Hey in ancient Rome, if you held a political office, you were allowed a certain number of guards with clubs(bundle of sticks actually). The higher your rank, the more guards with clubs you could have. If you held a high enough ranking, your guards could put axes in their bundle of sticks (outside of the boundaries of the city of Rome), signifying that you had the right to tell them to execute people.
Those bundles of sticks were called fasces, from which the word fascism derived. Koch and Bloomberg seem pretty fascist to me.
US. Congress has faces with axes attached on the wall