LA Times

Its leading companies are investing in the U.S. because they can do things here they would never think of doing at home.

The newest slumlord in Los Angeles is a pillar of German capitalism. Earlier this month, the city attorney's office filed suit against Deutsche Bank, the world's fourth-largest bank, for letting many of the more than 2,000 L.A. homes it has foreclosed on descend into squalor and decay.

A yearlong city investigation of the properties on which Deutsche Bank foreclosed turned up tenants compelled to live in crumbling apartments the bank would not fix, houses taken over by gangs, faucets from which water either wouldn't flow or wouldn't stop, and the occasional unidentified dead body. Nothing, in other words, that would be allowed to happen to bank holdings in Frankfurt, the neat-as-a-pin German city that is home to Deutsche Bank and much of the rest of German finance.

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In Wisconsin and other states, labor movements are on the defensive. Here, unions have gone on the offensive to help create jobs at decent pay.

American unions are waging epic battles today against the most serious assaults they've encountered in more than half a century, and they've had some major successes. No one could have predicted that union members and their supporters would flood state capitals in the way they have, or that polls would show Americans support collective bargaining rights for public employees by a 2-1 margin.

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Republican stonewalling won't close the state budget gap

The GOP's opposition to letting voters decide on Gov. Brown's proposal to extend tax hikes looks less like an expression of their certitude that his plan would fail than a sign of their fears that it would pass.

The role that Republicans in the Legislature play in the great scheme of California government is becoming harder and harder to discern.

They do not legislate; neither do they allow the people of California to legislate at the ballot box. The Republicans are giving negation a bad name.

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How do I, a card-carrying liberal — if only liberals had it sufficiently together to issue cards — think my way through this year's crop of California ballot measures

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In 1911, Gov. Hiram Johnson was able to make far-reaching political reforms in California. Both Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown could learn from him.

Of all the California gubernatorial polls taken this year, the one that tells us most about the state didn't pit Jerry Brown against Meg Whitman. In July, the folks at Public Policy Polling decided, presumably just for the heck of it, to see how Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gray Davis would stack up if they ran against each other today.

Davis won.

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Los Angeles is behind the curve in adopting a local preference ordinance, which would give local businesses an edge in landing city contracts. Washington should also act to keep jobs onshore.

It's taken awhile, but Los Angeles is at last beginning to do things that would help Los Angeles.

Last week, the mayor and two members of the City Council — Bernard C. Parks and Paul Krekorian — proposed a "local preference" ordinance that would give L.A. businesses a modest advantage over outside firms when bidding for city contracts. Modest, in this instance, is defined as 8%. If a company meets the city's definition of a local business, that company would get an 8% advantage on its bids for contracts. In the case of contracts awarded based on the lowest bid, the cost of a million-dollar bid would be listed as $920,000. In a "request for proposal" situation, if the city determines that a proposal is worth 100 points, that figure would be boosted to 108 points.

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