In a 1936 speech, President Franklin Roosevelt denounced the attempts by employers to coerce workers into voting for a candidate by threatening their jobs. That tactic is what the Koch Brothers have been accused of doing in a recent article published in The Nation by Mark Ames and Mike Ely.
“The very employers and politicians and publishers who talk most loudly of class antagonism and the destruction of the American system now undermine that system by this attempt to coerce the votes of the wage earners of this country. It is the 1936 version of the old threat to close down the factory or the office if a particular candidate does not win. It is an old strategy of tyrants to delude their victims into fighting their battles for them,” FDR said in his 1936 speech.