Politics & Power Quote by Morris Dees

It’s a neatly loaded piece of populist lawyering: take an abstract dispute about wages and corporate influence, then translate it into a moral imbalance anyone can feel in their gut. Dees frames the conflict as a rigged contest between “politically connected corporations” and workers who only possess “an honest day’s work.” The phrase “send the message” is doing strategic work, too. It’s not just a call to persuasion; it’s a warning shot. The audience isn’t merely asked to care, but to signal power - to show that quiet backroom advantage will carry reputational and political costs.

The subtext is that the cheating isn’t accidental. “Politically connected” implies a system designed to launder profit through proximity to lawmakers and regulators, turning public policy into a private subsidy. Meanwhile, “millions” is a blunt instrument: it’s less about precise accounting than about scale, about how obscene the imbalance looks next to the paycheck-to-paycheck reality implied by “honest day’s pay.” Dees also fuses two forms of legitimacy: labor’s moral legitimacy (“honest”) and the public’s democratic legitimacy (“supporters”). Corporations, by contrast, are cast as illegitimate twice over - enriched and insulated.

Contextually, this fits Dees’s career-long emphasis on mobilizing civic pressure against entrenched power. It’s activist rhetoric with legal DNA: he’s not arguing a case; he’s building a jury of the public, inviting supporters to render a verdict on a system that rewards access and punishes work.