It's not hard to find cracks in the system in need of fixing -- like this Secret Service security gap

by Ken

Sure, I'm still processing, even though I think I was reasonably well prepared intellectually for an election outcome similar to what actually happened. My first thought: Now we know who will appoint -- subject to confirmation by a still-Republican-controlled Senate -- at least two new Supreme Court justices: replacements not just for Antonin Scalia but for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and possibly for Anthony Kennedy and/or Stephen Breyer as well. (Yes, I'm steamed that "Miss Mitch" McConnell and Company won their extra-constitutional gamble in refusing to consider the Garland nomination. Now, alas, there's nothing for it but to hope that this gambit can be made to come back and bite their smelly butts.)

But for now, I don't want to go there. I'm going to try to think, well, not optimistically, but (let's say) within the realm of possibility. Let's say that President Trump really means to begin repairing our broken system. The Washington Post's Joe Davidson, whose "Federal Insider" beat is the seamy underbelly of the federal government, sensibly had one such instance ready to roll today regardless of the election outcome, under the headline "Secret Service IT management slammed following Chaffetz breach" (links onsite):

Now that the votes are in and the presidential campaign is done, the Secret Service can close an incredibly busy election season.

Perhaps it can turn some of that energy to protecting its computer systems, which suffer from neglect, ignorance and bad management, according to a watchdog’s report.

The report by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) at the Department of Homeland Security is related to the agency’s breach and leak of personal information belonging to Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) last year. That was another in a string of embarrassments for a law enforcement agency that has had such a proud tradition.

A 2015 OIG investigation found that 45 employees got into Chaffetz’s 2003 Secret Service job application. Only four had a legitimate need, leaving the rest in violation of the Privacy Act and agency policies. The file snooping began minutes after Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, opened a hearing into allegations of agents’ misconduct.

Chaffetz said the current report, issued last month, shows that “despite past warnings, USSS [U.S. Secret Service] is still unable to assure us their IT systems are safe.” In a letter to Inspector General John Roth, Chaffetz also said the discipline for some agents in his case “is not adequate to deter similar behavior in the future” and asked Roth to continue his investigation.

The October report goes well beyond the Chaffetz case and dissects the agency’s information technology operation in scathing particulars.

Summing up the report, the inspector general’s office offered this mouthful: The “audit uncovers a myriad of problems with Secret Service’s IT management including inadequate system security plans, systems with expired authorities to operate, inadequate access and audit controls, noncompliance with logical access requirements, inadequate privacy protections, and over-retention of records. The OIG concluded that Secret Service’s IT management was ineffective because Secret Service has historically not given it priority. The Secret Service CIO’s [Chief Information Officer] Office lacked authority, inadequate attention was given to updating IT policies, and Secret Service personnel were not given adequate training regarding IT security and privacy.”

The Secret Service agreed with the report’s 11 recommendations, even though officials believe it does not reflect the agency’s recent IT progress. In a memorandum responding to the report, Secret Service Director Joseph P. Clancy noted last year’s hiring of retired Marine Brig. Gen. Kevin Nally as CIO and “the sweeping and unprecedented improvements” under his leadership.

THERE'S ONE OBVIOUS CAVEAT TO THE ABOVE

Of course the "Chaffetz breach" became an issue, to the extent that it became an issue, almost entirely because in this instance the victim of governmental abuse was not just a right-winger but a far-far-right-winger and the loudest of loudmouths (maybe somebody out there can help? I'm racking my brain for a kinder and gentler term than "crackpot") as well. I think it's safe to say that such instances have been overwhelmingly the exception even in a Democratic administration. Projecting ahead to a federal government staffed with Trump appointees . . . well, you can finish that sentence for yourself. And with a Republican Congress still in charge -- and overseen by people we know only too well -- it's hard to imagine much impulse to reforms that would clamp down on all governmental abuses.

Then again, maybe the president-elect is serious about fixing our broken system. (Did I hear somebody laugh? Or was that crying?)


