across the region, including in Belgium, Denmark and Norway... An attack by a suspected suicide bomber this month in Stockholm heightened fears that terror groups are targeting nontraditional sites." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748703886904576030912668857954.html

These arrests came after al Qaeda had warned Europe of the threat of a commando-style attack, such as the one conducted in Mumbai in 2008. Since the arrests, it has been learned that one of the planned targets for these terrorist plotters in the UK was the US Embassy in London.

Yet in the afternoon of December 20, hours after the British arrests had been reported on numerous news broadcasts and Internet sites, the man above, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, sat down for a television interview with ABC news anchor Diane Sawyer, along with his Homeland Security colleagues, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano and White House Counterterrorism Advisor John Brennan, and responded to Diane Sawyer's question about the UK arrests with a blank stare and the response "London?". Brennan quickly clarified that he knew of the arrests and saw no concern for the US homeland.

Since the US Embassy in London was found on the suspects' "targeting list", as the Weekly Standard said, the first official response from Brennan that "there was no apparent 'homeland nexus' is small comfort to the Americans working at the London embassy. In addition, embassies have long been attractive targets for jihadists. Any threat to an American embassy, especially from a group that was already practicing with explosives, is serious."

The next day, Brennan told the press: "I know there was attention by the media about these arrests and it was constantly on the news networks. I am glad that Jim Clapper is not sitting in front of the TV 24 hours a day and monitoring what is coming out of the media.”

Why would anyone in the 21st Century have to watch TV 24 hours a day to keep up with the latest news? Does DNI Clapper not own a smart phone or other mobile device with Internet access as most of the US population does? Does Clapper not have staff traveling with him on appointments, especially to an interview on national television, who have easy access to the Internet 24/7; not to mention the fact that any such staff should have had information about important arrests of Muslim jihadists by one of our closest allies in order to brief the head of "National Intelligence"? Later the DNI's office admitted that Clapper had not been briefed on the arrests in the UK before going to the ABC interview.

The office of the Director of National Intelligence was created by Congress after the 9/11 Commission recommended such a function in order to better coordinate the sharing of information between the various intelligence agencies. If the current DNI does not know of the latest developments in fighting terrorism, why do we have this office and the bureaucracy that goes with it?

DNI Clapper's failure to be in the loop on the UK arrests is also particularly troublesome because "American officials have repeatedly trumpeted the cross-Atlantic counterterrorism cooperation between the UK and U.S. How, then, could American authorities not have known that this bust was going down? And if they did know, as they almost certainly did, then how could they have forgotten to tell the DNI? In other words, there are good reasons to believe that Clapper should have been informed not only after the fact, but also beforehand." http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/dni-director-james-clapper-needs-know_525796.html

Since the UK arrests took place, five other suspected Muslim jihadists were arrested in Denmark and Sweden for planning a commando-style gun attack at the Copenhagen offices of a Danish newspaper that printed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005. All of the unsuccessful jihadist attacks stopped by our allies' efficient counterterrorism operations in Europe appear to fit within the scope of the threat issued by al Qaeda earlier in the holiday season.

I wonder if our Director of National Intelligence knows about these events since apparently, according to the White House Counterterrorism Advisor, Clapper does not follow TV news and seems to lack routine access to the Internet or even "intelligent" staff.

How fortunate we were that these terrorists were caught by our European allies. If any such terrorist plans had been directed at the US homeland (as one was in 2009 on a Christmas day flight from Amsterdam) would our current team of Counterterrorism "Keystone cops" have stopped it? What a fortunate Christmas we have had.

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Mainstream Media Takes Notice of the Public Sector-Private Sector Income Disparity

My last post noted that recent survey data has shown the advantage that public sector workers have over private sector employees in terms of total compensation, including salary and benefits. I also noted that part of the reason for this advantage is due to the higher proportion of graduate and professional degrees among public sector workers. The Washington Post last week published the graphs shown above that demonstrate this disparity in educational achievement, as well as the fact that public sector workers are generally older than private sector workers.

Nevertheless, the Washington Post noted that state politicians in particular are talking about this pay package disparity between public and private sector workers because many states' fiscal problems are in large part due to the burden of having to pay for public workers' benefits, especially the pensions of their retirees. The general public is also likely to become increasingly concerned about, not only the pay package disparity, but also the relative security of public jobs during a period of continuing high unemployment throughout the country.

The Post quoted several elected state officials talking about this new type of class warfare:

"We can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and the taxpayers who foot the bill are the have-nots," Wisconsin's incoming Republican Gov. Scott Walker declared this month, as he raised the idea of stripping state workers there of collective bargaining rights. Outgoing Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who is mulling a GOP presidential bid, also sounded a class-war note last week on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal: "Unionized public employees are making more money, receiving more generous benefits and enjoying greater job security than the working families forced to pay for it with ever-higher taxes, deficits and debt."

