Stop the deficit extremists

June 11, 2013

The U.S. economy is improving, yet Congress seems still to be in the grip of the delirium that shrinking the deficit in the near term is still a matter of paramount urgency.

White House trying to clear the forest of 'patent trolls'

June 7, 2013

It's news when government identifies a genuine problem and takes reasoned steps to solve it. So here's news: The Obama administration has a plan to fix the broken U.S. patent system.

Who should pay for San Onofre fiasco? The answer is obvious

June 7, 2013

There may be lots of questions yet to be answered about Southern California Edison's permanent shutdown of its San Onofre nuclear plant, but here are a couple about which there's no doubt.

Social Security should be expanded, not cut

June 5, 2013

Fear-mongers and other critics of Social Security were silenced — momentarily — by the release last week of the annual trustees' report for the programs. The report showed not only that it's looking pretty good in the near term, but in the long term it's more important to the sustenance of millions of Americans than ever before.

Why would Leon Panetta, Marc Morial join for-profit Corinthian?

May 31, 2013

What do Leon Panetta, Marc Morial and Corinthian Colleges have in common? Good question.

Apple's tax tricks give rise to lousy reform ideas

May 28, 2013

Apple Inc.'s success at avoiding billions of dollars in U.S. taxes through some (apparently) legal maneuvers has tax pundits pointing their guns at the corporate tax system. The case has revived numerous hoary cures for the supposed evil of corporate taxes.

Showing the IRS some love after witch hunt

May 25, 2013

You may not have discerned this through the fog and mist of recent weeks, but the Internal Revenue Service is pretty durn good at its job.

Why the medical device tax needs to stay

May 21, 2013

The chief drawback of a law as complex as the Affordable Care Act, the health insurance reform measure passed in 2010, is that it provides self-interested opponents a multitude of places to stick a wedge in and hammer away.

Enron's Jeff Skilling doesn't deserve a break

May 17, 2013

As if you didn't know this already, we're coddling criminals in America.

The real IRS scandal

May 14, 2013

Legislature should pull plug on inept Medical Board of California

April 26, 2013

The time has come to put the Medical Board of California out of its misery.

Chained thinking on the federal deficit

April 23, 2013

Washington's tug of war over the federal budget has many wonders, but the biggest one of all must be the lengths to which politicians and pundits will go to deprive Granny and Grandpa of $30 a month.

What California should learn from the 1-800-GET-THIN saga

April 19, 2013

Today, 19 months after her death, we may finally have a good idea of what killed Paula Rojeski.

State's budget fakery takes a toll on charter schools

April 16, 2013

The CHIME Institute charter school of Woodland Hills would be hard pressed to make ends meet without the help of a program sponsored by the Local Initiatives Support Corp., a New York nonprofit active in underprivileged communities across the nation.

When public infrastructure goes private

April 12, 2013

Consider some of the things that have bound our nation together:

A federal judge takes on 'copyright trolls'

April 9, 2013

There are trolls who live under bridges in fantasy novels. Then there are "copyright trolls."

Does Congress have the heart to avert disability crisis?

April 2, 2013

Bonnie Lee worked for 12 years as a health technician for Kaiser Permanente in Southern California, started her own Web services company, and raised two kids as a single mother in Ontario.

San Francisco all wet in regatta deal

March 29, 2013

Stop me if you've heard this one: Billionaire comes to City Hall. Says that if the city will get behind him, he'll bring a major sports enterprise to town and might even renovate some decrepit municipal infrastructure as part of the bargain. Huge economic boost foreseen. Won't cost taxpayers a dime.

Insurers eager to maintain authority over healthcare premiums

March 26, 2013

While most of us face uncertainty with the rollout of healthcare reform, some insurance companies in California have been feeling their oats lately. Here's how they're responding to Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones' warnings that their latest rate increases are unreasonable: Stuff it, Dave.

How Apple invites facile analysis

March 22, 2013

For those of us not directly invested in Apple, the stock's trajectory over the last six months has been a thrill ride to rival anything you'll find at Magic Mountain.

Is Prime Healthcare settling scores with union?

March 19, 2013

In recent years, Prime Healthcare has built a reputation as a take-no-prisoners company willing to run roughshod over patients and employees alike in its quest for profits — $283 million on revenue of $1.6 billion in 2010, according to a financial statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

NFL may have met its match in AEG owner Phil Anschutz

March 15, 2013

National Football League, meet your worst nightmare: a potential team owner who can call his own shots.

