On Monday, October 5, Maine Equal Justice Partners (MEJP) jumped into the fight against Maine’s taxpayers. Sara Gagne-Holmes, MEJP’s executive director, announced that the organization “is joining the growing group of organizations, businesses, and labor unions against Question 4 by launching an online video series that highlights the potential harm created by TABOR II for families, schools, and our communities.” Her statement, of course, begs the question of the identity of the “organizations” and “businesses” opposing TABOR.
The videos themselves are crudely done and – in our opinion – quite harmless. They begin with a cheap animation and then continue with a Maine teacher and parent reacting in irrational fear to TABOR. They repeat the same untruths presented by Kristi Hargrove, who visited Maine this past week and bashed her home state of Colorado and its TABOR. As I said, pretty thin soup and easy to refute – even for the irrationally fearful.
But just who and what is Maine Equal Justice Partners? MEJP is one of the non-profit groups listing itself on the Maine Can Do Better website and is one of the “control” organizations listed on the EngageMaine site. In fact, MEJP boasts in its annual report that it helped found Maine Can Do Better. Both are fronts for Maine non-profits that largely subsist off $550 million in contracts with the state Department of Health and Human Services.
MEJP describes itself as finding “solutions to poverty and improv[ing] the lives of people with low income in Maine”. MEJP does lobbying, provides litigation services to the poor and trains people “on issues affecting” low income people. That’s nice, you say. Sort of like Pine Tree Legal with a bit of lobbying thrown in.
If that’s what you think, however, you would be wrong. According to MEJP’s website, the organization really only has one client: a coalition called MAIN – the Maine Association of Interdependent Neighborhoods. MEJP links to MAIN and, in fact, owns MAIN’s domain “www.peacebreadjustice.org” – a domain name that must surely raise a few eyebrows.
Just what is MAIN? First, MAIN and MEJP appear to be one and the same – or at least intimately related. As a separate corporation, MAIN was administratively dissolved by the Maine Secretary of State in 2004 and its identity apparently subsumed by MEJP. The MAIN website says that the organization does not have a fixed abode but funnels contacts through MEJP.
Second – and to put it politely – MAIN is a redistributionist coalition. It subscribes to a radicalized version of the Economic Bill of Rights originally promoted by FDR. The group’s purpose is to seek an ever-larger expansion of the welfare state and helps organize “economic human rights campaigns” in Maine. MAIN also cooperates with direct-action organizations like the “Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign” which, like ACORN, breaks into foreclosed homes to “reclaim” them for their former owners and others.
As for MEJP itself, it’s a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Its 2007 Form 990 shows income of approximately $750,000.00, one-third of which consists of government grants. Its board of directors seats several lawyers – and here the irony grows thick.
Jerrol Crouter of the Portland law firm of Drummond Woodsum & MacMahon is a director as well as MEJP’s treasurer. It should be noted that Mr. Crouter’s firm has earned millions in legal fees representing Maine school districts, including $108,000 billed to the Portland School District during one three-month period in 2007. If fact, the firm has pretty much captured the Maine market on school district representation.
Does anyone but me find it ironic that an organization attacking TABOR for its supposed detrimental effect on schools should have as its treasurer a lawyer whose firm generates millions in fees from the very same schools?
For more information on TABOR and Question 4, please visit the TABOR Now website.