COMING UP FRIDAY --

For my next post, I promise one with (almost) no reference at all to the election or the present political mess. It's something I had in mind for today, but I thought we needed to do a smidge of transitioning.

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From the Indignity of Labor Dept.: To the oligarchy, "American workers are less than nothing" (Ian Welsh)

The oligarchy takes care of its own: As Senator Blanche heads off into the post-senatorial sunset, don't think her loyal soldiering against card check will be forgotten by her oligarchical masters, whose motto is, "We take care of our own."

"[T]he oligarchy's overall goal is to crush wages and benefits, both to pay for their bailouts and as a permanent, long-running goal. They do not really believe that domestic consumer demand is necessary to their own prosperity, and prefer workers who are in permanent debt-slavery. For a generation and a half now they have made most of their money through leveraged financial games, asset bubbles and by offshoring and outsourcing jobs. American workers are nothing to them, less than nothing"

-- Ian Welsh, in the blogpost "Labor accepting permanent defeat?"

by Ken

Ian is referring to a NYT report from Milwaukee by Louis Uchitelle, "Unions Yield on Wage Scales to Preserve Jobs."

MILWAUKEE -- Organized labor appears to be losing an important battle in the Great Recession.

Even at manufacturing companies that are profitable, union workers are reluctantly agreeing to tiered contracts that create two levels of pay.

In years past, two-tiered systems were used to drive down costs in hard times, but mainly at companies already in trouble. And those arrangements, at the insistence of the unions, were designed, in most cases, to expire in a few years.

Now, the managers of some marquee companies are aiming to make this concession permanent. If they are successful, their contracts could become blueprints for other companies in other cities, extending a wage system that would be a startling retreat for labor.

Though union officials said they could not readily supply data on the practice, managers have been trying to achieve this for 30 years, with limited results. The recent auto crisis brought a two-tier system to General Motors and Chrysler. Delphi, the big parts maker, also has one now. Caterpillar, back in 2006, signed such a contract with the United Automobile Workers.

The arrangement was a fairly common means of shrinking labor costs in the recession of the early 1980s. At the end of the contracts, however, wages generally snapped back up to a single tier. At G.M., Chrysler, Delphi and Caterpillar, the wages will not be snapping back.

Nor will that happen for workers at three big manufacturers here in southeastern Wisconsin -- where 15 percent of the work force is in manufacturing, a bigger proportion than any other state. These employers -- Harley-Davidson, Mercury Marine and Kohler -- have all but succeeded in the last year or so in erecting two-tier systems that could last well into a recovery.

"This is absolutely a surrender for labor," said Mike Masik Sr., the union leader at Harley-Davidson, the motorcycle maker, not even trying to paper over the defeat. His union recently accepted a new contract that freezes wages for existing workers for most of its seven years, lowers pay for new hires, dilutes benefits and brings temporary workers to the assembly line at even lower pay and no benefits whenever there is a rise in demand for Harley's roaring bikes. . . .

As Uchitelle notes, two-tiered wage scales, a healthy step toward the final neutering of labor unions, have been a dream of the corporate masters for decades. Now, under cover of economic catastrophe, the corporate titans not only are getting rich but are ticking off another item on their "Chokehold Control of American Life" Wish List.

"Management clearly has the upper hand in negotiations because of the employment situation," Milwaukee's mayor, Tom Barrett, said.

Mr. Barrett ran as the Democratic candidate for governor in the Nov. 2 election, losing to Scott Walker, a Republican in a state that usually votes Democratic. In interviews, several blue-collar workers said they had voted Democratic in 2008 and switched to Republican this time -- mimicking the blue-collar political shift throughout the Midwest -- because the Obama administration, in their view, had failed so far to help them.

The breakthrough labor agreements reflect this antipathy. They capitalize on a particularly difficult set of circumstances for blue-collar workers. In response to falling demand, the big manufacturers here have cut production and laid off thousands of employees. Many people lost jobs that had paid $22 an hour or more. Few can get work that pays as well, if they can get steady work at all, given an unemployment rate of nearly 8 percent in the area. That makes holding a job a higher priority than holding the line on pay and benefits, much less pushing for improvements, Mr. Masik said.

Increasing the pressure, Harley-Davidson and Mercury Marine, a unit of the Brunswick Corporation, publicly declared that they would move factory operations to lower-cost American cities -- Stillwater, Okla., for example, or Kansas City, Mo. -- if the unions failed to accept the concessions set forth in remarkably similar contracts. One provision denies laid-off or furloughed workers their old pay if they are called back; they must return as second-tier employees, earning $5 to $15 an hour less.

Mercury Marine's nearly 900 hourly workers voted last fall to reject such terms, but a few days later, they voted again and accepted them. They reversed course after the company announced that its headquarters factory, in nearby Fond du Lac, would be closed and operations consolidated in Stillwater. The Stillwater factory is now being closed instead. . . .

Of course on the front lines it's not the corporate titans waging battle.

The Milwaukee agreement, recently ratified, will shrink the full-time payroll to 900 from 1,250 today and more than 1,600 before the recession. Up to 250 "casuals," as in York, will be used to handle surges in demand for Harley bikes. While hourly pay under the current contract averages $31 an hour, that drops to $25 for the second tier, which becomes the only tier once all the veterans have left or retired. Casuals, in contrast, get $18.50 an hour.

The new Milwaukee contract kicks in when the current agreement expires on March 31, 2012. The union balked at negotiating so far in advance, Mr. Masik said, but conceded after the company insisted it would otherwise use the intervening months to prepare to move operations elsewhere, perhaps Kansas City. To guarantee support, Harley also incorporated into the contract $12,000 bonuses for its steelworkers, including those laid off.

Harley's president said the recession left no choice but to reorganize. Motorcycle sales are down 40 percent from their peak in 2006, Mr. Levatich said. Cutting the core staff allows Harley to slow the line during the winter months of lean demand and add "casuals" when demand picks up in the spring and summer.

"What we are doing is not mean-spirited," Mr. Levatich insisted. "We have to retool if we want to survive. We should have started doing this, in small steps, 20 years ago."

But once the principle takes hold, but it's not hard to see what the labor-management situation will look like when the dust settles.

Here's Ian's take:

Solidarity is the first rule of unions. If you sell anyone down the river, you weaken yourself fatally.

On a larger scale, the destruction of unions remains job #1 of the oligarchy, especially that part of the oligarchy which prefers Republicans to Democrats. Why?

* Because union members vote Democratic, even if they are part of a demographic which normally vote Republican.

* Because the oligarchy's overall goal is to crush wages and benefits, both to pay for their bailouts and as a permanent, long-running goal. They do not really believe that domestic consumer demand is necessary to their own prosperity, and prefer workers who are in permanent debt-slavery. For a generation and a half now they have made most of their money through leveraged financial games, asset bubbles and by offshoring and outsourcing jobs. American workers are nothing to them, less than nothing.

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How do the Catfood Commissioners know which kinds of spending to target and which to leave alone? Meet the U.S. permanent government

[Don't forget to click to enlarge]

Why are the recommendations of the "deficit-reduction commission" stacked toward an assault on the popular government programs labeled "entitlements"? Because of who was appointed to the commission. And why were those particular people appointed to the commission?

by Ken

The other day WaPo wag Al Kamen reported this news on the executive-appointment front in his "In the Loop" column:

Republicans get a target

As expected, the White House, after nearly two years, has finally announced a pick for director of the Justice Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The choice is Andrew Traver, a career employee who is now special agent in charge of the ATF's Chicago field office.

As we mentioned back on Aug. 4, if approved, Traver would be the first-ever Senate-confirmed ATF director. The position had been filled (at the Treasury Department and more recently at Justice) without Senate input. Since the job became Senate-confirmable in 2006, it seems, no one has made it past the watchful eyes of the gun lobby.

