Public health alert: There has been an outbreak of an infectious disease in multiple public buildings in Massachusetts this week.
Kleptomania.
It’s striking down payroll patriots of every stripe – crooked state troopers, sticky-fingered city councilors, even a shifty-eyed mayor who talks out of the corner of his mouth.
By Sunday, the outbreak of public-sector kleptomania will be a full-blown crisis, as hundreds of tax-fattened hyenas in black robes plunge their snouts into the public trough for their fourth – that’s right, fourth – pay raise of $6250 in the last 18 months.
It is written that the good men do is oft interred with their bones, but that the evil lives on.
Not that disgraced ex-Senate president Stanley Rosenberg ever did anything than stuff his own pockets with millions of taxpayer dollars during his 40 years of gainful non-employment. But Rosenberg’s even greater evil lives on in the legacy of Sunday’s final round of obscene pay increases for the state’s hack judges (and court clerks).
You may recall how Stanley, a 68-year-old gay, was besotted with his male intern, now 30-year-old Byron Hefner, a Pee Wee Herman lookalike. So Rosenberg decided to, uh, marry this lad young enough to be his grandson. And for Pee Wee’s dowry, Stanley jacked up his own pay to $170,000 a year – supposedly setting Pee Wee up for perhaps 40-plus years of survivor’s pension benefits, otherwise known as the kiss in the mail.
The only problem was, if Rosenberg had merely hiked the pay of himself and his fellow legislators, those pay increases would have surely been repealed by the taxpayers via a referendum question, as they have been in the past.
As dim as he was, greedy Rosenberg understood that if he attached his own heist to a pay raise for the corrupt clowns in the state judiciary, the voters couldn’t do anything about it. And so, the seeds of the current kleptomania epidemic were planted.
In a fairy tale, Stanley and Pee Wee would have lived happily ever after, on the backs of those of us who actually work for a living.
Alas, Pee Wee has since been indicted – multiple counts of sexual assault, criminal lewdness and distributing pornography. The strange couple is now estranged, and Rosenberg got a one-way ticket down the State House steps to Palookaville.
But the judicial pay raises live on.
On Jan. 1 of last year, the district court judges got a $6250 pay raise from $159,694. As of Sunday, those same hack bleeding-heart judges – the likes of Touchy Feeley, Mark Coven and Ali Bibaud’s dad – will be making $184,694 a year.
It’s one thing to feed at the trough, as the old saying goes, but this is licking the plate.
The chief justice of the SJC will be up to $206,239, associate SJC justices $200,984. The hacks on the appeals court will be up to $190,087. Clerk-magistrates are up to $155,083.
Meanwhile, the outbreak of kleptomania has spread into the Executive Office of Public Safety, and then down the hill to City Hall, where the City Council voted 11-2 Wednesday to hand themselves $4,000 pay raises. (Their previous salary was $99,500 because, the joke goes, the Boston City Council is always on sale.)
Oddly, the two councilors voting against the pay raise are Ayanna Pressley and Josh Zakim, both of whom happen to be running in the September primaries. Funny coincidence, huh?
Then there’s Annissa Essaibi George, the Sarah Huckabee Sanders lookalike. She voted for the payraise, natch, and then had the gall to mention the most recent Council pay raise, $12,000 back in 2015.
“I benefitted from that raise,” she said, “although I was very vocally opposed to it.”
Must be nice, to be vocally opposed to something and yet benefit from it at the same time.
I’m thinking about putting out a new tee shirt, with proceeds to go to the American Kleptomania Foundation.
“I beat kleptomania – I got a real job!”