[Vision2020] Thought Control: Right-Wing Koch Brothers Caught Telling Thousands of Employees How To Vote

[Ted Moffett]

"Democracy Now" broadcast from today first at their website on "The
Nation" coverage of this story, which is pasted in second:

Thought Control: Right-Wing Koch Brothers Caught Telling Thousands of
Employees How To Vote

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/4/21/thought_control_right_wing_koch_brothers
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Big Brothers: Thought Control at Koch
Mark Ames and Mike Elk
April 20, 2011

http://www.thenation.com/article/160062/big-brothers-thought-control-koch

On the eve of the November midterm elections, Koch Industries sent an
urgent letter to most of its 50,000 employees advising them on whom to
vote for and warning them about the dire consequences to their
families, their jobs and their country should they choose to vote
otherwise.

The Nation obtained the Koch Industries election packet for Washington
State—which included a cover letter from its president and COO, David
Robertson; a list of Koch-endorsed state and federal candidates; and
an issue of the company newsletter, Discovery, full of alarmist
right-wing propaganda.

Legal experts interviewed for this story called the blatant corporate
politicking highly unusual, although no longer skirting the edge of
legality, thanks to last year’s Citizens United Supreme Court
decision, which granted free speech rights to corporations.

“Before Citizens United, federal election law allowed a company like
Koch Industries to talk to officers and shareholders about whom to
vote for, but not to talk with employees about whom to vote for,”
explains Paul M. Secunda, associate professor of law at Marquette
University. But according to Secunda, who recently wrote in The Yale
Law Journal Online about the effects of Citizens United on political
coercion in the workplace, the decision knocked down those
regulations. “Now, companies like Koch Industries are free to send out
newsletters persuading their employees how to vote. They can even
intimidate their employees into voting for their candidates.” Secunda
adds, “It’s a very troubling situation.”

The Kochs were major supporters of the Citizens United case; they were
also chief sponsors of the Tea Party and major backers of the
anti-“Obamacare” campaign. Through their network of libertarian think
tanks and policy institutes, they have been major drivers of
unionbusting campaigns in Wisconsin, Michigan and elsewhere.

“This sort of election propaganda seems like a new development,” says
UCLA law professor Katherine Stone, who specializes in labor law and
who reviewed the Koch Industries election packet for The Nation.
“Until Citizens United, this sort of political propaganda was probably
not permitted. But after the Citizens United decision, I can imagine
it’ll be a lot more common, with restrictions on corporations now
lifted.”

The election packet starts with a letter from Robertson dated October
4, 2010. It read: “As Koch company employees, we have a lot at stake
in the upcoming election. Each of us is likely to be affected by the
outcome on Nov. 2. That is why, for the first time ever, we are
mailing our newest edition of Discovery and several other helpful
items to the home address of every U.S. employee” [emphasis added].

For most Koch employees, the “helpful items” included a list of
Koch-approved candidates, which was presented on a separate page
labeled “Elect to Prosper.” A brief introduction to the list reads:
“The following candidates in your state are supported by Koch
companies and KOCHPAC, the political action committee for Koch
companies. We believe these candidates will best advance policies
supporting economic freedom.”

What the Kochs mean by “economic freedom” is explained on the next
page. As the mailer makes clear, Koch Industries tailored its election
propaganda to the state level, rather than focusing on national
elections. Of the nineteen candidates that Koch Industries recommended
in its Washington State list, sixteen were Republicans. The three
Democratic candidates approved by the Kochs included two members of
the “Roadkill Caucus,” Washington’s version of the conservative Blue
Dogs.

Only two of the nineteen races on the list were for national office,
and in both cases Koch Industries backed Tea Party–friendly
Republicans: Dino Rossi, an antilabor candidate, who lost to incumbent
Democratic Senator Patty Murray; and Jaime Herrera-Beutler, who ran in
the Republican primary as a moderate, but who came out recently as a
Tea Party radical, much to her constituency’s surprise.

After guiding employees on how they should vote, the mailer devoted
the rest of the material to the sort of indoctrination one would
expect from an old John Birch Society pamphlet (the Koch Brothers’
father, Fred Koch, was a founding member of the JBS). It offers an
apocalyptic vision of the company’s free-market struggle for liberty
against the totalitarian forces of European Union bureaucrats and
deficit-spending statists.

The newsletter begins with an unsigned editorial preaching familiar
Tea Party themes, repackaged as Koch Industry corporate philosophy:

For more than 40 years, Koch Industries has openly and consistently
supported the principles of economic freedom and market-based
policies. Unfortunately, these values and principled point of view are
now being strongly opposed by many politicians (and their media
allies) who favor ever-increasing government…. Even worse, recent
government actions are threatening to bankrupt the country…. And the
facts are that the overwhelming majority of the American people will
be much worse off if government overspending is allowed to bankrupt
the country.

Further into the company newsletter is an article headlined “What’s a
Business to Do?” It portrays corporate titans like the Kochs as
freedom-fighting underdogs, modern-day Sakharovs and Mandelas targeted
for repression by Big Government statists: “Citizens who are openly
critical of the European Union bureaucracy in Brussels or the
out-of-control government of the United States are being shouted down
by politicians, government officials and their media and other
allies.”

