Republicans hate to hear it. But it must be said, now more than ever. Some stuff should not be privatized, outsourced or sub-contracted out.
There is ample evidence, for example, that the private sector is less than efficient in delivering affordable, quality health care to most Americans, as is the conclusion most non-ideologues would likely to draw from reading this article comparing health care in the U.S. and Sweden.
For an even more newsy take on the inefficiencies of government outsourcing to the private sector, however, read Tim Shorrock’s “Put the Spies Back Under One Roof” in the New York Times. As Shorrock observes:

The revelation that Edward J. Snowden, a contractor at Booz Allen Hamilton, was responsible for the biggest leak in the history of the National Security Agency has sparked a furious response in Congress.
“I’m very concerned that we have government contractors doing what are essentially governmental jobs,” Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said last week. “Maybe we should bring some of that more in-house,” the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, mused.
It’s a little late for that. Seventy percent of America’s intelligence budget now flows to private contractors. Going by this year’s estimated budget of about $80 billion, that makes private intelligence a $56 billion-a-year industry.

Seventy percent? That’s an awful lot of faith in the integrity and capabilities of businesses that measure success in terms of their economic profit.
You will not be too surprised to learn that the push toward subcontracting our intelligence gathering and analysis to private, profiteering enterprises began around the year 2000. It wasn’t long before “The N.S.A.’s headquarters began filling with contractors working for Booz Allen and hundreds of other companies,” reports Shorrock, who adds:

And if the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance programs are unlawful or unconstitutional, as many Americans (including myself) believe, does it make any difference whether the work is done by a government analyst or a private contractor?
It does. Here’s why. First, it is dangerous to have half a million people — the number of private contractors holding top-secret security clearances — peering into the lives of their fellow citizens. Contractors aren’t part of the chain of command at the N.S.A. or other agencies and aren’t subject to Congressional oversight. Officially, their only loyalty is to their company and its shareholders.
Second, with billions of dollars of government money sloshing around, and with contractors providing advice on how to spend it, conflicts of interest and corruption are inevitable. Contractors simply shouldn’t be in the business of managing large projects and providing procurement advice to intelligence agencies…
Third, we’ve allowed contractors to conduct our most secret and sensitive operations with virtually no oversight. This is true not only at the N.S.A. Contractors now work alongside the C.I.A. in covert operations (two of the Americans killed in Benghazi were C.I.A. contractors; we still don’t know who their employer was).

Shorrock also writes about the incentives for corruption in the ‘revolving door’ and adds “After Blackwater’s sordid history in Iraq, we don’t need more unaccountable actors fighting terrorism for profit.” As for solutions to the problem:

Congress must act now to re-establish a government-run intelligence service operating with proper oversight. The first step is to appoint an independent review board — with no contractors on it — to decide where the line for government work should be drawn. The best response to the Snowden affair is to reduce the size of our private intelligence army and make contract spying a thing of the past. Our democracy depends on it.

There is way too much at stake in our national security to allow profit-driven concerns to spend 70 percent of our intelligence budget. Democrats should lead the call to restore public interest in our intel operations.

The following article by TDS founding editor Ruy Teixeira, is cross-posted from Think Progress:
In terms of red states going blue, Texas gets most of the ink (I myself wrote a recent piece on possibilities for a blue Texas). That’s understandable. Moving Texas and its 38 votes out of the red column would sunder Republicans’ already tenuous path to an Electoral College majority.
But Georgia’s 16 electoral votes are not trivial and would, if lost, also do grievous damage to Republican prospects. Yet we hear relatively little about possibilities for a blue Georgia, despite the fact that Georgia is, in many respects, a more plausible candidate than Texas for changing colors. Zac McCrary and Bryan Stryker’s strong argument, as well as some of my own research, suggests that we might see Georgia’s votes go to the Democratic candidate as soon as the 2020 Presidential election.
Start with the basic facts on electoral performance as rehearsed by McCrary and Stryker:

In 2012, Georgia was the second most competitive state carried by Mitt Romney (+7.8 percent Romney) — behind only North Carolina (+2.0 percent Romney). Romney’s margin in Georgia was narrower than his winning margins in 2008-cycle swing states Missouri (+9.4 percent Romney) and Indiana (+10.2 percent Romney) as well as in forward-looking Democratic target states Arizona (+9.1 percent Romney) and Texas (+15.8 percent Romney). And in 2008, Georgia was the third most competitive state won by McCain, behind only Missouri and Montana.

The 2012 numbers aren’t accidents. A slate of underlying demographic trends are pushing Georgia in a bluer direction.
In the last decade, Georgia had a rapid rate of increase in its minority population, going from 37 to 44 percent minority over the time period. The increase in the minority population accounted for 81 percent of Georgia’s growth over the decade. Unusually, the biggest contributor to minority growth came from blacks, who alone accounted for 39 percent of Georgia’s growth. The next largest contributor was Hispanics, whose numbers increased at a scorching 96 percent pace and accounted for 26 percent of the state’s growth.
By 2020, along with Nevada and Maryland, Georgia is almost certain to join the ranks of majority-minority states. These ongoing shifts should continue to move Georgia in a more competitive direction.
The geographical locus of that change will likely be in the burgeoning Atlanta metropolitan area, whose share of the statewide vote continues to grow (up to 54 percent in the 2012 election). It is here that the new Georgia is taking shape most clearly. As summarized by McCrary and Stryker:

Of metro Atlanta’s roughly one million new residents over the past decade, 90 percent are non-white (54 percent African American / 31 percent Hispanic). This growth reduced the metro area’s white percentage from 60 percent in 2000 to 51 percent in 2010. Conversely, African Americans (from 29 percent to 32 percent of the area’s population) and Hispanics (from 6 percent to 10 percent) have undergone a population boom.

Reflecting these changes, Obama carried the Atlanta metro in both 2008 and 2012, by 4 points and 1 point, respectively. That’s a 21 point Democratic swing from the 1988 Presidential election. The changes–and the improvements for Democrats-are generally even gaudier in the metro area’s (and the state’s) most populous counties: Cobb (138 percent of growth from minorities, 34 point margin shift toward Democrats since 1988); DeKalb (143 percent of growth from minorities, 55 point shift toward Democrats); Fulton (94 percent of growth from minorities, 16 point shift toward Democrats) and Gwinnett (118 percent of growth from minorities, 42 point shift toward Democrats).
With figures like this, it’s not hard to see a blue Georgia taking shape in the near future — probably nearer than Texas, despite its slightly higher Democratic support among whites and slightly higher minority share of voters. The secret ingredient: Georgia’s minority voters are dominated by extremely pro-Democratic African-Americans. That pushes overall Democratic support among minorities in Georgia about 20 points higher than in Texas. That makes a huge difference and explains why Georgia has been so much closer in the last two elections than Texas.
But how near is this near future we’re talking about? Could be pretty near. Projections we have done at CAP suggest the minority percentage of eligible voters in Georgia should rise by about 3.5 percentage points between 2012 and 2016. All else equal, that could cut the Democratic deficit by as much as 5 points (that is, reducing Obama’s 8 point deficit in 2012 to a mere 3 points). And by 2020, if trends continue, a blue Georgia seems eminently possible.
But, of course, all else might not be equal. That’s why the quest for a blue Georgia, just as the quest for a blue Texas, is going to have to be built on a three-legged stool, only one leg of which is ongoing demographic change. The other two are matching minority, particularly Hispanic, turnout to white turnout and elevating white support for Democrats. In the former area, the Democrats have an advantage relative to Texas because such a higher proportion of the minority vote is black and blacks have been turning out a high rate. But that has to continue post-Obama. Moreover, a greater proportion of the Georgia minority vote in the future will be Latino and these voters, according to recent data, turn out at a rate 17 points lower than blacks. Closing that gap will be an important part of any blue Georgia strategy.
In the latter area, if the Democrats can simply get their support among whites into the 25-30 percent range (support was probably around 20 percent in 2012) — in other words, make the typical GOP landslide among Georgia whites just a little bit less of a landslide — they will be in a good position to stand firmly on the three legged stool and take blue Georgia from aspiration to reality.