Hard to imagine Traver will be approved by the new Senate. While they're at it, maybe the folks at the White House will finally nominate someone to be solicitor general, name another to run Justice's Office of Legal Counsel and find a qualified nominee for the tax operation.

Did you get that? "Since the job [of ATF director] became Senate-confirmable in 2006, it seems, no one has made it past the watchful eyes of the gun lobby.

Now the NRA isn't a natural part of our permanent government. To give it its due, through sheer organizational single-mindedness and ruthlessness, it bullied its way into its position of power, from which it has an effective veto over any policy matter that in any way impinges on its guncentric agenda. And the permanent government for once yielded. The power of the NRA in its domain is pretty much unchallenged -- a wise decision for those who wish to control the levers of power, considering how well the NRA knows how and is willing and eager to, um, participate in the electoral process. (A quick show of hands, please, among those out there who hold elective office that requires them to face reelection or are contemplating running for same: How would you like to run your campaign against the full political force of the NRA?)

And who exactly makes up this permanent government of which I speak? It's people inside government, yes, but even more importantly people outside government, really important (read "rich") and well-connected (read "rich") people. It's not "rich people" as a class; there are probably a fair number of rich people who, as long as they can hold onto what they've got, aren't much interested in running the country. And there are rich people, as we keep seeing when people like Linda McMahon and Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina whom no amount of money will put into office -- though their mistake may simply be in trying to be office-holding members of the PG.

This won't define the PG for you, but we get some useful images when journalist-turned-cabinet-minister-turned-Prime Minister Jim Hacker (Paul Eddington) announces to the cabinet secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby (Nigel Hawthorne), and to his principal private secretary, Bernard Woolley (Derek Fowlds): "I know exactly who reads the papers."



Of course we don't usually see the PG at work. Its handiwork is usually most visible in the actions (or non-actions) of the people who do its bidding. If, for example, you look at the CVs of virtually all the Catfood Commission members, you'll see the network of ties that make their conclusions on deficit reduction so drearily predictable. Never mind that the "economic realities" they and their cronies keep warning us we have to confront if we wish to be taken seriously are challenged up and down the line by economists who aren't being paid off by the PG masters of the "deficit hawks." Or that when they whimper solemnly that they've explored every imaginable budget area for budget savings, they're just kidding. They have homed in on the areas their PG masters wish them to target, and will take away not so much as a thin dime from the areas their PG masters wish left undisturbed. (See Howie's post yesterday, "The Catfood Commission's Dark Vision For Our Country Isn't Inevitable.")

Now, not everyone in government. What we need to recognize is the ferocious power the PG exerts on officeholders to conform. A lot of people have invested an awful lot of money in arranging a status quo that suits them well enough, thank you, and while they always have helpful ideas for how that status quo can be (according to their perspective) "improved," none of those ideas would constitute what we would call "reform." More like de-form. You know, the sort of thing the Bush regime and the get-rich-quick Republican Congress specialized in, and that the new Republican House (and, coming in January 2013, the new Republican Senate) is poised to be offering its cash customers.

The rewards for "going along" range from generous to profligate. As we're so often made aware, the first consideration of most elected officials is getting reelected, and as the cost of getting elected has risen so enormously, our elected officials are in virtually perpetual fund-raising mode. Government service also attracts large numbers of the kind of people who are simply drawn to venues where large quantities of money are moved around. You know, the kind who specialize in ways of moving chunks of that money into their personal pockets. The PG both controls vast sources of campaign and just plain bribe-payment cash, and also often has the power to turn off the money tap for candidates it wishes to disadvantage.

In addition, lately I've been eavesdropping on chatter among people who've seen the inside of government and report that one of the most powerful engines for status-quo maintenance is the incredible inertial pull of the PG minions who fill the zillions of staff positions at all levels of government, certainly including the members of both houses of Congress. It's not necessarily a matter of being "conservative" in the political sense, but of being conservative in the literal sense of fighting tenaciously to preserve the system they've signed on to, in which they're making, or have made, their way.

