In these days of Red versus Blue, when every other story regionally and nationally is about Democratic politicians fighting Republicans, it's often hard to realize that the pols on both sides of the aisle do seem to be agreeing more and more on one thing. The kiddies in D.C. and Olympia appear united in trying to hide their actions from the voting public, which pays their salaries and gives them whatever prestige they have.
Down in Olympia, Sen. Bob Oke, a retired Navy officer and longtime Port Orchard Republican representative, has co-sponsored Senate Bill 5736, which would grant attorney-client privileges to legislators as they talk policy with their legal advisors here in Washington state.
In a town full of bad ideas, where our elected part-time representatives grovel almost 24/7 before the Almighty Dollar, Oke's proposal bakes the cake and applies the icing to the current craze for secrecy among those we hire to allegedly work for us in government.
These people should be televised throughout their entire legislative session, even if most of our benumbed and ever more dumbed-down citizenry will continue watching Oprah and Judge Judy instead of tuning in to the Legislative Follies.
There is nothing, other than the bathroom and the bedroom, we shouldn't know about the boys and girls in Olympia.
The gall of those we have elected to "serve" us knows no bounds, from our corpulent, allegedly Democratic mayor, running roughshod over community in his rush to toady to the super-wealthy, all the way up to our allegedly Conservative, always-a-failure (until he got on the public teat) president in Washington, D.C.
They seem to have come to an agreement that we the people are an impediment to good government, not the reason for it in the first place.
Of course, it's hard to blame Oke, a nice man whose career in state politics hasn't been the stuff of head-lines, or fodder for columnists. Oke probably believes that he and his cronies need peace and quiet while cutting up the state's diminishing revenues and parceling it all out to the folks back home in their districts.
But it is a bad idea. Government business is our business, not the private preserve of a few elected officials and their corporate sponsors.
The climate of the country nationally also probably encouraged Oke's bad idea. Ever since 9/11, our boys and girls in government have been protecting us from ourselves by trying to make everything, not just matters of national security, top secret.
The nation's Freedom of Information Act is being transformed and gutted in the alleged name of national security.
A recent Associated Press news feature by Robert Tanner, published in The Seattle Times and scores of other papers, documented instance after instance where private citizens requesting information that had nothing to do with terrorism were turned down. National security was the reason invoked in almost all of these instances, which concerned things like flood studies, dam failures, natural-gas terminals and even suburban gas pipeline plans.
The saddest thing about all this is that once again the United States, the nation that in the '90s opened up its secret files and showed the world how freedom is managed, has taken a hard turn toward repression and secrecy.
Since 9/11, thousands of documents have been removed from the public view, according to freedom-of-information watchdog groups.
A free society isn't built on secrecy. Nothing except legitimate matters of national security should be hidden from the public view. Unless I've missed something, our leaders and representatives are not gifted with the Divine Rights of Kings and Queens.
I've written here before about the way time passing seems to speed up as you get older. I never thought I'd be thinking about retirement, much less worrying about it. But there you are. It won't be all that long before I'll be eligible to collect Social Security. I don't feel guilt about this; I've been paying in since I started working for wages as a wet-behind-the-ears pup in 1963.
I vehemently don't want George W. and his voodoo-economics boy, old out-of-touch Al Greenspan, getting their greedy fingers all over my pennies. The government promised those of us who came of age under Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson that we could count on Social Security.
But of course the "experts" are out in force, telling us (after plenty of secret meetings) what's good for us.
The trouble is, most of the experts are feeding at the public trough and want to continue to do so. That makes it hard for us to get good information.
But there are a few folks doing the job of trying to get the information out.
Comptroller General David Walker, a nonpartisan government official who heads the Government Accountability Office, is no flaming radical. He was ordered to prepare a report on Social Security for the Congress.
In a nutshell, here's what he said to Congress last week, according to Knight Ridder Newspapers' Steven Thomma: "Social Security does not face an immediate crisis. They [pri-vate investment accounts, the Bush proposal] wouldn't shore up the system if they were carved out from current Social Security taxes and accompanied by no other changes."
In fact, Walker said that by them-selves private accounts would "exacer-bate" Social Security's problems.
Private accounts will enrich those working in the investment fields. It will do nothing for those of us who are counting on Social Security. The money in Social Security belongs to those who earned it, not the boys at Enron and the other corporations full of "players" getting rich on the backs of the workers and the stockholders.
Read today's business page in the Times or the P-I if you fear this columnist is being overly cynical. It doesn't matter what day it is, or which newspaper you read, for that matter. Some new CEO, who I'm sure supports the privatization of Social Security, is being indicted as we sit here worrying about what our own governments - national, region-al and local - will do to us next.
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