Taxpayer-funded propaganda gets very expensive under Cuomo

BY MIKE MADIGAN

Governor Andrew Cuomo has been accused of using taxpayer dollars to fund propaganda that promotes his administration, perhaps most infamously, in the form of hundreds of millions of dollars in StartUp NY advertising buys at friendly media outlets, where they buy into what is being fed to them.

Now, here is yet another recent example of the Governor’s State-funded propaganda. Did you not ever wonder why these “News” organizations report and promote, without question, Cuomo’s schemes – even typically conservative radio stations?

Fact: We are in the second year of a $29M two year Skyway renovation project that extends its life for 20 years.

Yes, Twenty-Nine Million Dollars — and justified based on structural repairs that will last twenty years.

When the Governor was in town yesterday he didn’t mention the ongoing construction project because it did not fit the narrative — it would expose the fraud. Cuomo instead acted as the Ringleader of a media circus where he claimed he intends to replace the Skyway and his bought and paid for media obediently and excitedly reported it as fact.

Cuomo announced that he is giving away another $100,000 of our tax dollars for a design contest to replace or repurpose the Skyway.

I guess if you can pretend to not know that we are smack dab in the middle of a $29M investment to extend the life of the Skyway for twenty years — then you can believe Cuomo intends to replace the Skyway.

Ahh um ahh – really, really?

Perhaps there are some hapless Western New Yorkers who believed the $750 million Buffalo Billion fraud scheme was ever going to result in landing 3,500 ‘high-paying, green-energy’ jobs that Cuomo had promised.

It’s not as if he did this once, and shame on him.

No, this is a pattern and practice of criminality — a racket master who knows how to steal votes from the poor and money from the rich by telling them, through his paid for media outlets, anything they want to hear.

Where is that ‘high-tech’ IBM computing center and the 500 jobs at Paul Ciminelli‘s Fountain Plaza that we were promised? Or the biotech startup, for which the State purchased the top floor of Lou Ciminelli‘s Conventus project? Or Athenex, that drug manufacturing plant that was to adorn the Dunkirk landscape.

The shame is certainly on us.

Many of the architects of this fraud and other pay-to-play schemes are going to prison. Incredibly, The Buffalo News continues to provide cover for Cuomo and to propagandize on his behalf; with little to no concern for more than a billion dollars in wasted resources.

Hello, hello – all of those politico-enablers surrounding Cuomo at his press conference lacked any shame at all: Grand Island’s Jim Sharpe, the 26th district’s Brian Higgins, and of course the propagandists at The Buffalo News.

At what point do New York taxpayers say enough is enough — and insist that this behavior must no longer be tolerated. It must be called out and stopped.