In this scenario, Big Government wants to muzzle the Kochs before they
can spread their message to the people. That message comes down to
preaching the benefits of lower wages:

If the government insists that someone should be paid $50 per hour in
wages and benefits, but that person only creates $30 worth of value,
no one will prosper for long…. Anything that undermines the mobility
of labor, such as policies that make it more expensive and difficult
to change where people are employed, also increases unemployment….
Similar policies that distort the labor market—such as minimum wage
laws and mandated benefits—contribute to unemployment.

Easily the strangest and most disturbing article of all comes from the
head of Koch Industries himself, Charles Koch, who offers an
election-season history lesson to his employees. Koch’s essay sets out
to rank the best and worst US presidents in terms of their economic
policies. Charles—who with his brother David is worth $44 billion,
putting them fifth on the 2010 Forbes 400 list—warns his readers that
his history lesson may surprise them. And to his credit, Koch doesn’t
disappoint.

Koch glorifies Warren G. Harding and his successor Calvin Coolidge for
producing “one of the most prosperous [eras] in U.S. history.” Koch
explains that what made Harding great was his insistence on “cutting
taxes, reducing the national debt and cutting the federal budget,” all
policies that Congressional Republicans are proposing in today’s
budget negotiations. What made Harding so great, in other words, is
what made radical Republican candidates so great in November 2010.

Koch’s pick for worst president is Herbert Hoover, whom he accuses of
undermining “economic freedom” and thus precipitating the Great
Depression. “Under Hoover,” he writes, “federal spending roughly
doubled and personal income tax rates jumped from 25 percent to 63
percent. He raised corporate taxes, too, and doubled the estate tax.
Hoover also pressured business leaders to keep wages artificially
high, contributing to massive unemployment.”

According to most historians, the Harding and Coolidge
administrations’ free-market romp was one of the key factors that led
to the Great Depression. Their time in office was marked by obscene
corruption, racial violence, unionbusting, feudal wealth inequalities
and, shortly thereafter, the total collapse of the American economy.

* * *

Legal experts say that this kind of corporate-sponsored propagandizing
has been almost unheard-of in America since the passage of New
Deal–era laws like the National Labor Relations Act, which codified
restrictions on political activism and pressure in the workplace. NYU
law professor Samuel Estreicher, director of the Center for Labor and
Employment Law, told The Nation in an e-mail interview that such overt
politicking to employees is still rare. “I am not aware of it
happening with many employers,” he wrote.

According to UCLA’s Stone, although Citizens United frees Koch
Industries and other corporations to propagandize their employees with
their political preferences, the same doesn’t hold true for unions—at
least not in the workplace. “If a union wanted to hand out political
materials in the workplace not directly relevant to the workers’
interests—such as providing a list of candidates to support in the
elections—the employer has the right to ban that material,” says
Stone. “They could even prohibit its distribution on lunch breaks or
after shifts, because by law it’s the company’s private property.”

Stone points to a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 1915, Coppage v.
Kansas, which protected employers’ right to draw up contracts
forbidding employees from joining unions. Justice William Day’s
dissent in that case pointed out that if the state was ready to
enforce the employers’ contractual bans on union activity, then it was
opening the way for the state to enforce employers’ legal right to
control their employees’ political and ideological activities:

Would it be beyond a legitimate exercise of the police power to
provide that an employee should not be required to agree, as a
condition of employment, to forgo affiliation with a particular
political party, or the support of a particular candidate for office?
It seems to me that these questions answer themselves.

With Citizens United, it seems, the country is heading back to the
days of court-enforced corporatocracy. Already, workers at a Koch
subsidiary in Portland, Oregon, are complaining about being subjected
to political and ideological propaganda. Employees at Georgia-Pacific
warehouses in Portland say the company encourages them to read Charles
Koch’s The Science of Success: How Market-Based Management Built the
World’s Largest Private Company and to attend ideological seminars in
which Koch management preaches their bosses’ “market-based management”
philosophy.

Travis McKinney, an employee at a Portland Georgia-Pacific
distribution center, says, “They drill into your head things like ‘The
10 Guiding Principles of Koch Industries.’ They even stamp the ten
principles on your time card.”

McKinney, a fourth-generation employee of Georgia-Pacific, says
relations have sharply deteriorated since Koch Industries bought the
company in late 2005. He and fellow employees at three Georgia-Pacific
distribution centers are locked in a yearlong contract battle with the
new Koch Industries management. Workers there, members of the
Inlandboatmen’s Union of the Pacific (an affiliate of the
International Longshore and Warehouse Union) recently voted
unanimously to reject management’s contract and voted overwhelmingly
to authorize a strike if management continues to try to impose cuts in
benefits and job security in the new contracts.

Political propagandizing is a heated issue in Oregon, which passed
SB-519 in the summer of 2009, a bill placing restrictions on
corporations’ ability to coerce employees to attend political meetings
and vote the way the corporation tells them to vote. In late December
2009—just before SB-519 was to go into effect—the US Chamber of
Commerce filed a lawsuit with Associated Oregon Industries to block
the bill from becoming law. A similar bill in Wisconsin was struck
down in November in a federal court. However, the Chamber’s lawsuit in
Oregon was thrown out in May 2010 by US District Court Judge Michael
Mosman on procedural grounds, leaving open the possibility that it
could still be struck down.

In the meantime, workers across the country should start preparing for
a future workplace environment in which political proselytizing is the
new normal.

Mark Ames and Mike Elk
April 20, 2011
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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett