The Koch brothers are businessmen and prominent free marketers who donate to organizations espousing that point of view. Olson writes that they have been attacked by the president and his surrogates and investigated and abused by agencies of the government, including the Internal Revenue Service.
Gibson Guitar Company CEO Henry Juszkiewicz, not incidentally, a contributor to the Republican National Committee, knows a thing or two about being a government target. Armed agents from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service raided Gibson’s facilities in Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee and seized more than 10,000 guitar fingerboards made from Indian Rosewood along with computers and other records. The government claims that Gibson violated the Lacey Act by purchasing and exporting Fingerboards from India. Gibson denies the accusation and says the company has imported the same wood without incident for the last 17 years, as have several of its competitors, who have not been raided by federal agents. To this writer’s knowledge, the issue has yet to be resolved.
The campaign against the Koch brothers and more particularly the Gibson raids prompt the memory of FDR’s 1944 attack on Sewell Avery, chairman of Montgomery Ward & Co. and a vocal opponent of the New Deal. Avery had refused to comply with government labor regulations, earning Roosevelt’s wrath. With national elections in the fall, FDR needed the labor vote. He issued an executive order (one of many during his tenure) to take over MW’s corporate offices “for the successful prosecution of the war.” Soldiers with fixed bayonets stormed the Chicago headquarters and when Sewell refused to leave, carried him out of the building. The incident became the subject of an iconic photograph.
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