Some of them, perhaps even many of them, may have made their way into government service for reasons as ringingly idealistic as DWT readers could hope for. However, it takes a really special kind of person to withstand the pounding the system inflicts on people who don't grasp the wisdom of "getting along." For both elected officials and staffers, it's a carrot-and-stick deal: rewards stretching on into the foreseeable future, even if unfavorably wafting electoral circumstances should thrust you out of office. There are, after all, all those lobbying positions, not to mention all those appointive positions inside and outside government where a "good soldier" can land on his feet. In case there are any electeds who somehow don't get the message, they're surrounded by all those staff grunts to keep trying to drum it into them.

As Howie has pointed out to me often since he's been working actively with candidates, the stifling effect of status-quo-driven staff sets in earlier and earlier in the electoral process. One traditional transformation point comes when an insurgent candidate is actually elected. Once that magic "-elect" is added to the office title, the sharks move in. Experienced staffers who know now that there are actual jobs to be had with, say, Congressman-elect X. And overnight, a candidate who was desperate for any attention he could get becomes unavailable except through his "people." We might also consider the kind of people who by basic personality type are drawn to being somebody important's people.

And more and more the process starts earlier than that. Candidates who want to be taken "seriously" -- and it's pretty hard to raise "serious" cash if you're not taken "seriously" -- are under pressure to hire, well, "serious" campaign staff and campaign consultants. It's gotten worse than that. Howie is going to be reporting some pretty stomach-turning revelations about a seemingly seamless integration of the Democratic congressional campaign apparatus with consultants whom candidates are, shall we say, urgently advised to use.

Whereas the price for not going along is, well, you're on your own. If you can keep getting reelected, more power to you, but not in the sense of any real power -- there are plenty of institutional ways to decrease the chances that a troublemaker doesn't amass much real power. And reelection isn't going to be a lead-pipe cinch. A chap like Russ Feingold, about as uncontrolled as a present-day U.S. senator can be, had precious few chits to call in from the PG, and against a deep-pocketed candidate whom no sane person would want on the same planet with our government, in an election climate where so many voters were determined to show that the human brain can be good for nothing more than filling intracranial space, he was hung out to dry. I suspect few tears were shed by either "the people who run the country" or "the people who own the country."

And that's all without even mentioning the vast apparatus that has grown up to support the PG, the hordes of media and other hangers-on whose livelihood waxes and wanes in exactly the same way as those of elected officeholders and staff people, the people who fill out that oh-so-harmonious, largely nonpartisan community of interest that Digby has so elegantly and usefully dubbed the Village -- that misty world where people like David Broder are (yes!) take seriously. There's no practical limit to the rewards for getting along with the Village agenda, and a painful price to be paid for not doing so. Resistance, one might almost say, is futile.

Actually, I find myself suddenly thinking a lot about Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minster, in which a well-meaning but easily befuddled by reality journalist becomes, first, minister of administrative affairs and then, by an astonishing series of "Party Games," prime minister.

In this clip from "Party Games," the extended episode of Yes, Minister that sets the stage for Yes, Prime Minister, Sir Arnold Robinson (John Nettleton), the recently retired cabinet secretary (the highest-ranking official of the official British permanent government, more or less the civil-service counterpart to the prime minister), who regretfully is unable to talk about his new work with the Campaign for the Freedom of Information, chats with his successor, Sir Humphrey, his old Oxford chum, who previously "served" Jim Hacker as the Ministry of Administrative Affairs' permanent secretary, about the candidates to be the next prime minister. As they describe the characteristics of their ideal PM (someone who's "malleable" and can be "guided" in the direction of not doing much of anything), there comes a magical moment when the same preposterous idea occurs to them more or less simultaneously.

The permanent government picks a PM

*