I want to thank you all for coming to this announcement. I want to preface my comments today with some words once uttered by a great American, John Adams, who once said that “Power always thinks it has a great soul.”
 
This is exactly why I am running for state office, because after the heady days of the 80s and 90s our state, and our nation, is on the course of seminal change. The Republican credo of “Greed is Good” has led our state to the brink of fiscal and ethical ruin. The conditions that have wracked our state are prevalent in the nation as a whole, and we now stand on the precipice, much like the captain of the Titanic during the frantic moments when he realized that the state-of-the-art vessel had an inadequate design to avoid the collision with the iceberg.
 
The Iceberg of societal chaos looms before us. Decades of Me-ism, greed, governmental larceny disguised as privatization, neglect and willful aloofness with regard to the vanishing middle class, rampant expropriation of corporate balance sheets by corrupt corporate managements, the fleecing of investors in a series of brilliantly engineered bubbles, the exportation of well-paying jobs to overseas corporate havens, and the elimination of any semblance of civic responsibility by corporate entities has yielded a steady and relentless drop in the standard of living for most Americans.
 
The financial crisis our state finds itself in has been astutely jawboned aside by Republican legislators who have found ways to appeal and redirect the attentions of the state’s votaries.
 
It is time to redirect our attention to the social umbrella which will protect our state’s citizens from the cumulative effects of these ill-conceived policies of short-term gain. We have mortgaged our state’s future through ill-directed spending, and have removed many from the protective umbrella that provides stability and assurance..
 
We must fortify those mechanisms that protect consumers from predatory and harmful usurious rates of interest and re-impose stern and enforceable usury laws. We must better protect their investments in their homes through higher homestead exemptions. We must protect their health and provide state sponsored health care. We must end the barbarous and counterproductive implementation of the death penalty. We must stop the state from being an accomplice to gambling – an insidious and damaging practice which ruins families, leaving them destitute and creating innumerable family tragedies; Complicity in this type of behavior is unethical and constitutes craven materialism on behalf of the legislature.
 
If elected I will propound and support all initiatives that are consistent with the Green Party’s published platform which can be located at: http://www.gp.org/.  I will tenaciously oppose any legislation which is based on the credo of Greed, Privilege, concentration of economic power, and economic benefit for a few at the expense of the many.
 
Our nation and state are on a precipice, and unless we immediately go hard astern, we will run aground with terrible consequences for everyone. It is time to awaken to the fact that this is not a time for business as usual, but that creative and critical thinking unbiased by loyalty to hidden moneyed benefactors is called for at this time.
 
I leave you with a passage from James Hilton’s immortal novel, Lost Horizon:
 
“He looked back on his long life…and it seemed to him that all the loveliest things were transient and perishable, and that war, lust, and brutality might some day crush them until there were no more left in the world.  He remembered sights he had seen with his own eyes, and with his mind he pictured others; he saw the nations strengthening, not in wisdom, but in vulgar passions and the will to destroy; he saw their machine power multiplying until a single-weaponed man might have matched a whole army of the Grand Monarque.  And he perceived that when they had filled the land and sea with ruin, they would take to the air…”
 
“But that was not all. He foresaw a time when men, exultant in the technique of homicide, would rage so hotly over the world that every precious thing would be in danger, every book and picture and harmony, every treasure garnered through two millenniums, the small, the delicate, the defenseless—all would be lost like the lost books of Livy, or wrecked as the English wrecked the Summer Palace in Pekin.”
 
“…But what are the opinions of reasonable men against iron and steel? …And that, my son, is why I am here, and why you are here, and why we may pray to outlive the doom that gathers around on every side.”
 
“…And you think that Shangri-La will escape?”
 
“Perhaps.  We may expect no mercy, but we may faintly hope for neglect.  Here we shall stay with our books and our music and our meditations, conserving the frail elegancies of a dying age, and seeking such wisdom as men will need when their passions are all spent. We have a heritage to cherish and bequeath.  Let us take what pleasure we may until that time comes.”
 
I hope in the year to come, we manage to protect and uphold our “Shangri-La”—the state of Connecticut.