LA violence halts Democrats’ move to middle

martes, 10 de junio de 2025

State and city leaders blame Trump View in browser Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is...
State and city leaders blame Trump
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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is taking questions today in Congress about the cost of deploying troops against protesters in Los Angeles. Businessweek Editor Brad Stone writes that there's also a political price to be paid, especially for California Democrats who have been moving toward the middle. Plus: Grab a waffle and read about Hampton Inn's rise, and a surprisingly juicy battle between two multibillion-dollar software vendors.

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California today is a tinderbox. Over the past five days, demonstrations have gripped downtown Los Angeles as protesters object to a sweep of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids on local immigrant communities and worksites. Over the weekend, President Donald Trump directed 2,000 National Guard troops to the city; then, on Tuesday, 700 members of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines arrived. Amid the fog of tear gas, rubber bullets and flash-bang grenades, some protesters have engaged in violence and vandalism, and scores have been arrested.

In another era, this would've felt epochal, the kind of moment that's destined for history books and breathless pop hymns. In the fifth month of Trump's chaotic second term, it kind of feels like just another Tuesday.

Members of the Trump administration have used social media to propagate a searing image from the unrest: a shirtless, masked demonstrator, standing on a battered car and waving a Mexican flag, flames of chaos in the background. It's a useful image for Trump, suggesting a California captured by immigrants and the extreme left and descending into lawlessness.

Protesters on Sunday in Los Angeles. Photographer: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg

The irony—and there's always rich irony these days—is that it's not an accurate reflection of California's current politics, which if anything have moved toward the center.

The shift is visible everywhere. Governor Gavin Newsom—who announced plans on Monday to sue the federal government after a barrage of threats from Trump and his border czar, Tom Homan, to have Newsom arrested—has over the past few months vowed to cut health care for undocumented immigrants, spoken out against trans athletes in girls' sports and signaled the arrival of fiscal austerity in dealing with the state's $12 billion budget deficit.

In LA, approval ratings for left-leaning Mayor Karen Bass have sunk since January's wildfires, while her more moderate onetime and potentially future rival, billionaire developer Rick Caruso, polls considerably better.

Nowhere is the California Democratic Party's move to moderation more evident than in my hometown, San Francisco. Mayor Daniel Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss & Co. fortune who took office in January, has presided over the first measurable increase of optimism since the city's dismal run during the Covid-19 pandemic. "We have a long way to go, but I'm telling you, it's going to happen. San Francisco, we are on our way back," Lurie told me last Thursday in an onstage interview at the Bloomberg Technology Summit.

Lurie on Thursday at the Tech Summit. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

San Francisco has been spared from the worst of the unrest—so far. On Sunday, protesters gathered near an ICE building downtown and marched peacefully through the streets. But by the end of the night, about 150 people had been arrested and two police officers injured. In a news conference Monday morning, Lurie said he had no tolerance for violence, then tried to lay the blame at the feet of the Trump administration without naming the president at all. "The tactics being used across the country to target immigrant communities are meant to instill fear," he said. "They make people afraid to go to work and send their kids to school. That all makes our city less safe."

In our interview at the Tech Summit, Lurie exemplified the state's new center-left politics. He said he wants to see construction cranes "all over the place" and plans to clean up city streets, address profligate public drug use and engage the tech and business communities in rebuilding. "I tell everybody we are open for business," he said, almost audibly ripping a page from the Democrats' so-called abundance agenda.

He also touted some upcoming public entertainment—a Zach Bryan concert in Golden Gate Park and a three-day Grateful Dead reunion. California's protests over ICE, which seem almost fatefully destined to grow in size and severity, could end up interfering with that summer of fun. It's probably no accident: By deploying the US military to patrol city streets, Trump aims to provoke a blue state that has consistently opposed him and to paint moderate Democrats like Lurie and Newsom into a dangerous political corner.

