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Politics & Power Quote by Morris Dees

"Our supporters can send the message that it's wrong for politically connected corporations to make millions while people doing an honest day's work are being cheated out of an honest day's pay"

About this Quote

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.

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TopicJustice
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Dees, Morris. (2026, January 16). Our supporters can send the message that it's wrong for politically connected corporations to make millions while people doing an honest day's work are being cheated out of an honest day's pay. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/our-supporters-can-send-the-message-that-its-110159/

Chicago Style
Dees, Morris. "Our supporters can send the message that it's wrong for politically connected corporations to make millions while people doing an honest day's work are being cheated out of an honest day's pay." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/our-supporters-can-send-the-message-that-its-110159/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Our supporters can send the message that it's wrong for politically connected corporations to make millions while people doing an honest day's work are being cheated out of an honest day's pay." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/our-supporters-can-send-the-message-that-its-110159/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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Morris Dees (born December 16, 1936) is a Lawyer from USA.

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