By Dr. Leon Koziol

Parenting Rights Institute

We love our children upstate as much as parents do downstate. But we now have a governor who has seized dictatorial powers under his emergency authority to open the floodgates of a killer virus to upstate New York where, until recently, we had few infections.

Andrew Cuomo dropped the ball long ago when he failed to shut down New York City in a timely manner, even after it was announced that his director of the New York Port Authority tested positive for covid-19 at JFK Airport. While precious minutes, hours and days were being sacrificed to political competition between Cuomo, NYC Mayor DeBlasio, President Trump and California Governor Gavin Newsom (the latter over which state would end up with the highest number of infections), the virus itself was finding fertile ground everywhere for killing their constituents.

Now this dictator politician is testing the waters over a mass transfer of coronavirus patients to upstate New York hospitals which are already being overrun by a sudden surge in local virus victims. Indeed even my state representative, Brian Miller, was sent to an ICU in a hospital in the heart of New York State due to coronavirus complications no doubt traced to infected downstate staffers at the Capitol in Albany.

The tiny rural village of Hamilton, New York, where Colgate University is located, found its mayor testing positive for the infection. She was made subject to quarantine. To make matters worse, violent criminals are being released from Rikers Island and state prisons elsewhere to complicate law enforcement duties needed to contain this virus.

These criminal predators are following the herd of wealthy people escaping NYC for upstate hide-outs, bringing untold crime into our already threatened communities. Indeed this past weekend, a Cortland city police officer (just south of Syracuse) was not only shot during a domestic violence call, he was chased down to a secure location (hiding behind his  squad car).

Despite all this, and his historic containment failures, Governor Andy Cuomo is acting recklessly and arrogantly to escalate the infection rates and criminal threats across all of upstate New York. Unlike destination states elsewhere, i.e. the Carolinas and Florida, where self-quarantine is required of all New York visitors, Cuomo has done nothing of the sort to protect upstate New York.

To illustrate, I was privy tonight to a conversation involving a New Jersey resident boasting how he lived in proximity to the Fusco family which has been in the news due to the tragic deaths and virus infections of a single household. He had recently escaped to New York’s Adirondack Mountains, assuring all in his vicinity that he had been washing his hands and maintaining social distancing.

“If you’re in New York City,” he announced, “you can die.” That’s when I interrupted his misguided sermon to correct that you can die anywhere from coronavirus, it does not discriminate based on wealth, status or location. I also advised him that people around here are now well armed and he would do well to self-quarantine right away.

This Jersey resident was busy ordering all kinds of take-outs for his shelter camp somewhere nearby. In case you doubt the need for citizen action, his respectful treatment here was a far cry from a group of armed vigilantes in Maine who cut down a tree to block three men with New Jersey license plates from invading their community.

Governor Cuomo, despite his oratory to the contrary, has shown massive incompetence in the public quest to contain this virus. History might depict him some day as the “governor of death.” During my stellar career as a civil rights attorney and city councilman, I exposed corruption time and again, even testifying about corrupt judges and ethics lawyers before Cuomo’s Moreland Commission on Public Corruption in 2013.

This governor’s lack of sincerity was made clear when testimonials began implicating him and his staff in various scandals. He shut down the commission prematurely to protect himself and his family, not the rest of us victimized by his government. Leaders of both houses of the state legislature and his top aid were later prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned for crimes arising from Commission deliberations.

I was personally targeted and persecuted for my whistle blower testimony then, but this public alert is far greater than anything I have publicized in the past. We have to petition and protest this “governor of death” while we still can. He is a political con-artist, saavy enough to know that by the time we catch up to his evil, he will distract to the next news item.

Where is the leadership on this tragic trend upstate? If our representatives are too intimidated by Coumo’s oratory, I would be happy to debate this governor anytime on the crucial issues. Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon is one of the few upstate who are recognizing this trend as Syracuse coronavirus cases reached nearly 200 in a matter of days.

This site, http://www.leonkoziol.com, has been censored to the point of a government gag order which I removed through a lawsuit in New York Supreme Court in 2016. If you truly love your children, you will now heed my call to action. Our next conference call is tomorrow, Monday, March 30, 2020 at 7pm ET.

Our call number remains the same: (605) 313-4427 and the access code when prompted is 583326. You can also e-mail me at leonkoziol@gmail.com or call our PRI office at (315) 380-3420. For the sake of your families and businesses, share this message and join our fight against coronavirus corruption.