Dr. Keith Richman represented the 38th district of the California State Assembly. He is infamous for a VERY expensive website where he does something that in America has always been considered off limits--publicly publishing the retirement salaries of elderly Americans online.
Richman did not pay for the site himself. He found anonymous deep pocket donors for that. His website financing is as unethical and creepy as the website itself.
He was also one of the lockstep Sacramento Republicans who cheerfully voted to bankrupt the state, put a college education out of the financial reach of a majority of California high school students, and cut back services for the least well off Californians--school children, the elderly, the ill, and the poor.
He consistently voted against forcing major corporations, especially the oil industry, to pay their fair share for the running the state.
Even Sarah Palin believed in and signed a major tax on companies pulling oil out of Alaskan soil. Keith Richman refused to allow even a fraction of that tax on the oil companies sucking oil out of our good California soil.
Our state is the third leading oil producing state out of all fifty and the only one where the oil companies get a free pass*, thanks in part to Keith Richman.
As a well paid physician I guess he could not relate to the poor. As a lock step Republican he made the poor, the elderly and the ill even more sorry that they were born. But his true moral monstrosity was the publishing of the retirement income of elderly Californians, who had given the productive part of their lives in service of our fine state.
How many of these elderly will be taken advantage of by confidence men who now know EXACTLY what their incomes are? Richman did not care.
Richman and other monsters (the ones who funded his website) like him would be outraged if their incomes were on-line. They as a group are basically bullies and moral cowards whose currency is hypocrisy. They feel 'righteous' when they abuse those weaker themselves, but are outraged if someone treats them the same way.
California is better off today than it was last Friday. See Richman's obituary here.
*The oil companies get to use our aging California infrastructure of roads, water, etc. as well as benefit from police and fire protection, but pay in taxes less than it cost the state to provide those services to them, let alone the costs of their despoiling of the good California land they leave stained with oil and blighted with broken down oil pumps.
The oil companies dismiss this once beautiful California land as 'oil fields' as though that was all the land was good for.
I have seen beautiful, potentially very productive agricultural land or wild life habitat turned into wasteland. You can to just drive north from Bakersfield on Highway 65.
Outside the desolation of the oil fields that same land, some with topsoil over one hundred feet deep, is the most productive agricultural land in the world. The top soil is so deep and rich because it has been washed down from the Sierra Nevada over thousands of years--layer by layer--one new layer every year.
The east side of the San Joaquin Valley has soil and a climate that is the best in the world. Virtually any fruit or nut tree, or any other crop can be grown there and is, except where the oil fields are. There the soil is destroyed and will stay that way for centuries after the last drop of oil is sucked out.
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