Prospect.org

Another red-letter day in the annals of Republican fiscal prudence. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie announced this afternoon that he has scheduled the special election to pick a succeessor for the late Senator Frank Lautenberg for October 16—despite the fact that the regular election for New Jersey state government, very much including the governor’s job, for which Christie is seeking re-election, will be held on November 5th. The cost of holding a special election, rather than consolidating it with the regular election three weeks later, has been estimated by the state’s office of legislative services at $24 million. But holding the special early means that Democrats won’t be mounting a huge get-out-the-vote drive for Lautenberg’s likely successor, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, during the election in which Republican Christie appears on the ballot.

Read More

Over the past month, an oceanic divide has opened between European and American retailers on the question of how to respond to the manmade epidemic of deadly disasters in the garment industry of Bangladesh, the world’s second largest clothing exporter. In the aftermath of the Rana Plaza fire on April 24, which killed at least 1,127 workers, a group of roughly 40 European retailers—including H&M, Carrefour, Bennetton, Tesco, and Marks & Spencer—signed on to a plan binding them to fund both a regimen of independent factory inspections and the improvements required to make those factories safe.

Read More

Major Ruth became a civic leader because he made a promise to his neighbor, Brian Wingate. Both had moved to the Beaver Hills section of New Haven, Connecticut, in 2003. A neighborhood of aging single--family homes that had seen better days, Beaver Hills had been targeted by the city for a housing--rehabilitation program, and, with the zeal of new arrivals, Ruth, a manager at the local utility company, and Wingate, a custodian and union steward at nearby Yale University, sought to involve themselves in neighborhood--improvement ventures. That proved harder than they had anticipated.  Although New Haven aldermanic districts are tiny, encompassing no more than 4,300 residents, Ruth and Wingate couldn’t find anyone who could identify, much less locate, their alderman. “We joked that one of us would run for alderman and the other would have to run his campaign,” Ruth says. In 2010, Wingate told Ruth he was running and a deal was a deal.

Read More

The main item of business before JP Morgan Chase’s annual shareholder meeting, which will convene today in Tampa, is whether JPM CEO Jamie Dimon will be stripped of his additional post as chairman of JPM’s board of directors. A range of institutional investors concerned about the over-concentration of power atop the nation’s most powerful institutions, and upset by the $6 billion loss JPM took last year at its London trading desk, won roughly 40 percent shareholder support last year to separate the two positions. This year, they hope to do better, even though the bank’s public-relations offensive on Dimon’s behalf has made the prospect of winning a majority more difficult.

Read More

Tomorrow, Angelenos go to the polls to select a new mayor. Well, some Angelenos—actually, not a hell of a lot. Indeed, turnout is projected to be so low that the winner may get fewer votes than Fletcher Bowron did in winning the election of 1938, when Los Angeles was less than half as populous as it is today.

The reason for the low turnout is straightforward: Not all that much differentiates the two candidates. Both City Controller Wendy Greuel and Hollywood-area City Councilman Eric Garcetti are mainstream Democrats. Unlike the election, say, of 1993, which pitted Republican businessman Richard Riordan against liberal Democratic Councilman Mike Woo—two candidates with widely divergent views on how to fix the L.A. police in the wake of the Rodney King riots—no great issues separate the two candidates this year. Unlike the election of 2005, in which former California Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa ousted incumbent Mayor Jim Hahn, this year’s election won’t be a milestone marking the political progress of Latinos or any other ethnic group.

Read More

If you’re looking for the personification of the Washington economic establishment, you could do a lot worse than Fred Bergsten. National Security Council economics deputy under Henry Kissinger (at age 27), then head of the international desk and the monetary portfolio in Jimmy Carter’s Treasury Department, and from 1981 through last year the founding director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Bergsten has been a forceful advocate for what used to be called the Washington Consensus: an unflagging belief in the virtues of free trade and fiscal discipline.

Read More