ATLANTIC: Mitt Romney wants your vote. And if you’re a small business owner, he wants your employees’ votes as well and insists that there’s nothing wrong with giving them a little guidance this election cycle. On June 6, Romney led a conference call with support from the über-conservative National Federation of Independent Business and — to cut to the chase — urged the bosses on the call to persuade their employees to vote for him in the upcoming election. “I hope you make it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections,” said Romney in a recording obtained by In These Times. “Nothing illegal about you talking to your employees about what you believe is best for the business, because I think that will figure into their election decision, their voting decision and of course doing that with your family and your kids as well.” MORE
RELATED: It’s hardly a surprise that billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch are supporting Romney in the upcoming election, but their efforts to persuade tens of thousands employees to do the same is curious to say the least. Koch Industries subsidiary Georgia Pacific recently sent out a “voter information packet” to its 45,000 employees with all kinds of helpful information like who’s running, who’s a Republican and how to vote for those Republicans.[…] Mitt Romney is at the top of the list. A copy of an anti-Obama editorial written by Charles Koch and pro-Romney editorial written by David Koch is also included. If Obama is reelected, 
one of the letters in the packet reads, “then many of our more than 50,000 U.S. employees and contractors may suffer the consequences, including higher gasoline prices, runaway inflation, and other ills.” MORE
RELATED: Last week, billionaire CEO David Siegel, who runs a timeshare empire, threatened to fire employees if President Obama is reelected in November, saying in an email, “the economy doesn’t currently pose a threat to your job. What does threaten your job however, is another 4 years of the same Presidential administration.” And Siegel is not alone in pushing his employees to cast their vote a certain way. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes reported today on another CEO — Arthur Allen of ASG Software Solutions — who said in an email to his employees that they’d only have themselves to blame if they lose their jobs if Obama wins. MORE
RELATED: David Siegel, the founder of Westgate Resorts, the biggest private time-share developer in the country, explains how he swung the election in Bush’s favor: “Whenever I saw a negative article about [Al] Gore, I put it in with the paychecks of my 8,000 employees. I had my managers do a survey on every employee. If they liked Bush, we made them register to vote. But not if they liked Gore. The week before [the election] we made 80,000 phone calls through my call center—they were robo-calls. On Election Day, we made sure everyone who was voting for Bush got to the polls. I didn’t know he would win by 527 votes. Afterward, we did a survey among the employees to find out who voted who wouldn’t have otherwise. One thousand of them said so.” MORE
RELATED: It has been said that we live in a new gilded age, in which the rich take it as their sovereign right and civic duty to get richer, while the rest of us look on in envy, simmer with resentment or dream of rebellion. “The Queen of Versailles,” a new documentary by Lauren Greenfield about life on the thin, fragile, sugarcoated top layer of the upper crust, captures the tone of the times with a clear, surprisingly compassionate eye. A gaudy guilty pleasure that is also a piece of trenchant social criticism, the movie starts out in the mode of reality television, resembling the pilot for a new “Real Housewives” franchise or a reboot of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” Before long, though, it takes on the coloration of a Theodore Dreiser novel — not quite an American tragedy but a sprawling, richly detailed study of ambition, desire and the wild swings of fortune that are included in the price of the capitalist ticket. MORE