Hackerama shares your pain, but keeps their pay

When are the layoffs going to begin in the state’s hackeramas like Massport and the University of Massachusetts?

I mean, fair’s fair, isn’t it? If sales clerks in strip malls and waitresses and line cooks who are making short money doing real jobs are going to end up broke and collecting unemployment, what about all the overpaid hacks on the state payroll who are being given what amounts to yet another paid vacation?

The commonwealth has a “rainy day fund” stuffed with billions of dollars for alleged emergencies. This is what the kleptocrats on Beacon Hill will be dipping into as tax revenues crater to keep the good times rolling for their friends and relatives on the public dole.

The governor, Tall Deval, hasn’t totally shut down the Dreaded Private Sector yet, but things are moving into that direction. Next door, in New York, Gov. Andrew “Baby Doc” Cuomo has already ordered the closure of all “non-essential” businesses.

If it’s your business, or you’re getting a paycheck from one, you are not likely to consider the enterprise “non-essential.”

UMass, on the other hand. …

Two headlines from Satuday’s Wall Street Journal: “Downturn Could Cost 5 Million Jobs,” and “Low Wage Workers Face Brunt of Coronavirus Crisis.”

Massport, on the other hand. …

Of course no police or firefighters or EMTs or hospital personnel should face the prospect of losing their jobs. Obviously they are “essential.”

But most of the public sector is anything but. Let’s start with UMass. It’s shut down, for all practical purposes. Check out the UMass salaries on the Herald website. Just scroll down the first thousand or so, say, to the $200,000 level. Tell me who’s more essential to anyone’s life — the UMass “staff administrator” making $252,591 a year, or the single mom handling take-out at your favorite fast-food hamburger joint.

Who has a job affecting more people’s lives — your laid-off local dental hygienist, or UMass’ “assistant to the president” who makes $245,364.91?

A friend of mine flew out of Logan Airport Friday night to West Palm. He was one of four passengers on the flight. I don’t think Massport is collecting a lot of their customary exorbitant “fees” this weekend.

So when is Massport going to start its reductions-in-force (RIFs), like everybody in the Dreaded Private Sector?

As I mentioned here last week, Massport now has a “deputy director, state affairs and community affairs,” for $130,000 a year, as well as a “deputy director, community relations and federal affairs,” for $129,375 a year.

Do you think either of those two legacy hacks is worried about having to lift their snouts from the trough?

Of course not. They’ll be “telecommuting,” wink wink nudge nudge.

The chairwoman of Massport, an old Mitt Romney hack, makes $360,000, and the guy she beat out for the job got a $311,000-a-year consolation sinecure.

We all get why the retail and hospitality industries have to fire people — if there’s no revenue coming in, the owners can’t pay the workers, the vendors, the landlords or the banks, not to mention themselves.

The politicians always lecture us that we’re all in this together, until something like this happens, when we find out we’re not, actually. If my daughter has her hours cut back because nobody’s walking through the doors of the business she works at, what about the payroll Charlies at the courthouses?

Nobody’s walking through those courthouse doors either.

House Speaker Bob DeLeo had no problems with shutting down vaping sales last year and throwing hundreds out of work until the taxes were raised to 75%. Now, he wants to jack up the state’s gasoline taxes by a nickel (a bargain compared to Tall Deval’s plan to raise them 26 cents per gallon).

So why doesn’t the unindicted co-conspirator tighten his 50-inch belt for a change — how about an unpaid furlough for DeLeo’s $142,515-a-year godson in the now-not-busy-at-all hack-infested Probation Department? And maybe the godson can take along the college-dropout wife of DeLeo lieutenant Tom Petrolati, who makes $134,786 a year for doing … whatever.

On Friday night, with taxpayers sweating the economic dislocations that are coming our way, the hackerama officially announced what we told you weeks ago — none of the crooked Massachusetts state troopers are going to lose their pensions just because they embezzled a few hundred thousand dollars from the taxpayers.

Fourteen of them are already retired. These greedy, crooked cops suffered no consequences for their crimes — they haven’t even had to make restitution for the money they stole — and now their kisses in the mail range from $69,000 to $106,000 a year.

A failed candidate for president used to say that there were “two Americas.” He was right, just not in the way he meant it.

In one America, the hacks are planning how they’re going to enjoy this latest paid vacation. In the other America, people who actually keep the nation running are wondering how they’re going to put food on the table … and pay for the pensions of the crooked state police.