It is not only Republicans that are recognizing this issue. Democratic Governor-elect Andrew Cuomo in New York is preparing to face the issue in that state when he takes office next month "warning that state employee salaries and benefits are unsustainable at a time when the state has a $9 billion deficit."

The Washington Post goes on to note: "Relative job security with generous benefits that extend into retirement has long been part of the appeal of working for the government. But an eight-hour day in a drab Independence Avenue office building can look like a supremely privileged lifestyle when Americans in the private sector are panicked and furious over what has happened to their own salaries, health coverage and 401 (k)s. Add to that the growing view that the government has gotten too big and that deficits are going to swallow the economy, and you have all the makings of a backlash." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/20/AR2010122005225.html?tid=wp_featuredstories

In an October editorial in Newsweek magazine, Mortimer Zuckerman stated that we are becoming "two Americas", but not the type that politicians have usually been talking about: that is the class warfare between rich and poor. Rather Zuckerman said that the division between the public sector and the private sector will define the "two Americas". He quoted from a 2009 Mayo Institute study that found "private-sector workers three times more likely to be jobless than public-sector workers", and Zuckerman notes public sector employees can thrive even in a down economy.

Zuckerman also stated that the compensation gap has been growing quickly in recent years because federal employees have been awarded bigger average pay and benefit increases for nine years in a row. As a result, he says this "is tantamount to a wealth transfer from the citizens to the people who serve in government". As I noted in my last post, even the federal pay freeze recently announced by President Obama will not stop all federal pay increases over the next two years, as his announcement may have implied.

As I have said before, the fact that there exists this pay disparity, on average, between public and private sector workers does not prove that public sector workers are overpaid because other factors such as the types of jobs, experience and educational levels must be considered. However, the fact that this issue is getting more attention by the mainstream media and state officials facing growing fiscal deficits at a time when high unemployment continues to plague the economy, while public workers are more secure in their jobs, will assure that the term "class warfare" will likely start to take on a new meaning.

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Are Federal Workers Earning Their Pay?

A couple of weeks ago, President Obama announced a freeze on federal workers' pay for two years. The freeze only applies to the "cost-of-living" raises given annually and only to the Executive branch workers (other than military personnel). Congressional members and their staffs' earnings are not included. It also does not apply to the automatic step increases that federal employees routinely get or to overtime pay. So federal workers will continue to get pay increases in spite of the fanfare given to the President's announcement.

There has been much discussion and analysis regarding the question of whether federal workers are overpaid, as the above graph published in USA Today suggests. The graph illustrates average pay over the entire federal and state/local government workforces compared with the full range of jobs in the private sector. It is often pointed out that government workforces have a larger segment of professional and college graduate employees than the private workforce in general.

President Obama even made this statement when discussing the issue of whether federal workers are overpaid:

"[T]he data we get back indicates that high-skilled workers in government are slightly underpaid. Lower-skilled workers are slightly overpaid relative to the private sector... And that's not surprising because it's a unionized workforce" in government, while the private sector typically is not.

Of course, one reason that highly skilled workers are "slightly underpaid" is due to the large number of lawyers who work for the government, who represent a much higher percentage of any government workforce than the private sector. Lawyers working for government salaries generally make much less than they would in private law firms or even in corporate law departments. However, they do not usually make government work their full career. They move out of government with valuable experience into the much higher paying jobs after their government service.

It is also worthy of note that, as above graph demonstrates, federal benefits represent a much higher average amount of federal compensation than benefits do in the private sector. In addition, while private sector workers have suffered lay-offs and high unemployment during the recession of the past few years, federal workers have much more job security. In fact, the federal workforce (not counting Census workers) has grown in the last two years. All of that federal job growth, job security and steady pay increases (even though now reduced some) likely accounts for the fact that seven of the highest ten average household income counties in the USA are in the Washington, DC metro area.

But my concern is not so much with whether government workers are overpaid as it is with whether they really earn whatever they are paid. Just look at the major foul-ups and misdeeds by many in the federal workforce, including lawyers, in recent years that could be contributing to the general public despair and uncertainty about the country's direction and outlook for the future.

To start with the economic meltdown, we need to look at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which has as its mission the job to oversee and regulate the financial and securities industry and protect public investors. We learned earlier this year that while the financial industry was on the way toward near-collapse beginning with the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in 2007 that investigations by the SEC inspector general’s office found 33 agency employees (including lawyers) violated internal policies by viewing pornography for hours a day since at least 2005. How many unreasonable Wall Street risks and unscrupulous investment schemes went undetected by the SEC because their "underpaid" professional workforce was distracted with porn?

It has also been reported that a whistleblower brought evidence of Bernie Madoff's scams to the SEC staff several times over several years before someone paid attention to it. After Madoff's arrest, we learned that he perpetuated the largest "Ponzi scheme" in history; costing his investors about $50 billion in lost investments.

Recently, it has been disclosed that many mortgage foreclosures have been filed without proper paperwork, including actual evidence that the parties filing foreclosure actions really had the right to foreclose. When these problems were discovered, many banks froze all foreclosure proceedings across the country for weeks while new procedures were put in place.

These banks and other companies in the chain of the mortgage processing industry are regulated by an alphabet soup of federal agencies that have the power to audit and investigate the companies' books and procedures. However, no federal agency uncovered these major problems in foreclosure actions that have been displacing homeowners and driving down real estate values nationwide over the past several years. Rather it was a pro bono lawyer in the private sector representing a homeowner defendant in a foreclosure action whose diligence discovered a common industry practice that led to foreclosures all over the country being put into question.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April again brought up ethical issues reported by Inspectors General (IG) at the Interior Department for several years about the Minerals Management Service (MMS) in the Department, which had the responsibility for approving which oil companies received leases to drill for oil in the Gulf and for collecting government royalties due under those leases. An IG report released a month after the BP oil rig in the Gulf exploded and started leaking "found that [MMS] inspectors had accepted meals, tickets to sporting events and gifts from at least one oil company while they were overseeing the industry. Although there is no evidence that those events played a role in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the report offers further evidence of what many critics of the Minerals Management Service have described as a culture of lax oversight and cozy ties to industry."

The New York Times article from which the above quote is taken goes on to say:

"The [IG] report includes other examples of troubling behavior discovered by [MMS] investigators. In mid-2008, a minerals agency employee conducted four inspections on drilling platforms when he was also negotiating a job with the drilling company.... And an inspector from the Lake Charles office admitted to investigators that he had used crystal methamphetamine, an illegal drug. Investigators said they believe the inspector may have been under the influence of the drug during an inspection." http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/us/25mms.html

While the May report focused on the agency's Lake Charles, Louisiana office, previous IG investigations of the MMS found inappropriate behavior by the royalty-collection staff in the Denver office.

None of these problems at MMS was news to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. He had ordered a new ethics program at MMS soon after he became Interior Secretary. Nevertheless, it was not until after the Gulf oil spill that Salazar reorganized the oil leasing agency by separating safety oversight from the division that collects royalties from oil and gas companies. He also replaced the head of the agency and renamed it the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

It has also been reported year after year that there are many federal employees who owe back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). According to a report by the IRS last year, federal workers owed $3.3 billion in delinquent income tax payments for 2009.

The Homeland Security Department has also had a few lapses of note. The most serious problem was the failed attempt by a Nigerian Muslim extremist last Christmas to blow up an aircraft traveling from Amsterdam to Detroit. In spite of this would-be bomber buying a one-way ticket with cash and recently visiting Yemen for a couple of months, he did not get any extra scrutiny before boarding the plane. Later it was also learned that this young man's father had reported his concerns about his son's extremist leanings to the US Embassy in Nigeria. Although the Embassy reported that information to the State Department, the intelligence community did not get the information to airport security personnel. After the fact, all air travelers are now being subjected to special scanning machines or more intrusive pat-downs before boarding planes.

In recent weeks, there have been reports of drivers transporting nuclear material across country for the federal government being observed drinking alcohol while en route. In addition, last week it was reported that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is missing important information about 199,000 aircraft listed on its registry of commercial aircraft.

And, of course, in recent weeks, the world has had access to a treasure trove of classified US State Department cables as a result of the Wikileaks disclosures on its own website, as well as the sites of major news organizations given prior access to the cables by the Wikileaks staff. It is suspected that the Wikileaks staff was provided with these classified government cables (and other classified government files disclosed several months ago regarding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) by an Army intelligence officer named Bradley Manning who is now in military custody awaiting court martial.

Manning had access to classified government files when he was stationed in Iraq as an intelligence officer. His ability to download hundreds of thousands of secret government files on to a device that he then took out of a military intelligence center near Baghdad without oversight or detection is a security failure of supreme significance. Any intelligence center permitting military access to classified information of the type being released by Wikileaks around the globe should have been subject to security procedures carefully designed and installed by high level experienced military intelligence personnel. But the Wikileaks fiasco suggests that even people of this supposed high level of professionalism failed miserably in carrying their extremely important duties.

While this list of fairly recent federal worker foul-ups, misdeeds, ethical lapses and disregard for official duties is rather lengthy, I need to also acknowledge that many more federal workers not only earn their pay but often go far beyond the call of duty. Clearly, Americans are grateful for the outstanding service provided by most of the military. Bradley Manning, the Fort Hood shooter and others who have disgraced their uniforms are the rare exceptions.

In addition, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been performing an outstanding service in apprehending Muslim jihadists on US soil over the years since 9/11 before any destruction has taken place. The FBI arrested two such extremists (who are American citizens) in the past couple of months who were plotting to bomb the DC Metro and another who tried to set off explosions at a military recruiting center in Baltimore. These are just the most recent examples of the critical role the FBI has been playing to keep us safe in our own homeland.

Nevertheless, there are always bad apples in every barrel and sorry news about certain federal workers falling short on the job, such those described above, will likely continue to be reported in the future regardless of how those public servants are paid. Sphere: Related Content