A man for all seasons. Niagara Falls Mayor Paul Dyster sent out a press release to the local media (except the Reporter) to announce that there were “warming centers” for homeless people – which while taking credit in the press, he had, as far as we could determine, little to do with their establishment as refuges for homeless people.
Unless of course you consider Dyster’s policies as having helped create more homelessness in the city.
We are waiting for the photo of Dyster ushering a homeless person in from the cold.
But whatever the reason and whatever the season, Dyster is always willing to be part of any photo op that helps reveal the man he is to his people – which incidentally are the highest taxed, most crime afflicted, impoverished folks in New York State. This would be lamentable in any city, but when you consider this city is a tourist town with eight million tourists coming (with money in their pockets) per year and with the world’s greatest natural hydropower, you have to wonder how Dyster managed to lead the city into such enduring poverty.
And if that was not enough, every year Dyster got between $15 and $20 million from Albany via the Seneca Nation for their slot machine monopoly here (about $200 million total). Never before has a small town had so much and kept so little.
Of course, none of this incredible poverty amid riches would be possible without Dyster being a puppet to Albany and serving the governor’s interests ahead of the city’s interest.
But while he has let the city slip into deep decline, Dyster appears frequently as the clown about town.
Mayor Dyster has only one condition for giving away public money to musical promoters for profit – that he appears onstage. Here the good Mayor enjoys appearing for the Blues Fest, which is poetic irony since the people of the city have long been feeling (if not singing) the blues. That overburdened taxpayers should be further burdened with paying for some promoter’s blues event is just the sort of folly that makes Dyster the clown prince of Niagara Falls.
Here the affable Mayor Paul Dyster appears on stage again. The Reporter has roughly calculated that every time Dyster appears onstage it costs taxpayers, on average, $10,000. And this is unjust in a poverty town. After all, if people want to see concerts, they should pay for it themselves. Simple old fashioned American enterprise-driven virtue. The idea of forcing you to pay for someone else’s concert is about as savage an idea that anyone could ever come up with. If I robbed you at gunpoint and made you buy a ticket for somebody else to go to a blues concert you’d think me a savage. But if government (which gets its money solely by taking it by force from the people through something called taxation) forces some people to pay for free concerts for others, the media celebrates the achievement and politicians rejoice in front of the cameras. Someday this will be seen as the savagery it really is. For it is the poor and the struggling middle class who suffer most from high taxes. The poor suffer from a lack of jobs and higher rents and smaller paychecks when they can find work and the middle class shoulder the disproportionate burden as their children are deprived of hard earned luxuries (like going to concerts). Taxpayer money is spent on frivolous nonessential things like concerts, subsidized hotels for millionaire developers and glorious train stations that nobody uses which will cost taxpayers millions in hidden costs, so that Dyster can pose in front of cameras and say ‘I got this done. Me – I built you a train station. Me folks.’
