Thought control by employers

See Democracy Now! for a revelatory interview about what the Koch brothers are doing, with the capabilities they get from last year’s Supreme Court Citizens United decision.

Last year’s Citizens United Supreme Court decision granted free speech rights to corporations and effectively removed regulations preventing employers from politically manipulating their workers. In practice, employers can also fire workers who refuse to attend political seminars or dare to voice their dissenting opinions too loudly.

“‎Lee Fang of ThinkProgress put a memo (see below) up on ThinkProgress yesterday from an operative who’s been tied to the Koch Industries, saying that, really, after Citizens United, corporations need to start using their employees more to push their politics. So they’re going to start using the three million supervisors that work in this country to directly push politics on the job before elections. And this is something we haven’t seen in American history since we passed the National Labor Relations Act in the 1930s….

“I think that’s what Americans really have to realize, is that we don’t have any power, except the power of solidarity and the power to strike and the power to organize in unions. Street protests are great. Online petitions are great. But only when you can threaten to shut down the factories of the boss, only when you can have that type of leverage, are Americans ever going to be able to change the situation. And I don’t see the situation changing unless there’s more organizing. I think we’re going to see more corporate oligarchs taking on workers, unless workers themselves organize and take away the power, their power to work.”

Here is the memo on ThinkProgress and the right-wing huzzahs about what corporations can now do to control how workers vote and even think.