This article, by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:

Here is the bottom line: if the minimum wage in 1968 had been adjusted for inflation, right now instead of $7.25 per hour, it would be $10.55 per hour — 45 percent higher. Instead of making $15,080 per year for 52 weeks of full-time work, a minimum wage worker would make almost $22,000.
The federal minimum wage has been increased 22 times since it was passed in 1938, but it has never been indexed to inflation. As a result, the incomes of a larger and larger number of working Americans have eroded over the last three decades to the point where many Americans work hard, for 40 hours a week, and still live in poverty.
To put it another way, the growing profits of some of the nation’s largest corporations and wealthiest people in America result from the labor of people whose work is rewarded with poverty level wages.
That makes no economic sense. And it’s just plan wrong.
Senator Tom Harkin and Congressman George Miller have introduced legislation in Congress to increase the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour and index it to inflation. The passage of these measures would be a major step in stopping the continued growth of the widening chasm between the incomes of ordinary Americans and the top 2% of the population.
And the President, Democrats in Congress and major progressive organizations — like the National Employment Law Project and the nation’s labor movement — are preparing a major national campaign to pass minimum wage legislation.
There are six reasons why the coming battle to increase the minimum wage is very high political ground for Democrats:
1). The polling is clear. Overwhelming majorities of Americans believe that it is simply wrong for people to work 40 hours a week and earn poverty level wages. And there is not much anyone can say to persuade them otherwise.
For years, many Republicans, corporate lobbyists and — especially — advocates for the restaurant industry, which is the worst offender when it comes to exploiting low wage workers – have promoted the conventional wisdom that raising the minimum wage somehow has political costs.
They try to make it appear that raising the “minimum wage” is a “low income” issue — that is unpopular with the middle class.
But the fact is that increasing the minimum wage can’t be exploited politically the way the right wing exploits increases in so-called “entitlements” of “takers” that are paid out of taxpayer dollars.
First, the minimum wage, by definition, is paid to people who work for a living. And, when you think about it, it is often paid to people who work harder than anyone else in America – doing some of the dirtiest jobs in America.
The guys who are chauffeured to work in black SUV’s aren’t the ones on the road at 4:30 a.m. It’s the maids and janitors and cooks and dishwashers who do hard, repetitive physical work — maybe at two or three jobs, and still barely make ends meet — that make the minimum wage.
Politically, it’s hard for a CEO who makes $10 million a year to argue that wages should not be increased for one of their workers when he makes as much before lunch on the first day of the work year as his minimum wage worker makes all year long.
Right now a CEO who makes $10 million a year makes $4,807 an hour. That’s 633 times the rate of a minimum wage worker.
2). Increasing the minimum wage — and tying it to inflation — helps stimulate the economy without relying on more public sector spending.
Most economists agree that the federal government should be spending more money on public sector activities like building infrastructure, investing in education and providing economic support to those who have been devastated by the economic crisis that began at the end of the Bush Administration. They believe more spending is necessary to get the slowly recovering economy to really take off.
Unfortunately, Republicans in Congress continue to do everything in their power to obstruct economic policies that most economists agree would turbocharge growth. Instead, Republicans insist on the kinds of cuts that serve as a massive albatross around the neck of the economic recovery.
Increasing the minimum wage would put more money in consumers’ pockets without tapping the federal treasury. And it would put that money into the pockets of people who will actually go out and spend it, rather than sinking it into yet another vacation home or a Cayman Islands account.

Read more…

in their post, “Why Democrats should listen to Joe Biden,” at The Fix, Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake share a quote from a recent speech by Vice President Biden, which they believe could serve as a boilerplate spiel for Democratic Senate candidates in particular:

“This is not your father’s Republican Party. It really is a fundamentally different party. There’s never been as much distance — at least since I’ve been alive — distance between where the mainstream of the Republican congressional party is and the Democratic Party is. It’s a chasm. It’s a gigantic chasm. … But the last thing in the world we need now is someone who will go down to the United States Senate and support Ted Cruz, support the new senator from Kentucky (Rand Paul) — or the old senator from Kentucky (Mitch McConnell). … Think about this: Have you ever seen a time when two freshman senators are able to cower the bulk of the Republican Party in the Senate? That is not hyperbole.”

As Blake and Cillizza intepret it,

The picture Biden is trying to paint is this: The Republican party is beholden to absolutists like Cruz and Paul who view any compromise as a concession, that a vote for any Republican for Senate — even one like Gabriel Gomez who has worked hard to avoid any connections to the national GOP during his campaign against Markey — is a vote for that sort of my-way-or-the-highway approach that subjugates getting things done to philosophical principles. (Tougher gun background checks, which national polling suggested had widespread support among the American public, is Exhibit A for Biden in making that argument.)
And poll after poll has shown the GOP remains in poorer stead with the American people than the Democratic Party. A recent Post-ABC News poll showed Americans thought Republicans in Congress were more focused on issues that aren’t pertinent to them than those that are by a 60-33 margin. For Democrats, the split was 50 percent non-pertinent and 43 percent pertinent.
…The potency of the “just too extreme” message among independents is demonstrated by the success of Democratic Senate candidates in conservative-leaning states like Indiana and Missouri in 2012. There’s no way that Claire McCaskill wins re-election or Joe Donnelly gets elected without winning a large majority of those voters who identify themselves as independents.

It seems like a sound strategy, if a little overstated in places. As Cillizza and Blake conclude, “…Biden is counseling his party to make 2014 a referendum on Republicans, not Democrats. It’s not an easy sell, but it may well be Democrats’ best bet in what, on paper, should be a very difficult election.”
But CNN.com’s Julian Zelizer brings the Republicans’ 2014 campaign problems into sharper focus:

The rebellion taking place within the GOP has been growing more intense. Many senior leaders are warning that their party is on a destructive path that will only lead to more rounds of defeat. Many Republicans privately agreed when former Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole said the GOP ought to be “closed for repairs” until next year, and in the meantime, “spend that time going over ideas and positive agenda.”
Since 2010, Republicans invested almost everything in the issue of deficit reduction and saying no to everything that came out of the White House. The bet hasn’t been paying off. At a certain point, voters seem to have lost interest in the message and, now that the long-term budget picture is doing much better while the economics of austerity has come under fire, the issue is gaining even less voter traction.

However, Zelizer sees a more positive message strategy for Democrats going forward:

Voters want to hear what Democrats have to say about federal investments in the nation’s economic future, about how to handle climate change and how to build on Obama’s promise to restore the balance between law and civil liberties and homeland security. If Democrats can start developing ideas for the next candidate to run on, they could not only bolster their numbers on the Hill but strengthen the platform for the next crop of candidates to win over voters.

Democrats should deploy a combination attack for 2014, tapping into Biden’s critique of the GOP, while offering a positive path forward to draw a stark contrast with the GOP’s obstructionist fixation. No matter how effective the Democrats’ GOTV effort or how impressive our candidates will be, a strong, clear messaging strategy will be essential to bust historical precedent and make election day 2014 the beginning of a new era of hope for progressives.

At The Washington Monthly Ed Kilgore explores the political fallout from the Edward Snowden leaks./whistle blowing story and shares some nuanced observations:

…Virtually all of the talk about extraditing and prosecuting Snowden, so far, is coming from Republicans. Obama’s National Intelligence Director James Clapper has referred Snowden’s case to the Justice Department for possible prosecutorial action, but that’s it. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who has been outspoken in defending aggressive surveillance activities and investigations of leaks, has so far been quiet about Snowden’s potential criminal liability. And the White House hasn’t been heard from either.
It’s much clearer that Snowden is presenting a major problem (as well as am Obama-bashing opportunity) for the GOP and the conservative movement. Peter King is calling for extradition of the leaker, and Eric Cantor is promising a House investigation. And for every Glenn Beck joining Ellsberg and Michael Moore in calling Snowden a hero, there’s a Max Boot calling him a “misguided and malevolent individual.”
Most of all, this is a tricky situation for Rand Paul, who has threatened to sue the federal government over the NSA’s sweep of phone numbers from telecom companies, but hasn’t linked arms with Snowden just yet (the unsurprising revelation that Snowden was a supporter of his father’s 2012 campaign may make this silence quickly impossible).

While the Obama Administration will continue to catch heat from the left until it all blows over, the fissures in the GOP may deepen considerably as a consequence. As Kilgore concludes,

…The set of issues raised by this case are harder to finesse than more conventional national security issues where Paul and the neocons can agree on unilateralism even as they mute differences over interventionist and non-interventionist postures. Most importantly, however, this is a rapidly developing story that tends to produce highly emotional reactions. So I’m not sure conservatives will be able to keep their rickety coalition together, particularly if Obama and Democrats find some way to avoid a rupture in their own.

In addition, the controversy once again raises questions about the wisdom of subcontracting important work bearing on our national security to the private sector — another thing they don’t do very well. That would be more of a problem for conservative ideologues than for Democrats.

From Jamelle Bouie’s “Virginia’s New Dominion” at The American Prospect:

…Virginia’s growing diversity made Obama’s four-point victories in 2008 and 2012 possible; he carried only 39 percent and 37 percent of whites. Since 2000, the state’s Latino population has nearly doubled to 8 percent; the Asian American population has grown from 4 percent to 6 percent; the African American population has held steady at 20 percent, while whites have declined from 74 percent to 65 percent of Virginians.
The political character of the white population has also changed. The huge expansion of military spending under President George W. Bush turned vast areas of the state into hubs for service members and defense contractors. This attracted Northern transplants, most of them whites with moderate or liberal views, to the seven cities of Hampton Roads and the sprawling suburbs of Northern Virginia.

However, Bouie cites a trend familiar to many Democratic Party operatives throughout the fifty states: “In 2008, 39 percent of Virginia’s voters were Democratic; in 2009, that figure fell to 33 percent, while Republican turnout was steady.” To sink deeper roots in the south, Democrats have got to figure out how to mobilize stronger GOTV in mid term and non-presidential elections.
Bouie sees Virginia’s current race for the governorship as a marquee contest for assessing the transformation of key southern states from red into blue, with Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a less than charismatic candidate, but one with impressive financial resources, vs. the GOP’s Ken Cuccinelli, a tea party extremist. If McAuliffe wins, that will be an indication that the political transformation of Virginia into a blue state is pretty much a done deal.
That makes sense. Since neither candidate is going to light the VA electorate on fire, a McAuliffe victory will signal that Dems in VA at least, have figured out how to reduce the GOP’s edge in turnout in non-presidential years, in this case through a combination of high tech GOTV and alerting women, in particular, to the ramifications of having a governor who opposes abortion in all circumstances, kowtows to the NRA and denies climate change.
These statewide races are critically important to the Democrats’ future. At the very least, electing Democratic governors can help prevent gerrymandering and resistance to Obamacare. If McAuliffe can win in Virginia in 2013, then 2014 looks a lot better for Dems in NC and GA in 2014.

Bob Moser, author of “Blue Dixie: Awakening the South’s Democratic Majority,” kicks off a four-part series at The American Prospect with “The End of the Solid South.” Moser, the Prospect’s executive editor, makes a compelling argument that the region is rapidly becoming the pivotal battleground for U.S. politics — and it’s all good news for Dems:

Over the next two decades, it will become clear to even the most clueless Yankee that the Solid South is long gone. The politics of the region’s five most populous states–Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Texas–will be defined by the emerging majority that gave Obama his winning margins. The under-30 voters in these states are ethnically diverse, they lean heavily Democratic, and they are just beginning to vote. The white population percentage is steadily declining; in Georgia, just 52 percent of those under 18 are white, a number so low it would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.
By the 2020s, more than two-thirds of the South’s electoral votes could be up for grabs. (The South is defined here as the 11 states of the former Confederacy.) If all five big states went blue, with their 111 electoral votes, only 49 votes would be left for Republicans. (That’s based on the current electoral-vote count; after the next census, the fast-growing states will have more.) Win or lose, simply making Southern states competitive is a boon to Democrats. If Republicans are forced to spend time and resources to defend Texas and Georgia, they’ll have less for traditional battlegrounds like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Even if Democrats aren’t competitive in those states for another decade, they will benefit from connecting with millions of nonvoters who haven’t heard their message. They are building for a demographic future that Republicans dread: the time when overwhelming white support will no longer be enough to win a statewide election in Texas and Georgia.

