I believe Cuomo when he made this claim of being a tea partier. Some one should tell Cuomo that New York kids need an education not cookies and tea. Please tell him that the homeless and battered women need housing not American Tea. Wake this man out of his tea party slumber and demand that he recognizes that New Yorkers need jobs, single payer health care, affordable mass transit, money for family farms and small businesses.

Wake him! Shake him! Don't let him sleep too late. He must be told that New York needs a sane energy policy that ends hydrofracking before our water supply becomes filthy syrup for his dainty tea cup.

Stop Cuomo from partying and sleep walking with his cup of hot tea.That hot tea is dripping and spilling all over the place burning a hole in the funds needed to close the gap in the endangered budgets for fire departments.

In 1967, Dr Martin L. King, the primary spokesperson for the civil rights and peace struggle in the USA, released a new book entitled, Where Do We Go From Here: Community or Chaos. King proposed that either America would redefine and enhance its human values making choices to reconstruct and rebuild Black and urban communities or enter and age of Chaos.

Among Dr. King's Choices was a proposal that America should either provide employment for all of its workers or a guaranteed annual income. King proposed full time meaningful work with a living wage. The music of the King movement said it best, "Listen here to me Mr. LBJ no more full time work for no part time pay."

On the issue of national health, King called for socialized medicine guaranteeing every resident of the nation government sponsored health care. In Kings, view, It was a shame that the richest nation on earth did not provide health care for all of its citizens.

With the violent silencing of the voice of the great drum major for human justice and peace in 1968 came an unexpected outcry from Black and poor in urban communities. Political eruptions blazed across the nation. Blacks and poor in more than three hundred cities and towns showed their disapproval using the match as a potent weapon. For days flames and smoke lit the day and evening skies. A sad spiritual came from the down deep grabbing the heart of America to remind her that "when the stars are falling down there ain't no time".

Within days of the silencing of Dr. King, President Johnson set up a Commission to study the violent upheaval and eruptions. Former governor of Illinois, Otto Kerner was assigned to head the panel. The panel findings shocked white America while affirming what Black America always knew. "There were two Americas, one white and rich, one Black and poor" and the panel should have made a further statement that the Black nation was oppressed.

A brief look at the USA from 1960-2010 shows in a profound way America's choices. Americas choice is crystal clear whether one looks at primary issues of political campaigns, federal, state and national budget line items, education, the criminal justice system, hiring practices, apartheid practices in federal, State and city zoning and housing legislation, practices for loans and grants for business development, red lining for insurance required for business development or the creative arts.

The African in the USA had become urban by design of corporate businesses beginning with migration out of South between 1890 and 1960. Millions of Africans abandoned their Southern slave home for northern slums and ghettos in search of jobs, education for their children and the "promised land" of freedom. The story of that sojourn is chronicled in hundreds of books, journals and news. The story of that journal is the story of the cultural remaking of America in the image of the image of Africa.

This huge population of new arrivals walked into a hornets nest in housing segregation and homelessness as they searched 'looking for a home'. They managed to reconnect the old African way forming new families and new alliances as way of establishing themselves in the cold bitter dismal environment of the Promised Land: Five, ten, fifteen men and women to a three room flat sharing bed and floor space.

As the African struggle to locate housing, the cities, townships of the north set up new restricted housing codes blocking their path and in many cases that of other arrivals, especially: Latinos, Asians and Jews. The promised land became a cold, insensitive and unwelcome environment for the new Black immigrant from the South.

Employment was minuscule with meager wages and hash working conditions. Those ads in papers like the Chicago Defender which enticed the African out of the South never said that police brutality; racial assaults would be as common place as the fields of cotton, tobacco and sugar cane and lynch mobs that made up the landscape of more than 200 years living in Dixie.

Down home remained as it had always been until the civil rights struggle lit a new light in the heart of Blacks in urban and rural communities. The new movement brought a broad diversity of Americans into a new struggle that would end in a Civil Rights Bill and Voting Rights Act. It would also open the way for the emergence of a struggle to end poverty, homelessness and unemployment.

In that hour of freedom and glory the assassins made their move killing Dr. King, and other civil rights activists and numerous members of the Black Panther Party. The assassins used the bullet for their target. America made her choice for development, too. America chose the moon.

For the African descendant of US slaves the picture remains dismal and dangerously genocidal. America Chose the moon for investment and "benign neglect" for the Black America. America prefers chaos over community. America dumped its workers into the trash heap while embracing the policies and practices of big business. America prefers "two Americas, one white and one Black poor and dispossessed."

Colia L Clark - Candidate for US Senate

Speaks in Favor of Acquittal of Joe Barton in Kingston

Colia Clark, one of the Green Party candidates for US Senate, spoke earlier this week in support of Joe Barton, a 62 year old Vietnam veteran in Ulster County, New York. Ms. Clark spoke outside of a court hearing in Kingston for Mr. Barton, who is on trial for a marijuana growing operation. Mr. Barton has been a vocal advocate for the legalization of marijuana since the early 70s. A video of her statement is available here and below.

Ms. Clark relates how access to medical marijuana would have helped her late brother in his battle with cancer.

Congressman Barney Frank has introduced H.R. 2835, the Medical Marijuana Patient Protection Act. This legislation would allow for the medical use of marijuana in accordance with the laws of the various States. H.R. 2835 has been referred to the Energy and Commerce Committee.

Howie Hawkins, the Green Party candidate for Governor, earlier this year spoke in favor of the legalization of marijuana.

"The 'war on drugs' has turned into a war on young people, the poor, and African Americans, Latinos, and other people of color. My opponents in the Democratic and Republican parties ignore the human and economic devastation in many communities caused by the war on drugs. Instead, the two major parties posture about law and order and endorse failed measures, wasting tax dollars, ruining lives and increasing violence in our neighborhoods. We need to stop spending $50 billion a year nationally on the drug war, and use that money for treatment and rebuilding poor communities of color," said Hawkins.

A study by the American Civil Liberties Union ("Cracks in the System: Twenty Years of Unjust Federal Crack Cocaine Law," October 2006) found that 37% of people arrested, 59% of people convicted, and 74% of those sent to prison are African American, even though only 15% of drug users are African American. Thousands of New Yorkers annually are arrested for small amounts of marijuana possession, even though the possession of two ounces of marijuana was decriminalized in New York more than three decades ago. The rate of incarceration for marijuana offenses in New York for blacks is nearly 3.8 times that of whites. In some communities like Syracuse, the rate is nearly ten times that of whites.

"Law enforcement should focus efforts on organized crime, including the laundering of drug money at banks, rather than on street-level drug trade, in which kids who get arrested -- or killed -- are quickly replaced," said Hawkins. "Addictive use should be treated as a medical and social problem. Locking up addicts in stressed prison environments, with minimal effort to address the addiction itself, and then freeing them to go back into the same circumstances that led to their abuse of drugs has only aggravated the problem of addiction. We need rational solutions to the problems of drug abuse that are based on science and health, compassion for addicts and their families, reduction of harm rather than moral judgment, and respect for basic civil liberties and principles of justice."

Colia Clark for US Senate - Green Party
Howie Hawkins for Governor - Green Party

For More Info:
Colia Clark, 646-657-7207
Howie Hawkins, 315-425-1019