'With Charity for All' looks beyond the glossy appeals

March 15, 2013

Americans just love feeling philanthropic. In any debate over cutting tax breaks in the income tax system, the deduction for charitable donations is always held sacred — even more than that other sacred cow, the mortgage deduction.

Ratepayers get the shaft in San Onofre fiasco

March 12, 2013

There are train wrecks, and there are train wrecks. Then there's San Onofre.

The five biggest lies about entitlement programs

March 8, 2013

Everybody loves lists.

Dow hits a record, but who's reaping the rewards?

March 6, 2013

You've heard the old joke about the stockbroker showing a friend all the luxuries he's bought with the commissions paid by his customers — big house, big car, big yacht. And the friend asks, "But where are the customers' yachts?"

Pro sports leagues aim to put workers' comp out of play

March 1, 2013

One would think that we've learned from bitter experience not to trust a word uttered by our major professional sports leagues.

Deficit hawks' 'generational theft' argument is a sham

February 27, 2013

Here's a phrase you can expect to be hearing a lot in the national debate over fiscal policy, as we move past the "sequester," which is the crisis du jour, and toward the budget cliff/government shutdown deadline looming at the end of March:

Herbalife cozies up with UCLA

February 22, 2013

Herbalife International says it's all about helping people "pursue healthy, active lives." UCLA's Geffen School of Medicine likes to think of itself as being in the forefront of medical research and modern healthcare.

A crucial step toward retirement security for the working class

February 19, 2013

It's amazing, and depressing, when political compromise functions only to throw obstacles in the way of ideas that bring the greatest good to the greatest number of people.

Taking aim at the gun industry

February 16, 2013

We've all heard the saw about California being hostile to industry. Here's an industry that indisputably has grounds for complaint: the gun industry.

Who's messing with whose jobs?

February 12, 2013

Gov. Jerry Brown ought to cut his Texas brother, Rick Perry, a little slack.

Execs off the hook at S&P

February 9, 2013

You may have heard last week about a couple of big lawsuits brought by federal and state governments, alleging that the credit rating agency Standard & Poor's concocted a fraudulent scheme that contributed to trillions of dollars in investment losses and the cratering of pretty much the entire world financial system.

Congress' horse-and-buggy computer laws

February 6, 2013

As martyrs go, Aaron Swartz was an extraordinary example of the breed. A computer programming genius, he had helped develop the social networking site Reddit and became known as a leading advocate for easy and free information sharing on the Web.

Gordon Brush plant owner bristles at red tape tying up expansion

February 2, 2013

Ken Rakusin is frustrated.

Stem cell agency not doing enough to avoid conflict of interest

January 29, 2013

Compromise, defined as the art of getting part of a loaf when the whole loaf is out of reach, comes in many forms. But surely the strangest of all is what comes of trying to compromise with yourself.

A backyard nuclear shelter? Yes, paranoia does sell

January 18, 2013

One sterling quality of American businesses is that they'll try to make money from anything.

Argentina is cautionary tale as U.S. debates debt limit

January 15, 2013

You know all those warnings about how America's addiction to deficit spending is going to make us look like Greece?

California manufacturing jobs fall through the cracks

January 9, 2013

The shutdown of a 102-year-old California manufacturing company points to a major flaw in California's industrial development policy:

Corporations and execs need penalties that hurt

January 5, 2013

If you're concerned about corporate crime, 2012 looked like a pretty successful year for the good guys.

The 'fiscal cliff' con game

January 2, 2013

Whatever the ultimate shape of the "fiscal cliff" solution that has preoccupied all Washington, and a fair swath of the rest of country, in the final days of 2012 and into the new year, Americans of all walks of life should be asking themselves this question: How do we like being conned?

The middle class languishes as the super-rich thrive

December 30, 2012

The good news for the U.S. economy as we enter 2013 is that the election's over. The bad news is that the election's over.

Barry-Wehmiller has a funny way of valuing its employees

December 26, 2012

You'd be hard pressed to find a company that talks more about its "people-centric" management culture than Barry-Wehmiller, a privately owned manufacturer of industrial equipment.

E-book restrictions leave 'buyers' with few rights

December 22, 2012

There's a crass old joke about how you can never buy beer, just rent it. Who would think that the same joke applies to book buying in the digital age?

Proposed cap on federal tax deductions would hit California hard

December 19, 2012

You may be unaware of the local ramifications of one of the proposals currently at play in the danse macabre that passes for fiscal negotiations in Washington.