Moser describes the brutal gerrymandering conducted by the Republicans in the southern states and notes how it paid off for them in 2012, but adds:

…The voters are moving left, while the state governments are lurching right. The only safe prediction is that after 150 years of being largely ignored in national elections, the South is about to become the most fiercely contested, and unpredictable, political battleground in America…To this day, Americans still think “rural” when they think “Southern.” But there’s nothing very rural about the South anymore. Florida is 91 percent urban, Georgia and Virginia 75 percent, and in probably the biggest surprise, Texas is 85 percent urban.

He notes the ‘Great Remigration,’ African Americans coming back to the south in ever-increasing numbers:

Last decade, 75 percent of the growth in America’s black population was in the South. Atlanta and its endless suburbs gained 491,000 African Americans in the past decade, more than any other city. Some are middle-class blacks whose families once relied on government jobs up North that are now disappearing. Some are caring for older relatives left behind in the Great Migration. Some are simply coming home to reunite with their families, finding a region that has undergone seismic changes since the South’s segregated “way of life” finally came to a merciful end.

Add to that the accelerating growth of the Latino population:

…By 2010, 49 percent of newborns in Texas were Latino. Among the big five Southern states, Virginia has the lowest rate at 12 percent. Hundreds of thousands of young Latinos become eligible to vote in the South every year, and that number will be climbing for decades. At least for now, this strongly favors Democrats, who win Latino votes by large margins. Florida used to be the exception, because first-generation (and often second-generation) Cuban Americans were staunch, anti-communist Republicans. But younger Cuban Americans have joined a new immigrant population in Central Florida to help flip the state in the Democrats’ favor.
The key is getting Latinos to the polls–and it’s been a challenge in most Southern states. In 2010, for instance, Latinos were 38 percent of Texas’s population. But just 16 percent of eligible Latinos voted as Republicans won historically big margins in both legislative chambers. The poor turnout is partly a factor of youth. Latinos are, on average, a decade younger than Anglos. Most are not in the habit of voting. If they live in a state like Texas or Georgia, it’s likely that nobody has ever courted their vote.
Once Latinos begin to vote in proportion to their population, the change that they will bring to Southern (and American) politics won’t be limited to a shift in party loyalties. It will be manifested in a new progressivism as well.
Republicans like to talk about how Latinos are “hardworking, religious, family-oriented,” as if those qualities automatically made people conservative. In fact, an exit poll from 2012 showed the opposite: Latino voters are not only more liberal than Republicans; they’re sometimes more liberal than Democrats. On same-sex marriage, 59 percent said yes, against 48 percent of all voters. Should abortion be legal? Sixty-six percent said yes, against 59 percent overall. On economic issues, Latinos’ liberalism tends to be even more pronounced (the same is true for African Americans). Fifty-five percent said last year that they have a negative view of capitalism. They want more spending on public schools. They want universal, public-run health care. They want government to take a strong hand in the economy. Taxes? Raise them, if it means better social services. The same goes for every part of the South’s emerging majority–African Americans, Asian Americans, and under-30 whites who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012.

Clearly the GOP will have to exercise considerable creativity to get a healthy bite of the Latino vote in the south , which may alienate their tea party base. And Moser notes that Dems face formidable obstacles in the region, including gerrymandered districts through 2020 and a strong possibility that the Supreme Court will invalidate the Voting Rights Act or render it impotent, thereby encouraging voter suppression in the region.
However, concludes Moser:

More likely, destiny will follow demography. The South’s big states could soon be undergirding a durable national Democratic majority that’s capable of lasting as long as the New Deal consensus. Liberalism would have a chance to flourish anew–not just in state capitols but in Washington, D.C., as well…From Teddy Roosevelt’s Square Deal to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to Barack Obama’s stimulus and heath-care overhaul, the biggest obstacle has always been Congress’s solid white wall of Southern conservatism. That wall is crumbling. In the future, if you can be progressive and win Texas or Georgia, the American political order will transform in ways we can barely comprehend.

As America prepares to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s dream, it’s encouraging to know that such a positive transformation of the region he loved and struggled to change is well underway.