In a recent column about the ineptitude and waste in the Los Angeles homeless industry run by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), I wrote that one can only imagine what is going on at the state level given the findings from the local level. It turns out to be absolutely correct and worse than we thought.
The further the government gets from the voters the less responsive they are, and the accessibility to the elected officials becomes ever lower. With the virtual disappearance of the Sacramento Bee and the shrinking of other newspapers’ bureaus in Sacramento, investigation into the state government has shrunk significantly. Add to that the state government’s one-party control with the buddy-buddy attitude of their friends in the press, we knew that there had to be mischief going down from our elected officials that was unreported.
Ricardo Lara was elected Insurance Commissioner in 2018. He has essentially been involved in California government his entire career doing what many career governistas do – move their way up the ladder through many positions. He worked as a staffer for a few powerful members of the California State Assembly before running himself in 2008 for the State Assembly.
That campaign failed, but he ran again in 2010. He won overwhelmingly in our “one-party” state. He did not sit still very long as a newly redrawn State Senate seat became open. He won that seat in 2012 and then won re-election in 2016. Lara took aim at his secondary cause by running for state insurance commissioner in 2018 and won again in our one-party state.
Despite lying to the people of California about not taking contributions from insurance companies during his 2018 campaign, the one-party state reelected him in 2022 with 60% of the vote.
He was now primed to accomplish his primary goal – bilking the people of California. He had already achieved his apparent primary goal of destroying the insurance market in California. As you can see from his long career as a governista in California, he had zero experience in the insurance industry – not to mention with economics. No qualifications. During his term, insurance companies were fleeing the state even before the Palisades and Altadena fires.
It has been discovered that Lara hasn’t really done anything about the seven significant insurance carriers leaving California because he found out his true mission in life – world traveler. He has traveled to 15 different countries on the California taxpayers’ tab.
A local TV station decided to do some investigative reporting. They obtained hundreds of public records. They stated they found at least 46 international and cross-country trips. They attempted for months to find out the business purpose of the trips, but stated “Lara’s staff has been unable to identify the business purpose for nearly all of them.”
They found he traveled to Paris, Bogota, Bermuda, Uruguay, Hawaii, Washington DC, Florida, Toronto, Singapore, Cape Town, Dublin, Costa Rica, Chile, Egypt, Tokyo, Glasgow, and Dubai. And multiple trips across the U.S. If he had a brain, he could have travelled to Switzerland to meet with reinsurance companies. On the other hand, he avoided Rome so we could not argue he fiddled while the Palisades was burning.
Lara missed many Assembly and Senate hearings. He did argue that he went to Bermuda twice because that is where many reinsurance companies are located. I guess I should have used that argument to deduct my trip to Bermuda.
Other than one TV station, the only press I could find that covered this matter is the California Globe.
Now it has been discovered that Lara has been spending a lot on stuffing his face with expensive meals to the tune of at least $30,000. At least this time it was not taxpayer money; it was pure graft. The meals were funded from a campaign account for Lt. Governor even though he has never filed any papers seeking that particular office.
Just like it was stated in my previous column, if someone spent time investigating what was going on in Sacramento, extensive graft and fraud would easily be discovered. We have a government where the elected officials have no real oversight and don’t care what the political opposition says because they are powerless. Elected officials saw Julie Su oversee $30 billion of fraudulent unemployment payments and then get promoted to be U.S. Secretary of Labor.
Lara is just the tip, and it is really an iceberg. Hopefully, this time people will wake up. Another column will be coming your way soon.
