LETTERS: THOSE SECRET PENSIONS

To the editor:

At the request of several people, I write the following:

Once upon a time, the servant became the master, and the master became the servant. It happened in Jefferson City. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, after two years of legal battles they finally hacked their way into the almost impenetrable walls of 40 years of secrecy constructed carefully by our trusted officials to hid from us forever the size of their retirements and the way they personally tailored them.

The state has no money. It's the people's money. And when our trustees loot it or allow it to be looted, they all should go to jail. No exceptions.

To cite one of their many outrageous pensions they concocted, shrouded in the murky shadows of secrecy: Janice Noland, a former four-year probate judge, paid a one-time $1,868 and got her pension raised $18,985 a year for the rest of her life. Noland and all those others (my friends call them leeches) are taking that which they did not earn and what we do not owe them. One gentleman of some years said, "They all should be horse whipped and run out of Missouri." Everyone in a crowded coffee shop said, Amen.

Secrecy in government breeds corruption, and in Jefferson City they waded knee deep in their own hidden muck. We should have smelled the stench long ago. The odor reaches all the way to Sikeston. I have a story of my own about a bureaucracy. I will tell it when the time is right, and that should be soon.

Judicial pensions have tripled in 10 years, and that's like a snowball rolling down the mountainside. If we taxpayers don't stop it soon, it will crush us and our children and their children.

Let's face it, people no longer like their government. Extremists are resorting to acts of terrorism, blowing up federal buildings and courthouse. Even in Sikeston and other towns, government agencies are locking their doors in the daytime. Is anyone out there in government listening?

Terrorism is not the way, and the ballot box is not working. How do we, the honest, fair, peaceful people, get control of our government back? We can start by demanding they cancel and roll back all those unscrupulous laws they made, and make the recipients refund their ill-gotten gains plus interest plus a penalty. Fire the bureaucrats who were involved, and figure out a way to impeach and imprison the elected officials who legalized illegal looting of the people's treasury in secrecy. There is a way.

But we must not let those bad apple spoil the image of many dedicated state workers. I know some of them.

W.T. WOODS

Bertrand