In Brief

Hampton Inn Excels at Being OK

At a location in Farmington, New Mexico, the white bedspreads are meant to show
any dirt at a glance. Photographer: Ramsay de Give for Bloomberg Businessweek

Shortly before 6 a.m., early risers stalk the cafeteria at the Hampton Inn & Suites in El Segundo, California, waiting for the breakfast buffet to open. At the appointed hour, proteins and starches spin out in combinations that change slightly but perceptibly from day to day. On a Tuesday in March, it's egg white frittatas, Yukon gold potatoes and maple sausage; the next day, it's scrambled eggs, red potatoes and chicken sausage. There are yogurts and hand fruit scattered about for the truly health-conscious, and a drawer of bite-size lemon scones for those who are merely playing at it. The key constant is the tub of Hampton's malted vanilla waffle batter. In a now-familiar ritual, guests push a plastic tab to extrude the mix into a paper cup, drizzle it over a waffle iron, then flip the handle and watch the seconds tick down on a digital timer. As with almost everything at Hampton, the process has been rigorously engineered. Those little paper cups of batter are what peak hotel performance looks like.

Last year, Hampton Inns around the world cooked up more than 2 million gallons of batter, or about 30 million waffles. With all due respect, they're not great. Nor is the coffee or the orange juice, the bananas or the convection-oven eggs. What all these things are, crucially, is free to lodgers. It costs a US Hampton franchisee less than $5 per occupied room to furnish this cornucopia, but to a family of four, the perceived value is closer to $50, or roughly one-third of the average cost of a nightly stay. That math has helped power Hampton Inn's unlikely rise to become the world's largest lodging brand, with almost 350,000 rooms spread across 43 countries. Hampton sold almost 90 million room nights last year, according to Bloomberg estimates, a few million more than its closest competitor, Holiday Inn Express. That helped it generate nearly $12 billion in room revenue, dwarfing that of the industry's luxury leaders.

The chain's story is a triumph of Wall Street dealmakers, corporate tastemakers and immigrant entrepreneurs, writes Patrick Clark. And it's growing: American Mid: Hampton Inn's Good-Enough Formula for World Domination

Espionage Accusations at Rival HR Startups

Illustration: Andrea Chronopoulos for Bloomberg Businessweek

On a cold March day in Dublin, Keith O'Brien looked down at his phone, raised an ax and smashed the device, again and again.

A day earlier—a day O'Brien would later describe in sworn testimony as one of the darkest of his life—a corporate lawyer had given him the legally dubious advice to throw the phone into one of Dublin's canals. Instead he crushed it beyond recovery, gathered the shards and flushed them down the drain at his mother-in-law's house.

Before all this, O'Brien was a regular payroll compliance manager at Rippling, a $17 billion startup that makes software for human resources departments. His professional headshot shows a man with a round face and short gray hair. He'd mentored other professionals in the field and appeared on trade podcasts, geeking out about the intricacies of global payroll systems in a lilting Irish accent. In one episode, O'Brien earnestly proclaimed he "enjoyed the complexities and challenges that came with payroll." In another he warned his peers to be on the lookout for outsiders trying to steal confidential information.

O'Brien's outwardly unremarkable professional existence ended on March 17. That was the day Rippling sued its biggest rival, a $12 billion startup named Deel Inc. Rippling, whose full name is People Center Inc., accused Deel's chief executive officer, Alex Bouaziz, of paying an unnamed Rippling employee to spy on his colleagues. According to the lawsuit, the double agent conducted thousands of searches for sensitive information on Rippling's internal messaging system, then passed along details about pricing and customer targets that would give Deel a competitive edge.

As Kate Clark and Ellen Huet write, things only escalated from there: The Spying Scandal Rocking the World of HR Software

Summer Pay

$28.85
That's the hourly wage at the top of the range for software engineering interns, according to research from the job site ZipRecruiter. Architecture and data analysis roles are also among the most lucrative for interns this year.

Lula's Struggles 

"We don't fear retaliation. It's impossible for a country the size of Brazil to fear retaliation. Trump can do what he thinks is good for the US, and we'll do what we think we have to do for Brazil."
 Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva
President of Brazil
High inflation and economic discontent are hammering the Brazilian leader's approval. Allies say the real problem is a 79-year-old president who's stuck in the past.

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