PUC plan would put trust funds at risk

December 16, 2012

Even the most inattentive 401(k) owner surely understands today that the markets can bite you where it hurts, that promises of long-term investment gains can evaporate in the blink of a short-term crash and that the less understandable an investment scheme is, the more dangerous it is.

When government does things better than private enterprise

December 11, 2012

Budget discussions in Washington these days always seem to deteriorate into arguments over what government is supposed to do for its citizens, and what should be left aside. Is the reach of government strictly defined in the Constitution? Or tradition? And, if so, whose "tradition"?

Election is over, but 'super PACs' remain a threat

December 9, 2012

Just as the devil's finest trick is persuading you that he doesn't exist (according to the poet Baudelaire), the best trick of big-money political donors may be persuading Americans that Citizens United doesn't matter.

Port strike numbers are out to sea

December 5, 2012

Big, round numbers always get people's attention. Numbers such as $1 billion, which has been bandied about as the economic loss per day nationally from the eight-day strike that shut down most of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

Cut Medicare and Social Security? What's the rush?

December 1, 2012

The question that normally comes to mind when someone claims to know the future is why he's out hustling rubes for pennies with his purported clairvoyance, instead of using it to make a fortune and retiring to the South Seas.

Gas price spikes disguise real problems with California market

November 27, 2012

Gasoline price spikes, such as the event that drove the average gallon in California to a stratospheric $4.67 in October, create two types of frustration.

Poor management, not union intransigence, killed Hostess

November 25, 2012

Let's get a few things clear. Hostess didn't fail for any of the reasons you've been fed. It didn't fail because Americans demanded more healthful food than its Twinkies and Ho-Hos snack cakes. It didn't fail because its unions wanted it to die.

Avoiding the 'fiscal cliff' but falling anyway

November 21, 2012

It would be bad enough if the purveyors of economic and fiscal misdirection had done no more than describe a certain event looming at the end of this year as the "fiscal cliff."

Obama will get no rest before second-term challenges arise

November 7, 2012

So, Barack Obama, you've been granted a second term. What do you do for an encore?

Most important issues went missing from presidential campaign

November 7, 2012

You know all that talk about how Superstorm Sandy will revivify efforts in Washington to address climate change? Write it down somewhere, because a few days or weeks from now it will be forgotten.

California's initiative process adds up to a huge waste of money

November 4, 2012

No one today can overlook that it's California's self-indulgent initiative process that's attracting the big political bucks into the state, the way a magnet attracts scrap iron. Year in, year out, the torrent of spending on initiative campaigns swamps the money spent on traditional candidates.

Charles Munger Jr.'s fee claim may chill public interest suits

October 31, 2012

Here's a question about Charles Munger Jr. that's been buried by coverage of his $35 million in campaign spending to pass an anti-union initiative and torpedo Gov. Jerry Brown's tax initiative in next week's election: Has he been maneuvering to bankrupt a public interest activist who had the temerity to mount a court challenge to one of his previous initiatives?

Would Prop. 30 really drive millionaires out of California?

October 28, 2012

A counterpart to the biblical adage that the poor will always be with us is the notion that the rich will always be one tax hike away from leaving us.

Blown away by the attacks on wind-power subsidy

October 23, 2012

To hear business leaders and political candidates talk, proper industrial policy comprises only three elements: a fair tax system, a level playing field and "certainty."

Prop. 33 is billionaire's attempt to manipulate public policy

October 21, 2012

George Joseph must think that the old saw defining insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result doesn't apply to him — or at least that it's amenable to tweaking.

Research firm reaped stem cell funds despite panel's advice

October 17, 2012

StemCells Inc. has a history not much different from those of dozens, even hundreds, of biotech companies all around California.

Using junk science to promote Proposition 37

October 14, 2012

Proposition 37, the ballot measure mandating the labeling of genetically modified food that is also known as the "right to know" initiative, is narrowly running ahead of the opposition, according to the latest opinion polls.

Here's what Obama failed to say during debate

October 5, 2012

The identifying characteristic of progressives' syndrome, which I believe psychiatrists have been following since the Truman administration, is their defensiveness about their own policies when they're challenged by Big Business and other stalwarts of the status quo.

Unmasking the most influential billionaire in U.S. politics

October 2, 2012

Who's the most influential billionaire business figure in national politics?

JPMorgan case shows why energy trading schemes are chronic problem

September 30, 2012

We all know what corporate law firms are for, right? To represent their clients' interest fairly and professionally, of course. To obfuscate, obstruct, delay, misdirect — sometimes that too.

