This is a printer-friendly version of an article from Zip06.com.
06/21/2018 12:00 AMThe Shoreline Green Party, a chapter of the Green Party of Connecticut, announces the candidacy of Madeleine Leveille for state representative in the 35th District, which serves the towns of Clinton, Killingworth, and Westbrook. Leveille is a Clinton resident with a long career as a clinical and forensic psychologist. Her platform calls for fundamental tax reform, environmental protection, and social justice.
As a Green, she is unafraid to take up the issues that the Democrats and Republicans ignore, foremost among them taxation fairness. According to Leveille, the current Connecticut state budget crisis has been brought on by a failure to fairly tax wealthy individuals and corporations. As a result, local property taxes have been overburdened as a source of basic revenue for local government.
“Taxation should not fall disproportionately on the backs of the middle-class,” Leveille said. “The wealthy should pay their fair share of taxes and not be allowed to act as freeloaders on the body politic.”
She offers innovative solutions such as creating a Connecticut state-sponsored public bank similar to the state-sponsored Bank of North Dakota as a way of reducing interest rates to members of the public on mortgages and consumer loans.
Leveille advocates more aggressive policies to protect the environment, including a timely and full conversion to a solar-electric economy and the restoration of funds to environmental uses that Governor Dannel Malloy diverted to the general fund. Recently, in Clinton, she was an integral member of the group organized in opposition to the proposed industrial waste recycling/dump in Clinton.
“In a democracy, the people’s will should not be subservient to moneyed interest,” she said. “Our victory proved that when people unite, we can protect our communities’ health and safety.”
Other positions she supports are enacting ranked choice voting (as Maine recently did) to allow ranking candidates for more democratic elections, increasing the minimum wage to $15 by January 2020 (as New York recently did), and legalizing marijuana (as many states have recently done), and upholding the rights of those disenfranchised including LGBTQ, women, the poor, immigrants, and prisoners.
Leveille says she is running as a Green because the two-party system excludes the voices of those who most deserve their economic, social, and environmental interests be represented over those of large corporations and wealthy donors.
The Shoreline Green Party chapter comprises shoreline towns from Branford to Niantic.