NFL follows corporate America's game plan in referees dispute

September 26, 2012

The one thing about the National Football League on which almost everyone agrees is that it takes its job of providing first-rate entertainment very seriously.

Former Broadcom executive emerges intact from options scandal

September 21, 2012

Almost from its inception, the federal government's options backdating case against executives of Broadcom Corp. reeked of cheap melodrama more than it gleamed with truth-seeking about corporate accounting and corporate pay.

Chick-fil-A president crossed a danger line

August 1, 2012

Despite decades if not centuries of bitter experience, business leaders apparently haven't absorbed the lesson that it's best to let your products speak for themselves and keep your big mouth shut.

Has blazing a trail in solar energy cost California too much?

May 23, 2012

That ray of light you see peeking through all the clouds darkening California's future? That's the sun. More specifically, solar power, in which California is the hands-down national leader.

Book review: 'The Idea Factory' by Jon Gertner

March 25, 2012

For generations of industry research executives, AT&T's Bell Telephone Laboratories served as an inspiration: a warren of youthful scientists and engineers assigned to go where their intellects took them, not especially concerned about serving the corporate bottom line, picking up cartloads of Nobel Prizes along the way. Bell Labs was the model for, among others, Xerox Corp.'s legendary Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, which spun out the personal computer, Windows-style displays, Ethernet and many other advances that delivered their bounty more to society at large than to the parent company.

Inaction by regulators as weight loss surgery allegations mount

January 22, 2012

Several current or former workers for the people behind those 1-800-GET-THIN ads have made allegations about this weight-loss enterprise that government regulators should have gotten to the bottom of long ago. Taken together, the allegations are that its patients are subjected to life-threatening conditions.

Lap-Band maker needs to step up

December 16, 2011

Like most big companies, Irvine pharmaceutical giant Allergan Inc. likes to project the image of an upstanding corporate citizen. Indeed, it devotes several pages of its website to its purported good works.

It's about time that FDA took action against Lap-Band billboards

December 14, 2011

It has taken almost two years, but government regulators finally woke up to the idea that those 1-800-GET-THIN billboards plastered all over Southland freeways may be dangerous to your health.

Occupy Wall Street shifts from protest to policy phase

October 12, 2011

How do you know when a protest movement is starting to scare the pants off the establishment?

Regional investment bank aims for a reprise

May 18, 2011

Jim Freedman and his partners have been here before.

Stench of CalPERS' financial scandal lingers

March 18, 2011

Whether we're talking about corporate affairs or home ec, it's a fundamental fact that housecleaning doesn't work unless it's thorough. Leave the smallest task undone, and the rats and bugs come swarming back.

Book review: 'Common as Air' by Lewis Hyde

October 31, 2010

Common as Air

Coffeepot maker vents about doing business in California

July 30, 2009

Wilbur D.Curtis invented the globular glass coffeepot, that staple of coffee counters everywhere, in 1940. Since then his son and grandsons have turned Wilbur Curtis Co. into a manufacturing concern that earns revenue approaching $100 million by turning out commercial coffee brewing equipment from a sprawling factory in Montebello.

CalPERS appears to be a willing victim

July 27, 2009

Students of the fine art of pointing fingers know that the key thing is to not make yourself look like an idiot in the process.

File California tax system revision effort under flawed

July 20, 2009

In these budget-crisis days, when California citizens showing true public spirit are thin on the ground, I propose a tip of the hat to Gerald L. Parsky.

It's time to close a big tax loophole for businesses

July 13, 2009

Of all the ways in which California residents have slit their fiscal throats over the last 30 years, surely the most inexplicable is the bestowal of a gaping tax loophole on commercial and industrial property owners.

Mercury General using guise of benevolence to assault Prop. 103

July 2, 2009

The art of setting automobile insurance rates is incomprehensible to most of us civilians. Liability coverage, comprehensive insurance, assigned risk pools, discounts, surcharges . . . the list goes on. Just try to figure out how your carrier arrived at the figure at the bottom of your itemized bill -- I know nuclear physicists who can't do that math.

A California tax on oil drilling? Why not?

June 15, 2009

The most persistent misconception about Californians is that we hate to raise taxes. The truth is that we adore raising taxes -- as long as someone else is paying, that is.

In-N-Out: Can perfection survive?

May 7, 2009

My life as a fast-food consumer pretty much ended the moment my kids became old enough to drive themselves to the nearest hamburger stand.

Apple's condition linked to Steve Jobs' health

January 5, 2009

Some important questions can't be asked without sounding crass and insensitive. But there's no way around asking this one that's on everybody's mind, so here goes: