April 28, 2023 • 49 mins
Mia discusses the history of the Pinkertons and the arc of corporate military force that led them from mass murdering strike breakers to the enforcers of Magic the Gathering embargoes.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome Dick. It Happened Here a podcast about things falling
apart and sometimes about how to put them back together again.
I'm your host, Na Wong. This is a we are
once again talking about Wizards of the Coast. Now this
time is not about dungeons and dragons. It is about
their other property, Magic the Gathering, which if you don't know,
(00:25):
is Wizards of the Coast's trading card game that's at
the forefront of some truly wild stuff. Right now. Now
you could ask Mia, why are we even talking about
this about Magic the Gathering on this show, And you know,
there's multiple answers. One of them is that as industrial
profit rates have been decreasing in the last half a century,
(00:45):
capital has increasingly turned towards entertainment as a way to
make money. Magic is now a billion dollar brand, partnering
with everything from Fortnite to The Walking Dead to and
this is not a joke, being in the process of
releasing an entire set of Lord of the Rings card.
As capital is flooded into the entertainment industry and Magic
in particular, our silly little hobbies are suddenly the front
(01:07):
lines of class struggle. Workers at TCG player, this year,
given the job of sorting through literally tens of thousands
of cards that TCG player processes finally won their second
attempt to form a union after two devastating union busting campaigns.
And this is where things get very, very weird. Now
bear with me here, dear listeners. We have to talk
(01:29):
about a little bit of Magic minutia to understand what
has happened in this incident, and then we will get
back to what the show is usually about, which is
corporations killing enormous numbers of people. So a few days ago,
Dan Cannon, a man who runs a very small Magic
YouTube channel called Old School EMPTG, bought what he thought
were cards in the latest Magic the Gathering set called
(01:50):
March of the Machine. Now Magic releases new cards periodically
and what are called sets. These sets have plots and characters,
They've written stories. They are enormous sort of lower events,
they have enormous hype behind them, And March of the
Machine story wise, is basically the version of an Avengers movie.
Giant apocalyptic threats, all the heroes crossing over, people, hopping
(02:14):
through multi versus, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, okay,
this has happened before. You know, Wizards does big sets.
It wasn't that weird, but Wizard decided to do something
very very weird, which is they printed, for the first
time ever, a mini set called March of the Machines
March of the Machine Aftermath. Now, the regular March of
(02:37):
the Machine set has three hundred and eighty seven cards
in it, Aftermath has fifty. Now, I don't know why
they decided to do this. They've never done anything like
this if they've never printed just a tiny set they
release a bit after the regular set before and you know,
the names are very very confusing, right, one is called
March of the Machine and the other one is Marching
the Machine Aftermath. How is a regular person supposed to
(02:59):
keep track of this? The mind boggles, et cetera, et cetera.
Either way, So Dan Cannon tries to buy cards from
the regular March of the Machine set. What he gets
in sent instead are by accident March of the Machine
Aftermath cards. Now, these cards are still secret. They have
not been revealed yet, no no one, no one knows
(03:20):
what they are. No one's supposed to know what they are.
Before every set, there's an incredibly elaborate process where Wizards
gives cards to influencers to reveal them to the public,
and on a certain date, everyone reveals, you know, your
influencer reveals what their card is, and there's this whole
hype cycle on Reddit, and everyone argues about how good
the cards are, and I'll call the art is and
what it means for the story. It's sort of it's
(03:43):
sort of similar to the sort of hype cycles that
would happen around trailers from Marvel movies, or people would
be analyzing every detail of it, etcetera, et cetera. And
these are these spoiler seasons, as they're called, are a
huge deal for Wizards. Date. Wizards tries to heavily control
the entire process, but sometimes cards leak out. Now Dan
Cannon suddenly has been handed a bunch of cards no
(04:06):
one has ever seen before. So he does what you know,
every person who just suddenly has magic cards that haven't
been revealed yet do and have been doing for years
and years and years. He makes a video showing off
the cards. Now, importantly, this is not illegal. I need
to stress this because of what what's going to happen,
What is going to happen next? You you know, it's
(04:28):
it's it's it's very very easy to look at the
at the sort of severity of what's going to happen
to this guy and assume that he broke a law.
But no, he did not. He did not break a law.
Nothing he has done he is illegal. Literally, what he's
done is he bought some magic cards from someone who
screwed up and accidentally broke the street date for selling
cards because he confused March of the Machine with March
of the Machine aftermath, Wow, how can anyone make that
(04:52):
mistake right? The genius of Wizards of the Coast marketing
is unmatched. Everything they do is incredibly clear, et cetera,
et cetera. Now in the pros says because of how
many cards he bought and how small the set is,
he reveals most of the cars that are in the set,
and then the Pinkertons show up to his house, forced
(05:13):
their way through his door, make his wife cry, threaten
to arrest him, and threaten to put him in prison
for ten years with two hundred thousand dollars fines for
copyright infringement on the grounds of him having stolen material.
The Pinkertons also harass his elderly neighbors. Literally. Just today,
as I'm recording this, a story broken gizmoto that revealed
(05:35):
that Wizards of the Coast have used the Pinkertons before
to go after stolen goods. Now, some of you may
be asking who are the Pinkertons, And I think some
of you probably know in very broad outlines who the
Pinkertons are. But in order to really get at the
core of what this organization is and why they look
(05:56):
the way they do today as compared to how they've
looked in the past, we need to ask another question,
which is how has the balance of military power between
the state and corporations changed over time? And this seems
like a very weird question, but the Pinkertons emerge in
a very weird period of time in this balance. They
(06:17):
are what fills in the gap between corporations directly having
armies that could conquer nations and modern corporations who, instead
of having their own personal armies, have intelligence of vast
intelligence agencies, but also rely on the police and the
governments as the people who do violence for them. So
let's go back and tell the story from the beginning
by taking a brief look at the most infamous corporate
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army of them all, the army of the East India
Trading Company. The East India Trading Company was formed in
sixteen hundred and it was given a vast state monopoly
over trade in what they called East India, which is
an area we would broadly call Southeast Asia and the
South Pacific today. And at the start these guys are
(07:00):
optimistically they are half trading group half pirate. The level
of piracy is really high, especially in the early days.
They you know, trade for spices. They steal a lot
of other people's spices from places like Java and they
bring them back to England. They make a lot of
money now over the course of their actions. And again
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it's worth noting these people are kind of the descendants
of the British privateers, people like Thomas Drake, who'd been
you know, just pirates who have been hired by the
government to only go after like Spanish ships instead of
English ships. So they are, you know, from the beginning,
the East India Company has this sort of dna of
army in it, and over the course of about two
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centuries they are going to conquer with their own army
most of what is now India and Pakistan, and that
territory is either going to indirectly or directly come under
the rule of the East India Company. And the EASTERNDA
Company is fighting war everywhere again. They seize Indian Pakistent
by force, they are fighting wars in Afghanistan. They kill
(08:06):
unfathomable numbers of people. The worst of these events is
the Great Bengalf Famine. There's a Behind the Bastard's episode
about this that you can listen to if you want
a really sort of long thing about the East India
Company and the famine. But I want to talk about
the famine a little bit, because so the Great Bengalf
(08:26):
Famine of seventeen seventy kills ten million people. And I
knew this intellectually, right, I studied a bit in college.
But what I had never actually looked up somehow, what
I'd never seen was the percentage of the population of
this famine kills. And this famine is directly the fault
of the East India Company. This is something that all
(08:47):
historians who of look at this agree is that this
is directly the fault of these India Company and the
combination of their agricultural policies and their tax extraction. The
sort of put into perspective how bad this gets. The
highest serious estimates for the number of people who die
in the Great Leap Forward stands at about thirty million dead.
This is an unfathomable atrocity. It is a scale of
(09:09):
death at which the human mind breaks down and loses
the ability to process. Some of my family lived through it.
It is horrific in ways that are difficult to even
begin to describe. The Great Leap Forward killed about five
percent of China's population. The Great Bengal Famine killed thirty
percent of the population of India that the East India
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Trading Company controlled thirty percent. That's not just sort of
small populations statistics either. Right, It's not like they killed
thirty percent of a country with thirty people in it, right.
They killed ten million people. This isn't you know. This
is an unbelievable force of human evil. They are capable
of killing people in numbers that defy comprehension. They're able
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to do this because they have an army that is
the size of a great power in nation state. The
East India Trading comp Company's army in eighteen hundred had
two hundred thousand soldiers. That is a massive army today.
That is like the size of the active Ukrainian army
in twenty twenty two. It is more than twice the
size of the British army eighteen hundred. And you know,
(10:16):
in eighteen hundred it's not like the British aren't fighting wars,
right they are. In eighteen hundred the British are fighting
the war the Second Coalition. So there they are fighting Napoleon, right.
So this isn't a sort of you know, completely half
assed like peacetime British army. This is a you know,
this is a serious military force. And even once they
(10:37):
like fully build up their army at the peak of
the Napoleonic Wars thirteen years later, the entire size of
the British army is about two hundred fifty thousand troops.
That's not much larger than the East India Company's army.
At the same time, and at the height of the
East India Trading Company there are army swells to again
(10:57):
two hundred and fifty thousand, which is again the size
of the regular British army at in the most desperate
war that the British had fought to that point. The
Anitierating Company is a full on military great power, right.
But and this is this is this is something that
is going to shape an enormous amount of the sort
of arc of the relationship between corporate and military power.
(11:22):
It is unbelievably expensive to maintain an army like this
the the East, the British Stateia Company, even though they're
they you know, they are looting entire nations, right they
have they have they're there are entire states where they
fully taken over the tax services. They're just walking into
temples and taking stuff. But even with all of that profit,
(11:44):
right they you know, they have the ability to mint
their own coins in a lot of these areas, but
they still lose money. And they still lose money again
because they're maintaining this on two hundred and fifty thousand
strong army. And you know, so you have this problem, right,
which is that you have this item on your balance
sheet that is unfathomably expensive. And then you have a
second problem, which is that if you have an army,
(12:07):
there's always a danger. But the army goes into revolts,
and that's what happens in eighteen fifty seven, the British
managed to piss off their own army, which is almost
all composed of Indian troops, and they fight an incredibly
bloody war. Notice either this is the boy mutiny to
suppoy uprising and the British win, and they after victory
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they strap a bunch of prisoners bodies to canons and
shoot them so they can't be properly buried. But the
consequence of this sort of horrifying war, and particularly the
sort of fear it invokes in the minds of you know,
the British populace of like, oh my god, these non
(12:48):
white people can actually fight us, is that they directly
seize control of India from the East India Trading Company.
And for all your nationalization fans out there, the British
assuming direct control of India is actually a nationalization. It's
not actually inherently socialist, guys, you have to be a
bit smarter than this. But that aside, right, this marks
(13:08):
an enormous shift in the sort of political economy of violence.
What is happening here is that states are assuming direct
military control over their colonies intead of operating through corporations.
And this means that what you see is a shift
from direct corporate armies to corporations using the state to
do violence for them. And this doesn't mean that corporations
(13:28):
don't use force directly today, and it also doesn't mean
that the governments, you know, weren't acting as the armies
of corporations and like the eighteen hundreds, but what's happening here,
and specifically the direct seizure of India from the East India,
the direct seizure of India from the East India Company,
marks a dramatic shift in the balance of forces away
(13:52):
from corporations with armies doing violence towards states doing violence
on their behalf. And this is one of the things,
alongside sort of slave catchers in the US, that leads
to the formation of the police. You see this but
both both both in Britain and in sort of France, right,
you start to get police agencies that are you know,
(14:12):
largely tasked putting down their own working class. And this
is one of the things, one of the sort of
inexorable marches that happens over the course of the twentieth century,
and it's also happened in nineteenth century too. There is
a sort of mass centralization of state and police power,
and particularly that's an expansion of the bureaucracy. Right the
American state in eighteen forty is barely a functional state
(14:35):
by today's standards, right, Like, they have an incredibly difficult
time even figuring out how many people there are in
the country that they're provisioning of services is a joke.
Nobody has like geek cars, Like people don't even have
birth certificates for the most part. And that's something you know,
and that's only that changes right over the course of
(14:56):
sort of the eighteen and nineteen hundreds, is that you
get a massive bureauocracy. The bureaucracy is built on the
model of the police, and they get bigger and more powerful,
and by the time you're you know, you're halfway through
the twentieth century, you get you get a modern standing army.
And that's something that is very, very weird. The Founders,
who you know, suck ass in enormous numbers of ways,
are also fundamentally and deeply opposed to standing armies because
(15:19):
you know, they are students of Roman history and they
know that standing armies have this, you know, this sort
of way of seizing power. But we've led it in
a situation where you know, they don't really need to, right.
The US Army is kept in check by the fact
that it has it basically unlimited budget that increases every year,
so you can't even like talk about cutting it without
getting accused of treason. But it didn't used to be
(15:40):
like that in the eighteen hundreds. Right after a war
would end, you know, entire parts of the like they like,
you know, all the US cavalry for example, sometimes which
just get disbanded. Right, there'd be these massive reductions in
troop size in behitry wars, and you know that's that
like doesn't happen anymore, right, But the product of this
was that, you know, there weren't that many like armed
(16:02):
agents of the state running around with guns. And that's
the thing that is completely and utterly ubiquitous in modern
American life. I mean, modern American life has reached a
point where people you can't even imagine what it would
be like if there weren't cops literally everywhere, and if
you didn't have the ability to call the police about anything.
And that was just the sort of the state of
(16:22):
affairs for a lot of the eighteen hundreds in the
US is that just you know, they're really weren't police.
And you know, there's kind of midpoint in the level
of sort of bureaucratic development and the level of sort
of the bureaucracy of violence, that is the police happens
(16:43):
after a bit after the Civil War, where there are
not enough police to develop the kind of sort of
to deploy against the kind of violence that companies need
to stop unions informing. And you know there's a secondary problem, right,
which is okay, so you know there are armed troops
in a state, but the armed troops are the militia.
(17:05):
And you know a lot of the times the militia
can be relied upon to choose striking workers and break them.
But there's always a chance that you ordered the militia in,
and the militia are people from the towns where you
know where the striking workers are from. But this is
a real problem with sheriffs too, right, is that in
this period, you get it, you get a lot of
sheriffs who just won't prosecute workers because the entire town
(17:28):
and the sheriff are all pro union. And this is
where we come to the pinkertons. But first, and this
is something that the Pinkertons would have approved of some
ads and we're back. So who are the Pinkertons. The
(17:54):
Pinkertons are founded by a guy named Alan Pinkerton. Alan
Pinkerton's an interesting guy. He's he's kind of a radical
when he's young, he's like he's a hardcore abolitionist who
like funds John Brown. Right, there's a whole debate about
the extent to which she was involved in a sort
of British workers reform movement called the chartlists every source
(18:17):
I've read disagrees about how much he was involved in it.
It's I mean, one's disagreements are basically penning the radiology.
I don't know if I ever going to get a
good answer about how involved in it he is. But
Pinkerton briefly and kind of by accident, becomes a bounty hunter.
But he just like walks across it, just runs into
(18:37):
a camp of people who seem to clearly be counterfeiters.
And he eventually becomes a detective around Michigan and then
in Chicago, and then he becomes a postal cop. And
in the process of being a postal cop, he figures
out something that is more lucrative. He figured out a
more lucrative way to detective work than just working for
the state, which is working for the railway. So by
(19:01):
eighteen fifty he has a full detective agency going that
he renames the Pinkertons. Now, you know, this is the
eighteen fifties, right, you are rapidly coroaching the Civil War,
dreaming the Civil War. He is hired by George McClellan,
the just the worst union general. He runs a spy
network in the Confederacy that absolutely sucks, Like all the
(19:22):
spies get caught. His intelligence being awful. It's one of
the things that leads McClellan to suspect, you know, that
there's like secretly way more Confederate troops that there actually are.
So he just never does anything for the entire world.
He's like the worst union general until he gets replaced. Yeah,
when McClellan is asked, Pinkerton is also out, but you know,
the agency is still around and the detectives are initially
(19:45):
known as Sidered as cinder Dix for complicated a railroading reasons. Yeah,
I don't know about that one, but it's very funny
and what they sort of do, right, is in this
early phase, they have this massive network of sort of
informants and spies that they sell to the highest bidder.
They're not sort of when you know, they are detectives
(20:07):
right in sometimes, but they're not detectives in the Sherlock
sense where you have a guy who sees a bunch
of evidence and then uses logic and uses an investigation
to deduce like who did the crime. Pinkerton detectives are operatives.
They do infiltrations. This is basically their one trick, right
is they send a guy undercover and then he gets
people to talk to him, and then they catch the
(20:29):
guy because someone talked. Right now. The other thing that
the Pinkertons are really really good at is spinning mythology
around them. Pinkerton claims that he saved Lincoln from an
assassination plot, and you know, he successfully convinces Lincoln to
flee a building in a disguise. Right. The problem is
(20:50):
that you know, as early as like the next day
after this like supposed plot happens, assassinating assassination plot happens,
people were already claiming that there was one. And you know,
I think the evidence for their not being one is
bolstered by the fact that no one was ever like,
not only was no one ever tried for this, no
one was ever even arrested for again, a plot to
(21:11):
assassinate the president of the United States. So I am
inclined to suspect that this was fake. So sorians disagree
about this, but he's able to milk this for incredible
pr right, He's you know, he's like, I'm the guy
who saved the president. And he does this whole sort
of like, ah, if I had been there when I
if I, if I had only been there when Lincoln
(21:32):
was being gunned down by John wielks Booth, ah, I
would have saved him. And you know this this makes
him very famous. They also start doing you know, it's
sort of word noting, right, the kind of crime that
they're doing, these guys are, they're they're basically a corporate
anti crime group, right. They they solve crimes, but the
(21:52):
crimes that they solve are people stealing from corporations. So,
for example, they do a lot of solving bank robberies.
They do a lot of security to stop train robbers,
they do counterfeiting. These are all kinds of crimes that
affect rich people. And you know, and so the Pinkertons
are slowly starting to gain this reputation to sort of
(22:14):
like the hired hands of capital. Now they're also sort
of doing like frontier outlaws stuff. There's a gang of
people who this is a gang sort of bandits who
they very successfully break up, but they also go after
Jesse James. And Okay, we need to tell the story
of Jesse James briefly here because it's an important thing
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to get an understanding of what the sort of conflict
that's going on in the West is at this point.
And the thing that's incredibly important to understand about the
story of Jesse James versus the Pinkertons is that there
are no heroes here. Every single person involved in all
sides is just an absolutely terrible person. So Jesse James
is an ex Confederate terrorist who somehow managed to make
(22:57):
robbing trains uncol by doing it and a KKK rope
with the aim of like restoring the honor of the Confederacy.
So this sucks. And this is where part of the
sort of like rebel flag like that, part of the
sort of like lost cause myth those comes from. Right there,
are you know, there are these sort of frontier outlaws
who are like ex Confederates whose things like yeah, we're
(23:20):
like against the man and like the man is like
you know, the north Right. But these people suck right.
These are these are these are these are people who
fought and died for slavery. I Jesse James in particular,
like he's again he's in this group of like gorillas
who are fighting in Kansas and Missouri, and they do
they do things that are genuinely unspeakable. So these people
(23:44):
suck right. But the problem is the people going after
them are the Pinkertons. And we're gonna learn a lot
about the Pinkertons by what they managed to accomplish by
going after again ex Confederate terrorists who are like some
of the worst people whove ever lived. So the Pinkertons
take this case in eighteen seventy one. He sends in
a bunch of agents try to infiltrate the gang, and
Jesse James just like smokes them all. So, in a
(24:05):
very sort of modern cop move, the Pinkertons do a
raid on Jesse James's house. So they throw in this
weird pseudo It's a very weird kind of explosive device
thing that I don't know. They claim that they were
just trying to scare like the family out of the
(24:28):
house so they could arrest them. But the family sees
this thing that looks like a bomb and they throw
it into their fireplace and it blows up, and instead
of smoking the family out, they have now blown up
Jesse James's nine year old step brother and maimed his mom.
So the Pinkertons absolutely suck right like so far in
there at Kemp to catch Jesse James. They have managed
(24:50):
to blow up a child and maame a woman. Now
you could ask the question, right, Okay, so they have
killed a child, they have maimed a woman. Get Jesse James. No, no,
they don't. They never get him, because that's what happens
when you know, you have an ex Confederate in places
where with a bunch of ex confederates, with a bunch
of people who support the Confederacy right, they won't turn
(25:12):
over their own people. And you know, and when the
people they're going up against are the Pinkertons, who are
like the hired guns of Northern Capital, a bunch of people,
you know what happens is a bunch of grand people
end up dead, and yeah, but both sides of this
are incredibly deeply evil. Jesse James is later shot by
one of his own men, and yeah, that is the
(25:33):
famous story of Jesse James versus the Pinkertons, which I
think is useful in establishing that, like God, like, the
South are obviously the bad guys in the Civil War,
but a lot of the people in the Union are
sort of genuinely awful hired gun for capital people. And
(25:55):
you know that's not so much of a big deal
dreamed the war, but after the war, you know, you
got these battles just like, oh God, everyone here is
like everyone here should simply die now. Ellen Pinkerton dies
in eighteen eighty six, and he is replaced by his
even worse sons. And at this point the Pinkertons cease
(26:16):
even sort of the pretense of being a detective agency,
and they devote themselves full time to being strike breakers.
Now they have spies everywhere. They have you know, over
a thousand of them at their peak, spread across the
dozens and dozens and dozens of unions. They are spying
on meetings or appointed to the pinkertons. And this allows corporations.
For example, if you know who's in a union meeting, right,
(26:37):
you can just fire all of them. And this is
especially easy. And you know in this sort of pre
nineteen thirties period where like there is no protected right
to strike, right like you if you stop working, that
is illegal. The other thing they do is provide quote
unquote security for corporations Traine strikes. What this looks like
(27:00):
practice is shooting people. And you know, sometimes those people
are striking workers, like the three strikers they killed in
the Pennsylvania Colt strike of eighteen ninety. Sometimes they just
shoot random bystanders, like the random guy they shoteen in
eighteen sixty six, while providing security. And you know, again
when you're shooting a random bystander, you have to ask
like security for who, Like who is the security you're
(27:25):
providing for when you're just shooting random people, you know,
anominally it's for the boss that's in a dog strike.
And sometimes, like in eighteen seventy seven, they shoot children
where they shot and killed a fifteen year old you
a Jersey coal wharf strike, you know, and they do
stuff like this all the time, right, there's a famous
incident in Chicago where a bunch of people are yelling
at them because again the thinker doesn't have a really
(27:47):
bad reputation among workers at this point. And you know,
there's there's a point where they're they're going by on
a train and people yelled the train and the Pinkertons
just bomb by, taking out the rifles and shooting four
people out the window. So you know, these are these
are good people, TM right. The other thing they do
is they start getting into breaking strikes by being a
(28:07):
company you can hire to import scabs, and this culminates
in the Homestead strike. Again, there's another thing. There's like
a giant Bastard's episode on, but we'll do we'll do
a short version of the Homestead strike. So the Homestet
strike is this giant confrontation between steel workers and the
forces of Andrew Carnagie and Henry Frick. Carnagian Frick like
(28:28):
locked the union out of the factory and they call
a Pinkerton army to seize control of the town of Homestead.
This is from the book Inventing the Pinkertons. Quote. By
the end of June, he had built around the mills,
a protective twelve foot fence that included rifle holes, waterman's
capable of blasting strikers with boiling water, and wires attached
to a generator which could be electrified. In response, workers
(28:51):
dubbed the mills Fort Frick. Now striking steel workers and
other residents of Homestead. Here the pinkertons are coming, and they,
you know, they that the pinkertons are trying to land
on these like invasion barges that they've modified, and so
the homestead people go try to stop the barges, and
the Pinkertons start shooting at them. And this is this
is another thing that's very interesting about this whole story
(29:12):
is that, Okay, every account at the time agrees that
the first person the people who started shooting first with pinkertons.
Later accounts suddenly, like mysteriously later on it suddenly start
to claim it like, well, nobody really knows she started
the shooting in these fights, or like maybe it was
a worker. But like again, everyone at the time gose
(29:34):
it was the pinkertons. So I and given given what
we know about the track record of pinkertons are shooting
children of shooting random people yelling at them outside of
a train of shooting, just literally random people on the streets.
We can be pretty sure the Pinkertons started this, and
but you know, the workers in Homestead are heavily armed,
and this starts a massive gun battle. I'm gonna read
(29:56):
from inventing the Pinkertons again. This serious battle woul the
next fourteen hours. After an initial surge, the Pinkertons were
pinned down in their barges. After several hours, the crowd
attempted to sink the barges by cannon fire. Residents borrowed
the cannon that had been that the city used for
commemorations and by the way, that that's a civil war
cannon that they're using it in eighteen ninety to try
(30:17):
to sink these boats. The crowd also set burning railcars
rolling towards the barges and sprayed oil into their river,
which they attempted a light on fire in hopaes of
burning the Pikertons out of their barges. The lubricating oil
thrown onto the water proved impossible to set a flame.
So the Pickertons like try to surrender, but by this
(30:37):
one people hate them so much that every they showed
this four times and each time someone will hold up
a white flag and a sniper will shoot the flag
and refuse to let them surrender. On try five, the
Picckertons are finally allowed to surrender and the Pickersons are crushed,
but unfortunately, the state militia is brought in to sort
of break the strike and the union movement in Pennsylvania
is essentially destroyed. But why this is terrible from the Pinkertons,
(31:03):
and they start trying to do like a giant pr
op to sort of recover the reputation, and a lot
of what the sort of popular image of the Pinkertons
right comes from the pr op the agency does, like
after the homes distruct that gets reproduced by like TV
producers later on. So fast forwarding a little bit to
some other stuff that they were involved in. In late
nineteen oh five, someone blew up the notoriously anti union
(31:26):
governor of Idaho who'd sent troops to kill striking workers
a few years ago. Now Idaho hires a Pinkerton detective
to just torture a guy into confessing to the murder
and then also claiming that like basically every instance of
violence in the last five years in that part of
the US was committed by the IWW, who are THEWW
(31:48):
are a very very radical union whose thing basically was
that society should be run by like confederations of direct
democratic unions like run you know, all all of society,
all production should be run by workers in these in
you know, in in in the form of like one
giant direct democratic union. And people hate this, and by people,
(32:10):
I mean like bosses absolutely hate this. Dow IWW very
popularly with workers. Bosses are going to spend the next
rest of there's just murdering them, you know. But having
tortured this guy into saying, into fingering the industrial workers
of the world in this conspiracy, they get Big Bill Haywood,
who is one of the most famous and like successful
(32:31):
organizers of the AWW, and several other IWW leaders kidnapped
and taken into Idaho to stand trial for murder, which
again they had nothing to do with. Heywood is defended
by Clarence Darrow of the infamous Scopes monkey trial, and
Heywood gets off, but the case to serious damage to
the WW. If you want to learn more about this
(32:52):
whole story, go listen to Cool People who did cool stuff.
There's two episodes about the IWW in this period called
the IWW In the Hobbo you saved free speech. It's
good stuff, you know. I should also briefly mention, right,
another thing that the Pinkertons do is Okay, so if
someone if someone's wanted in one state, right, instead of
(33:13):
having to like make you know, the government having to
like the state government have to making requests, have to
be having to make request to another state in order
to get them to extradite someone, they would just have
the Pingertons kidnap them. This is this is this is
one of the sort of big services they provide. They
also seemed it's very unclear. I don't know, this historical
record is a bit muddled. They seem also to have
(33:34):
been people you could hire if so if like your
spouse was trying to divorce you, which sucks. Is deeply evil.
They do sort of lots more deeply evil stuff, which
we will get into after these ads. All right, we're back,
(34:00):
So speaking of deeply evil stuff, they also send one
hundred detectives to break a strike of the mostly black
Brotherhood of Timber Workers, which is an IWW affiliate in Louisiana.
Now they break this They try to break this union
by walking into a union meeting shooting forty four people
and killing four of them. There are like forty more
(34:21):
stories of a guy with the Pinkerton walks in and
shoots amongst people that I could put here. I had
to find the limit at some point to how many
stories about Pinkerton's murdering people that I could I could
sort of put. But you know, there's an interesting shift
that starts to happen in the in sort of as
the nineteen hundred, you know, the nineteen hundreds turn into
(34:41):
nineteen tens. The Pinkertons start to figure out that it's
more effective to form mobs of vigilantes than it is
to fight unions directly. And there's a few benefits here, right,
There's less danger to Pinkerton detectives themselves. It's easier to
deploy large numbers of people. Instead of having to sort
of like pay an enormous amount of money for bunch
of like eight hundred detectives and weapons and logistics, you
(35:02):
would just sort of whip up a mob, we get
them to do the shooting, right. The Pinkerdons also get
plausible deniability, which is very helpful for their reputation. And
you know, the Pinkertons are very much ahead of the
curve here. The government, you know, who is going to
displace the Pinkertons is sort of the main force opposing
the IWW in later sort of like Cio union organizing
that you know, turn into the two Red Scares. They're
(35:24):
going to start taking pages from the Pinkerton's book, and
eventually they are going to you know, instead of like
sending the US Army to invade Nicarago, which is what
they would have done in the eighteen hundreds, by you know,
by the time he gets in the nineteen eighties, right,
they are sending people to train Nicaraguan desk squads. And
so we can track the shift here. Right as the
(35:46):
nineteenth century comes to a close and we get to
sort of the October Revolution of the height of the
Red Scare, we're in a place where they're starting to
be enough cops and enough federal agents to do the
job the Pinkertons had done in previous generations. And you know,
there's sort of robust arguments in the sort of historiography
about to what extent J Edgar Hoover and the FBI
(36:10):
were influenced by the Pinkertons. I think there's decent evidence
that they that they were influenced by them. But the
FBI kind of turns into what the Pinkertons are. You know,
they're the people who suddenly are like showing up and
shooting people, showing up and arresting union organizers, deporting union
organizers from the country. But this puts the Pinkertons in
kind of a weird spot, right, The Pinkerton name has
(36:32):
become synonymous with sort of this this kind of like
they're called sort of like feudal retainers, right, these sort
of lawless private armies that are not supposed to exist
in a democracy. And so you know in the nineteen
thirties when the Wagner Act like makes strikes legal, right.
I talked about the Wagner Acts a long time ago,
(36:53):
an episode called The Eden Makes Us Strong. But after this,
they tried Robert Pinkerton, the second who's the new sort
of owner with the Pinkertons, tries to do a rebrand
and he has this great quote. That's quote he's talking
about union busting. That is a phase of our business
that we are not particularly delighted or proud of and
we're out of it. However, there was nothing illegal about
(37:16):
it at the time. Now, okay, you could say a
lot about what was or wasn't illegal in a period
when you know, you could order a drink that was
cocaine mixed with wine and you know, you could just
get like opium prescribe to your baby, But torturing and
murdering people was still illegal back then. Now, I guess
if you're you know, if you really wanted to have fun,
you can get into an argument that like, nowhere in
the Constitution is murdered specifically banned, but like you don't
(37:39):
have fun with that. But FDR and the New Dealers
go after the Pinkertons very hard. And this is a
lot of interesting effects. What it means is, on the
one hand, you can't have some guy with a detective
badge who works for a corporation walked into a union
meeting and start the killing. But it also means that
when you need someone to smash a union by force,
it's going to be the state doing it. And the
(38:00):
aposteosis of this sort of one of the internal contradictions
that destroys a new Deal is that it's reliance on
the state to contain the worst exis of capitalism means
that you know, they have in turn directly enormously empowered
the state and the state's military capacity. And this means
that in the nineteen eighties, unions are going to be
destroyed by the state that the New Deal had built.
(38:23):
The Pickerchins are replaced by Hoover and the g Men,
and the g Men are eventually sort of become known
as the dreaded modern fat who you know, lurks at
every doorstep eating babies and is the terror of every
sort of political movement in the US. Now. The Pinkertons,
for for their part, right with union busting now technically illegal,
(38:44):
and when I say union busting like I mean walking in,
shooting people stop and performing a union, they start working
basically as regular security guards. And then they move on
to selling surveillance equipment and trainings for government organizations. And
this reflects a kind of large shift in what what
kinds of military operations the corporations run, which is that
(39:07):
instead of directly running armies or hiring groups like the
Pinkertons to do violence for them, now what they're in
the business of is intelligence operations. And this changes the
way that corporations kill people enormously. You know, when when
Coca Cola now needs to kill union organizers, right, they
have paramilitaries for this. Now, some of these guys are contractors,
some of them are paid under the table, some of
(39:28):
them are in it for ideology, some of it for money.
But it's not, you know, it's not quite like Coca
Cola has its own military force like it would have
been in the eighteen hundreds, in the early eighteen hundreds.
It's also not there is just like a private but
there's not like it's not they're not. They're not also
not like hiring a specific private military contractor. Right the
(39:49):
way they do, way they do it tends to be
they you know, sort of semi clandestinely arm paramilitary. Now,
there are limited exceptions where sort of like oil companies
will have at armies and places where civil wars are
going on, but that's usually a thing that happens when
they're in a place that doesn't have state capacity. When
they're in a place that does have state capacity, like
(40:10):
for example, Nigeria, you get a very very different story.
So Nigeria is a major oil producer, and this has
a number of consequences on the places where that oil
is extracted. A huge amount of it comes from the
Niger Delta, where the government faces an almost perennial insurgency. So, okay,
why is there an insurgency there?
Speaker 2 (40:29):
Right?
Speaker 1 (40:29):
Part of the reason is that there is an indescribable
amount of wealth coming out of the oil and Niger Delta,
and that money goes mostly to I mean, might I
say mostly ninety percent of it, right, goes to Nigerian
elites and corrupt for and oil companies. And you know,
another part of the reason this turns into an insurgency
is that people try nonviolence of disobedience in the Niger
(40:50):
Delta to protest the sort of horrific environmental consequences of
companies like Shell doing oil extraction, you know. And they
have these marches that will draw out three hundred thousand
people in places where this is half of the population,
half of the total population of the ethnic group being affected.
The Nigerian government responds by publicly executing one of the
(41:12):
movement's leaders, the famous activist Ken Sarrowewa, by hanging him
and then dissolving his body and limes we couldn't be buried,
which is a real British empire shit. And okay, so
at this point you've come to the sort of crossroad
of a nonviolent movement, right where the government's answer to
non violence we will publicly hang you and you get
you get to this question do you take up arms?
(41:32):
And the answer is yeah, a lot of people do. Right.
This is this is this is a very complicated insurgency
in a lot of ways that you know, we can't
do justice here too. But I want to read something
from this interview from a guy for the Movement for
the Emancipation of the Niger Delta Men, which is one
of the like many many, many, many many like militant
groups that appear in the Delta over the last twenty
five years. Quote, this is our territory. The soldiers dare
(41:56):
not come here. Now they came, and we defeat them.
He says. We are civilized people, educated people, and we
do not want our children to be deprived as we
have been deprived so other people can get rich from
what is under our feet. The oil companies have had
many years to treat us rights. They have never done that.
Now we are making them think now if this is
(42:18):
you know, eighteen twenty, right, and Shell is dealing with
people taking up arms and cutting off their ability to
sort of like extract profits of oil. They would form
an army of semi literate Belgian and British barbarians, arm
them with cannons and conquer the region and in place
the entire area under direct corporate rule. You know, if
this was say, like the eighteen nineties, right, they would
hire the Pinkertons and the Pinkertons to go shoot these
(42:40):
people for them. But this is the nineteen nineties, in
the two thousands, so instead, what Shell does is literally
pay the salaries of Nigerian cops you go slaughter protesters
in the streets. And eventually they moved to spending hundreds
of millions of dollars just just between two thousand and
seven two thousand and nine alone directly funding equipping and army,
(43:02):
the Nigerian army and a special like war crimes task
force called the Joint Task Force the JFT, which is
this like it's this sort of incredible thing where the army,
the navy, and the police do a fusion dance to
massacre civilians. And you know, I say this hundreds and
millions of dollars. Right, that's an underestimate, that's just three years.
That's just what we know about. The actual total that
(43:24):
they sunk into sort of like literally funding the Nigerian
Army is enormous. Now, what's interesting here is that Shell
does have its own security guards, but the ratio of
what they spend in the Nigerian Army versus what they
spend on their own security guards is two to one.
And this goes to demonstrate the point that I've sort
of been making this episode, right, which is that there's
(43:46):
been a shift in you know, if you are a
company like Shell, right who has a need, you know,
who are horrifically exploiting a bunch of people to the
point where you need to shoot them in order to
keep them in line. Instead of going to like a
private detective agency or having your own army, they are
increasingly simply funding the state. And you know this means
(44:09):
that right again, instead of the Pinkertons, the actual trigger
pullers are cops. They are the police, There are the military,
they're weird special forces groups. And you know where that
sort of leaves space for groups like the Pinkertons now
is the area that's left for them is in corporate intelligence,
(44:31):
and this seems to be most of what the Pinkertons
have been up to recently. Amazon hired them in the
last few years to work and to work with their
intelligence division, the Global Security Operations Center, which they use
to try to stomp out union organizing in their warehouses.
And Amazon isn't just sort of spying on union organizers,
spying on basically every social group but they can get
(44:52):
their hands on. Here's from WECE. In twenty nineteen, Amazon
monitored the yellowfst movement known as the jele jean as
roots uprising for economic just to spread across France and
solidarity movements in Vienna and protest against state repression in Iran.
They've been deployed deployed againt strikes of communication workers in
West Virginia, Google and Facebook deploys them against their own
(45:14):
employees to prodout leakers. Now, this is all in line
with the pivot of sort of corporate repression towards mass surveillance. Interestingly,
the Pinkertons have been planting stories in the press about
going back to their roots as mercenaries, pitching themselves. As
you know, the force that can stop climate chaos with
ex military forces. The company claims to have been deployed
(45:35):
by corporations in Puerto Rico after the hurricane and after
Hurricane Ria in twenty seventeen. I don't know if that's true.
This is possible, but again it's something that they have
to be very careful with the Pinkertons is that they
are very, very brand obsessed, even though they're now owned
by like a different sort of Swedish security company, and
(45:56):
they lie constantly, so it's very difficult to stort up
the myth from the fact when myth making has been
such a vital part of their branding from the beginning.
For another example, here's from New York Times magazine. Among
their most popular news services is the Pinkerton Dedicated Professional,
in which agents join a client's company like any other
new hire, allowing them to provide intel one employees. By
(46:21):
twenty eighteen, the agency said it could count among its
clients about eighty percent of Fortune one thousand companies. Are
these numbers correct? Who knows? They absolutely could be lying right.
On the other hand, here's Gizmoto talking about the current
reach of the Pinkertons in Magic the gathering. There are
other connections between Wizards of the Coast and the Pinkerton Agency.
(46:44):
Robert M. Klemmick, who has been the director of Security
Risk Management at Hasbro, Inc. Which is the parent company
Wizards of the Coast for twelve years, was previously the
director of supply chain Security Practice at Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations.
The current manager of Global Investigations just all to a
floor of Pinkerton agents. So what we saw in the
(47:04):
fact that you know, Wizards of the Coast said the
Pinkertons after a guy who made a YouTube video showing
some cards that he bought from someone else, is you know,
you can see in that the arc of the arc
of of what the Pinkertons are trying to do. Right,
You have, on the one hand, the Pinkertons falling back
into their sort of intelligence role. You also have them
(47:28):
like specifically trading on their reputation to intimidate people. And
you know, the reputation they acquired by killing unfathomable numbers
of people between the eighteen hundreds, which they use to
sort of intimidate people by just sort of the power
of their reputation. You can see something very interesting, which
is that the Pinkertons don't arrest Dan Cannon directly, right,
They're able to leave with the sort of goods. But
(47:52):
what they threatened Dan Cannon with is the regular police.
And that is I think a very important aspect of
what the story actually is, which is it's a story
about the modern division of labor, of violence against people
who corporations don't like, and that division of labor runs
through security. You know, you have your major, you have
(48:12):
a major corporation. That corporation has its own security division.
That security division is connected to the Pinkertons. They use
the Pinkertons as an intelligence network, and they have done
several times now. And then you know, when it comes
time to you know, you can use the Pinkertons as
like the people will the stop you booth. But when
it comes time to actually do violence against someone, when
(48:34):
it comes time to arrest someone, that's the state's job.
And that, I think is the thing that's that you know,
that that's very important to understand about the way all
of this stuff works is that the thing that is
true now about the year twenty twenty three that was
not true about the year like eighteen seventy three. Is
(48:55):
that the the sort of primary driver of corporate violence
in you know, in in in the US and abroad
is not necessarily private security companies. It is the state,
and it is the police. And yeah, this has been
it could happen here. Uh, the police, suck acab get
(49:17):
rid of them.
Speaker 2 (49:22):
It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts,
you can find sources for It could Happen here, updated
monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
Welcome Dick. It Happened Here a podcast about things falling
apart and sometimes about how to put them back together again.
I'm your host, Na Wong. This is a we are
once again talking about Wizards of the Coast. Now this
time is not about dungeons and dragons. It is about
their other property, Magic the Gathering, which if you don't know,
(00:25):
is Wizards of the Coast's trading card game that's at
the forefront of some truly wild stuff. Right now. Now
you could ask Mia, why are we even talking about
this about Magic the Gathering on this show, And you know,
there's multiple answers. One of them is that as industrial
profit rates have been decreasing in the last half a century,
(00:45):
capital has increasingly turned towards entertainment as a way to
make money. Magic is now a billion dollar brand, partnering
with everything from Fortnite to The Walking Dead to and
this is not a joke, being in the process of
releasing an entire set of Lord of the Rings card.
As capital is flooded into the entertainment industry and Magic
in particular, our silly little hobbies are suddenly the front
(01:07):
lines of class struggle. Workers at TCG player, this year,
given the job of sorting through literally tens of thousands
of cards that TCG player processes finally won their second
attempt to form a union after two devastating union busting campaigns.
And this is where things get very, very weird. Now
bear with me here, dear listeners. We have to talk
(01:29):
about a little bit of Magic minutia to understand what
has happened in this incident, and then we will get
back to what the show is usually about, which is
corporations killing enormous numbers of people. So a few days ago,
Dan Cannon, a man who runs a very small Magic
YouTube channel called Old School EMPTG, bought what he thought
were cards in the latest Magic the Gathering set called
(01:50):
March of the Machine. Now Magic releases new cards periodically
and what are called sets. These sets have plots and characters,
They've written stories. They are enormous sort of lower events,
they have enormous hype behind them, And March of the
Machine story wise, is basically the version of an Avengers movie.
Giant apocalyptic threats, all the heroes crossing over, people, hopping
(02:14):
through multi versus, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, okay,
this has happened before. You know, Wizards does big sets.
It wasn't that weird, but Wizard decided to do something
very very weird, which is they printed, for the first
time ever, a mini set called March of the Machines
March of the Machine Aftermath. Now, the regular March of
(02:37):
the Machine set has three hundred and eighty seven cards
in it, Aftermath has fifty. Now, I don't know why
they decided to do this. They've never done anything like
this if they've never printed just a tiny set they
release a bit after the regular set before and you know,
the names are very very confusing, right, one is called
March of the Machine and the other one is Marching
the Machine Aftermath. How is a regular person supposed to
(02:59):
keep track of this? The mind boggles, et cetera, et cetera.
Either way, So Dan Cannon tries to buy cards from
the regular March of the Machine set. What he gets
in sent instead are by accident March of the Machine
Aftermath cards. Now, these cards are still secret. They have
not been revealed yet, no no one, no one knows
(03:20):
what they are. No one's supposed to know what they are.
Before every set, there's an incredibly elaborate process where Wizards
gives cards to influencers to reveal them to the public,
and on a certain date, everyone reveals, you know, your
influencer reveals what their card is, and there's this whole
hype cycle on Reddit, and everyone argues about how good
the cards are, and I'll call the art is and
what it means for the story. It's sort of it's
(03:43):
sort of similar to the sort of hype cycles that
would happen around trailers from Marvel movies, or people would
be analyzing every detail of it, etcetera, et cetera. And
these are these spoiler seasons, as they're called, are a
huge deal for Wizards. Date. Wizards tries to heavily control
the entire process, but sometimes cards leak out. Now Dan
Cannon suddenly has been handed a bunch of cards no
(04:06):
one has ever seen before. So he does what you know,
every person who just suddenly has magic cards that haven't
been revealed yet do and have been doing for years
and years and years. He makes a video showing off
the cards. Now, importantly, this is not illegal. I need
to stress this because of what what's going to happen,
What is going to happen next? You you know, it's
(04:28):
it's it's it's very very easy to look at the
at the sort of severity of what's going to happen
to this guy and assume that he broke a law.
But no, he did not. He did not break a law.
Nothing he has done he is illegal. Literally, what he's
done is he bought some magic cards from someone who
screwed up and accidentally broke the street date for selling
cards because he confused March of the Machine with March
of the Machine aftermath, Wow, how can anyone make that
(04:52):
mistake right? The genius of Wizards of the Coast marketing
is unmatched. Everything they do is incredibly clear, et cetera,
et cetera. Now in the pros says because of how
many cards he bought and how small the set is,
he reveals most of the cars that are in the set,
and then the Pinkertons show up to his house, forced
(05:13):
their way through his door, make his wife cry, threaten
to arrest him, and threaten to put him in prison
for ten years with two hundred thousand dollars fines for
copyright infringement on the grounds of him having stolen material.
The Pinkertons also harass his elderly neighbors. Literally. Just today,
as I'm recording this, a story broken gizmoto that revealed
(05:35):
that Wizards of the Coast have used the Pinkertons before
to go after stolen goods. Now, some of you may
be asking who are the Pinkertons, And I think some
of you probably know in very broad outlines who the
Pinkertons are. But in order to really get at the
core of what this organization is and why they look
(05:56):
the way they do today as compared to how they've
looked in the past, we need to ask another question,
which is how has the balance of military power between
the state and corporations changed over time? And this seems
like a very weird question, but the Pinkertons emerge in
a very weird period of time in this balance. They
(06:17):
are what fills in the gap between corporations directly having
armies that could conquer nations and modern corporations who, instead
of having their own personal armies, have intelligence of vast
intelligence agencies, but also rely on the police and the
governments as the people who do violence for them. So
let's go back and tell the story from the beginning
by taking a brief look at the most infamous corporate
(06:39):
army of them all, the army of the East India
Trading Company. The East India Trading Company was formed in
sixteen hundred and it was given a vast state monopoly
over trade in what they called East India, which is
an area we would broadly call Southeast Asia and the
South Pacific today. And at the start these guys are
(07:00):
optimistically they are half trading group half pirate. The level
of piracy is really high, especially in the early days.
They you know, trade for spices. They steal a lot
of other people's spices from places like Java and they
bring them back to England. They make a lot of
money now over the course of their actions. And again
(07:21):
it's worth noting these people are kind of the descendants
of the British privateers, people like Thomas Drake, who'd been
you know, just pirates who have been hired by the
government to only go after like Spanish ships instead of
English ships. So they are, you know, from the beginning,
the East India Company has this sort of dna of
army in it, and over the course of about two
(07:45):
centuries they are going to conquer with their own army
most of what is now India and Pakistan, and that
territory is either going to indirectly or directly come under
the rule of the East India Company. And the EASTERNDA
Company is fighting war everywhere again. They seize Indian Pakistent
by force, they are fighting wars in Afghanistan. They kill
(08:06):
unfathomable numbers of people. The worst of these events is
the Great Bengalf Famine. There's a Behind the Bastard's episode
about this that you can listen to if you want
a really sort of long thing about the East India
Company and the famine. But I want to talk about
the famine a little bit, because so the Great Bengalf
(08:26):
Famine of seventeen seventy kills ten million people. And I
knew this intellectually, right, I studied a bit in college.
But what I had never actually looked up somehow, what
I'd never seen was the percentage of the population of
this famine kills. And this famine is directly the fault
of the East India Company. This is something that all
(08:47):
historians who of look at this agree is that this
is directly the fault of these India Company and the
combination of their agricultural policies and their tax extraction. The
sort of put into perspective how bad this gets. The
highest serious estimates for the number of people who die
in the Great Leap Forward stands at about thirty million dead.
This is an unfathomable atrocity. It is a scale of
(09:09):
death at which the human mind breaks down and loses
the ability to process. Some of my family lived through it.
It is horrific in ways that are difficult to even
begin to describe. The Great Leap Forward killed about five
percent of China's population. The Great Bengal Famine killed thirty
percent of the population of India that the East India
(09:29):
Trading Company controlled thirty percent. That's not just sort of
small populations statistics either. Right, It's not like they killed
thirty percent of a country with thirty people in it, right.
They killed ten million people. This isn't you know. This
is an unbelievable force of human evil. They are capable
of killing people in numbers that defy comprehension. They're able
(09:53):
to do this because they have an army that is
the size of a great power in nation state. The
East India Trading comp Company's army in eighteen hundred had
two hundred thousand soldiers. That is a massive army today.
That is like the size of the active Ukrainian army
in twenty twenty two. It is more than twice the
size of the British army eighteen hundred. And you know,
(10:16):
in eighteen hundred it's not like the British aren't fighting wars,
right they are. In eighteen hundred the British are fighting
the war the Second Coalition. So there they are fighting Napoleon, right.
So this isn't a sort of you know, completely half
assed like peacetime British army. This is a you know,
this is a serious military force. And even once they
(10:37):
like fully build up their army at the peak of
the Napoleonic Wars thirteen years later, the entire size of
the British army is about two hundred fifty thousand troops.
That's not much larger than the East India Company's army.
At the same time, and at the height of the
East India Trading Company there are army swells to again
(10:57):
two hundred and fifty thousand, which is again the size
of the regular British army at in the most desperate
war that the British had fought to that point. The
Anitierating Company is a full on military great power, right.
But and this is this is this is something that
is going to shape an enormous amount of the sort
of arc of the relationship between corporate and military power.
(11:22):
It is unbelievably expensive to maintain an army like this
the the East, the British Stateia Company, even though they're
they you know, they are looting entire nations, right they
have they have they're there are entire states where they
fully taken over the tax services. They're just walking into
temples and taking stuff. But even with all of that profit,
(11:44):
right they you know, they have the ability to mint
their own coins in a lot of these areas, but
they still lose money. And they still lose money again
because they're maintaining this on two hundred and fifty thousand
strong army. And you know, so you have this problem, right,
which is that you have this item on your balance
sheet that is unfathomably expensive. And then you have a
second problem, which is that if you have an army,
(12:07):
there's always a danger. But the army goes into revolts,
and that's what happens in eighteen fifty seven, the British
managed to piss off their own army, which is almost
all composed of Indian troops, and they fight an incredibly
bloody war. Notice either this is the boy mutiny to
suppoy uprising and the British win, and they after victory
(12:27):
they strap a bunch of prisoners bodies to canons and
shoot them so they can't be properly buried. But the
consequence of this sort of horrifying war, and particularly the
sort of fear it invokes in the minds of you know,
the British populace of like, oh my god, these non
(12:48):
white people can actually fight us, is that they directly
seize control of India from the East India Trading Company.
And for all your nationalization fans out there, the British
assuming direct control of India is actually a nationalization. It's
not actually inherently socialist, guys, you have to be a
bit smarter than this. But that aside, right, this marks
(13:08):
an enormous shift in the sort of political economy of violence.
What is happening here is that states are assuming direct
military control over their colonies intead of operating through corporations.
And this means that what you see is a shift
from direct corporate armies to corporations using the state to
do violence for them. And this doesn't mean that corporations
(13:28):
don't use force directly today, and it also doesn't mean
that the governments, you know, weren't acting as the armies
of corporations and like the eighteen hundreds, but what's happening here,
and specifically the direct seizure of India from the East India,
the direct seizure of India from the East India Company,
marks a dramatic shift in the balance of forces away
(13:52):
from corporations with armies doing violence towards states doing violence
on their behalf. And this is one of the things,
alongside sort of slave catchers in the US, that leads
to the formation of the police. You see this but
both both both in Britain and in sort of France, right,
you start to get police agencies that are you know,
(14:12):
largely tasked putting down their own working class. And this
is one of the things, one of the sort of
inexorable marches that happens over the course of the twentieth century,
and it's also happened in nineteenth century too. There is
a sort of mass centralization of state and police power,
and particularly that's an expansion of the bureaucracy. Right the
American state in eighteen forty is barely a functional state
(14:35):
by today's standards, right, Like, they have an incredibly difficult
time even figuring out how many people there are in
the country that they're provisioning of services is a joke.
Nobody has like geek cars, Like people don't even have
birth certificates for the most part. And that's something you know,
and that's only that changes right over the course of
(14:56):
sort of the eighteen and nineteen hundreds, is that you
get a massive bureauocracy. The bureaucracy is built on the
model of the police, and they get bigger and more powerful,
and by the time you're you know, you're halfway through
the twentieth century, you get you get a modern standing army.
And that's something that is very, very weird. The Founders,
who you know, suck ass in enormous numbers of ways,
are also fundamentally and deeply opposed to standing armies because
(15:19):
you know, they are students of Roman history and they
know that standing armies have this, you know, this sort
of way of seizing power. But we've led it in
a situation where you know, they don't really need to, right.
The US Army is kept in check by the fact
that it has it basically unlimited budget that increases every year,
so you can't even like talk about cutting it without
getting accused of treason. But it didn't used to be
(15:40):
like that in the eighteen hundreds. Right after a war
would end, you know, entire parts of the like they like,
you know, all the US cavalry for example, sometimes which
just get disbanded. Right, there'd be these massive reductions in
troop size in behitry wars, and you know that's that
like doesn't happen anymore, right, But the product of this
was that, you know, there weren't that many like armed
(16:02):
agents of the state running around with guns. And that's
the thing that is completely and utterly ubiquitous in modern
American life. I mean, modern American life has reached a
point where people you can't even imagine what it would
be like if there weren't cops literally everywhere, and if
you didn't have the ability to call the police about anything.
And that was just the sort of the state of
(16:22):
affairs for a lot of the eighteen hundreds in the
US is that just you know, they're really weren't police.
And you know, there's kind of midpoint in the level
of sort of bureaucratic development and the level of sort
of the bureaucracy of violence, that is the police happens
(16:43):
after a bit after the Civil War, where there are
not enough police to develop the kind of sort of
to deploy against the kind of violence that companies need
to stop unions informing. And you know there's a secondary problem, right,
which is okay, so you know there are armed troops
in a state, but the armed troops are the militia.
(17:05):
And you know a lot of the times the militia
can be relied upon to choose striking workers and break them.
But there's always a chance that you ordered the militia in,
and the militia are people from the towns where you
know where the striking workers are from. But this is
a real problem with sheriffs too, right, is that in
this period, you get it, you get a lot of
sheriffs who just won't prosecute workers because the entire town
(17:28):
and the sheriff are all pro union. And this is
where we come to the pinkertons. But first, and this
is something that the Pinkertons would have approved of some
ads and we're back. So who are the Pinkertons. The
(17:54):
Pinkertons are founded by a guy named Alan Pinkerton. Alan
Pinkerton's an interesting guy. He's he's kind of a radical
when he's young, he's like he's a hardcore abolitionist who
like funds John Brown. Right, there's a whole debate about
the extent to which she was involved in a sort
of British workers reform movement called the chartlists every source
(18:17):
I've read disagrees about how much he was involved in it.
It's I mean, one's disagreements are basically penning the radiology.
I don't know if I ever going to get a
good answer about how involved in it he is. But
Pinkerton briefly and kind of by accident, becomes a bounty hunter.
But he just like walks across it, just runs into
(18:37):
a camp of people who seem to clearly be counterfeiters.
And he eventually becomes a detective around Michigan and then
in Chicago, and then he becomes a postal cop. And
in the process of being a postal cop, he figures
out something that is more lucrative. He figured out a
more lucrative way to detective work than just working for
the state, which is working for the railway. So by
(19:01):
eighteen fifty he has a full detective agency going that
he renames the Pinkertons. Now, you know, this is the
eighteen fifties, right, you are rapidly coroaching the Civil War,
dreaming the Civil War. He is hired by George McClellan,
the just the worst union general. He runs a spy
network in the Confederacy that absolutely sucks, Like all the
(19:22):
spies get caught. His intelligence being awful. It's one of
the things that leads McClellan to suspect, you know, that
there's like secretly way more Confederate troops that there actually are.
So he just never does anything for the entire world.
He's like the worst union general until he gets replaced. Yeah,
when McClellan is asked, Pinkerton is also out, but you know,
the agency is still around and the detectives are initially
(19:45):
known as Sidered as cinder Dix for complicated a railroading reasons. Yeah,
I don't know about that one, but it's very funny
and what they sort of do, right, is in this
early phase, they have this massive network of sort of
informants and spies that they sell to the highest bidder.
They're not sort of when you know, they are detectives
(20:07):
right in sometimes, but they're not detectives in the Sherlock
sense where you have a guy who sees a bunch
of evidence and then uses logic and uses an investigation
to deduce like who did the crime. Pinkerton detectives are operatives.
They do infiltrations. This is basically their one trick, right
is they send a guy undercover and then he gets
people to talk to him, and then they catch the
(20:29):
guy because someone talked. Right now. The other thing that
the Pinkertons are really really good at is spinning mythology
around them. Pinkerton claims that he saved Lincoln from an
assassination plot, and you know, he successfully convinces Lincoln to
flee a building in a disguise. Right. The problem is
(20:50):
that you know, as early as like the next day
after this like supposed plot happens, assassinating assassination plot happens,
people were already claiming that there was one. And you know,
I think the evidence for their not being one is
bolstered by the fact that no one was ever like,
not only was no one ever tried for this, no
one was ever even arrested for again, a plot to
(21:11):
assassinate the president of the United States. So I am
inclined to suspect that this was fake. So sorians disagree
about this, but he's able to milk this for incredible
pr right, He's you know, he's like, I'm the guy
who saved the president. And he does this whole sort
of like, ah, if I had been there when I
if I, if I had only been there when Lincoln
(21:32):
was being gunned down by John wielks Booth, ah, I
would have saved him. And you know this this makes
him very famous. They also start doing you know, it's
sort of word noting, right, the kind of crime that
they're doing, these guys are, they're they're basically a corporate
anti crime group, right. They they solve crimes, but the
(21:52):
crimes that they solve are people stealing from corporations. So,
for example, they do a lot of solving bank robberies.
They do a lot of security to stop train robbers,
they do counterfeiting. These are all kinds of crimes that
affect rich people. And you know, and so the Pinkertons
are slowly starting to gain this reputation to sort of
(22:14):
like the hired hands of capital. Now they're also sort
of doing like frontier outlaws stuff. There's a gang of
people who this is a gang sort of bandits who
they very successfully break up, but they also go after
Jesse James. And Okay, we need to tell the story
of Jesse James briefly here because it's an important thing
(22:37):
to get an understanding of what the sort of conflict
that's going on in the West is at this point.
And the thing that's incredibly important to understand about the
story of Jesse James versus the Pinkertons is that there
are no heroes here. Every single person involved in all
sides is just an absolutely terrible person. So Jesse James
is an ex Confederate terrorist who somehow managed to make
(22:57):
robbing trains uncol by doing it and a KKK rope
with the aim of like restoring the honor of the Confederacy.
So this sucks. And this is where part of the
sort of like rebel flag like that, part of the
sort of like lost cause myth those comes from. Right there,
are you know, there are these sort of frontier outlaws
who are like ex Confederates whose things like yeah, we're
(23:20):
like against the man and like the man is like
you know, the north Right. But these people suck right.
These are these are these are these are people who
fought and died for slavery. I Jesse James in particular,
like he's again he's in this group of like gorillas
who are fighting in Kansas and Missouri, and they do
they do things that are genuinely unspeakable. So these people
(23:44):
suck right. But the problem is the people going after
them are the Pinkertons. And we're gonna learn a lot
about the Pinkertons by what they managed to accomplish by
going after again ex Confederate terrorists who are like some
of the worst people whove ever lived. So the Pinkertons
take this case in eighteen seventy one. He sends in
a bunch of agents try to infiltrate the gang, and
Jesse James just like smokes them all. So, in a
(24:05):
very sort of modern cop move, the Pinkertons do a
raid on Jesse James's house. So they throw in this
weird pseudo It's a very weird kind of explosive device
thing that I don't know. They claim that they were
just trying to scare like the family out of the
(24:28):
house so they could arrest them. But the family sees
this thing that looks like a bomb and they throw
it into their fireplace and it blows up, and instead
of smoking the family out, they have now blown up
Jesse James's nine year old step brother and maimed his mom.
So the Pinkertons absolutely suck right like so far in
there at Kemp to catch Jesse James. They have managed
(24:50):
to blow up a child and maame a woman. Now
you could ask the question, right, Okay, so they have
killed a child, they have maimed a woman. Get Jesse James. No, no,
they don't. They never get him, because that's what happens
when you know, you have an ex Confederate in places
where with a bunch of ex confederates, with a bunch
of people who support the Confederacy right, they won't turn
(25:12):
over their own people. And you know, and when the
people they're going up against are the Pinkertons, who are
like the hired guns of Northern Capital, a bunch of people,
you know what happens is a bunch of grand people
end up dead, and yeah, but both sides of this
are incredibly deeply evil. Jesse James is later shot by
one of his own men, and yeah, that is the
(25:33):
famous story of Jesse James versus the Pinkertons, which I
think is useful in establishing that, like God, like, the
South are obviously the bad guys in the Civil War,
but a lot of the people in the Union are
sort of genuinely awful hired gun for capital people. And
(25:55):
you know that's not so much of a big deal
dreamed the war, but after the war, you know, you
got these battles just like, oh God, everyone here is
like everyone here should simply die now. Ellen Pinkerton dies
in eighteen eighty six, and he is replaced by his
even worse sons. And at this point the Pinkertons cease
(26:16):
even sort of the pretense of being a detective agency,
and they devote themselves full time to being strike breakers.
Now they have spies everywhere. They have you know, over
a thousand of them at their peak, spread across the
dozens and dozens and dozens of unions. They are spying
on meetings or appointed to the pinkertons. And this allows corporations.
For example, if you know who's in a union meeting, right,
(26:37):
you can just fire all of them. And this is
especially easy. And you know in this sort of pre
nineteen thirties period where like there is no protected right
to strike, right like you if you stop working, that
is illegal. The other thing they do is provide quote
unquote security for corporations Traine strikes. What this looks like
(27:00):
practice is shooting people. And you know, sometimes those people
are striking workers, like the three strikers they killed in
the Pennsylvania Colt strike of eighteen ninety. Sometimes they just
shoot random bystanders, like the random guy they shoteen in
eighteen sixty six, while providing security. And you know, again
when you're shooting a random bystander, you have to ask
like security for who, Like who is the security you're
(27:25):
providing for when you're just shooting random people, you know,
anominally it's for the boss that's in a dog strike.
And sometimes, like in eighteen seventy seven, they shoot children
where they shot and killed a fifteen year old you
a Jersey coal wharf strike, you know, and they do
stuff like this all the time, right, there's a famous
incident in Chicago where a bunch of people are yelling
at them because again the thinker doesn't have a really
(27:47):
bad reputation among workers at this point. And you know,
there's there's a point where they're they're going by on
a train and people yelled the train and the Pinkertons
just bomb by, taking out the rifles and shooting four
people out the window. So you know, these are these
are good people, TM right. The other thing they do
is they start getting into breaking strikes by being a
(28:07):
company you can hire to import scabs, and this culminates
in the Homestead strike. Again, there's another thing. There's like
a giant Bastard's episode on, but we'll do we'll do
a short version of the Homestead strike. So the Homestet
strike is this giant confrontation between steel workers and the
forces of Andrew Carnagie and Henry Frick. Carnagian Frick like
(28:28):
locked the union out of the factory and they call
a Pinkerton army to seize control of the town of Homestead.
This is from the book Inventing the Pinkertons. Quote. By
the end of June, he had built around the mills,
a protective twelve foot fence that included rifle holes, waterman's
capable of blasting strikers with boiling water, and wires attached
to a generator which could be electrified. In response, workers
(28:51):
dubbed the mills Fort Frick. Now striking steel workers and
other residents of Homestead. Here the pinkertons are coming, and they,
you know, they that the pinkertons are trying to land
on these like invasion barges that they've modified, and so
the homestead people go try to stop the barges, and
the Pinkertons start shooting at them. And this is this
is another thing that's very interesting about this whole story
(29:12):
is that, Okay, every account at the time agrees that
the first person the people who started shooting first with pinkertons.
Later accounts suddenly, like mysteriously later on it suddenly start
to claim it like, well, nobody really knows she started
the shooting in these fights, or like maybe it was
a worker. But like again, everyone at the time gose
(29:34):
it was the pinkertons. So I and given given what
we know about the track record of pinkertons are shooting
children of shooting random people yelling at them outside of
a train of shooting, just literally random people on the streets.
We can be pretty sure the Pinkertons started this, and
but you know, the workers in Homestead are heavily armed,
and this starts a massive gun battle. I'm gonna read
(29:56):
from inventing the Pinkertons again. This serious battle woul the
next fourteen hours. After an initial surge, the Pinkertons were
pinned down in their barges. After several hours, the crowd
attempted to sink the barges by cannon fire. Residents borrowed
the cannon that had been that the city used for
commemorations and by the way, that that's a civil war
cannon that they're using it in eighteen ninety to try
(30:17):
to sink these boats. The crowd also set burning railcars
rolling towards the barges and sprayed oil into their river,
which they attempted a light on fire in hopaes of
burning the Pikertons out of their barges. The lubricating oil
thrown onto the water proved impossible to set a flame.
So the Pickertons like try to surrender, but by this
(30:37):
one people hate them so much that every they showed
this four times and each time someone will hold up
a white flag and a sniper will shoot the flag
and refuse to let them surrender. On try five, the
Picckertons are finally allowed to surrender and the Pickersons are crushed,
but unfortunately, the state militia is brought in to sort
of break the strike and the union movement in Pennsylvania
is essentially destroyed. But why this is terrible from the Pinkertons,
(31:03):
and they start trying to do like a giant pr
op to sort of recover the reputation, and a lot
of what the sort of popular image of the Pinkertons
right comes from the pr op the agency does, like
after the homes distruct that gets reproduced by like TV
producers later on. So fast forwarding a little bit to
some other stuff that they were involved in. In late
nineteen oh five, someone blew up the notoriously anti union
(31:26):
governor of Idaho who'd sent troops to kill striking workers
a few years ago. Now Idaho hires a Pinkerton detective
to just torture a guy into confessing to the murder
and then also claiming that like basically every instance of
violence in the last five years in that part of
the US was committed by the IWW, who are THEWW
(31:48):
are a very very radical union whose thing basically was
that society should be run by like confederations of direct
democratic unions like run you know, all all of society,
all production should be run by workers in these in
you know, in in in the form of like one
giant direct democratic union. And people hate this, and by people,
(32:10):
I mean like bosses absolutely hate this. Dow IWW very
popularly with workers. Bosses are going to spend the next
rest of there's just murdering them, you know. But having
tortured this guy into saying, into fingering the industrial workers
of the world in this conspiracy, they get Big Bill Haywood,
who is one of the most famous and like successful
(32:31):
organizers of the AWW, and several other IWW leaders kidnapped
and taken into Idaho to stand trial for murder, which
again they had nothing to do with. Heywood is defended
by Clarence Darrow of the infamous Scopes monkey trial, and
Heywood gets off, but the case to serious damage to
the WW. If you want to learn more about this
(32:52):
whole story, go listen to Cool People who did cool stuff.
There's two episodes about the IWW in this period called
the IWW In the Hobbo you saved free speech. It's
good stuff, you know. I should also briefly mention, right,
another thing that the Pinkertons do is Okay, so if
someone if someone's wanted in one state, right, instead of
(33:13):
having to like make you know, the government having to
like the state government have to making requests, have to
be having to make request to another state in order
to get them to extradite someone, they would just have
the Pingertons kidnap them. This is this is this is
one of the sort of big services they provide. They
also seemed it's very unclear. I don't know, this historical
record is a bit muddled. They seem also to have
(33:34):
been people you could hire if so if like your
spouse was trying to divorce you, which sucks. Is deeply evil.
They do sort of lots more deeply evil stuff, which
we will get into after these ads. All right, we're back,
(34:00):
So speaking of deeply evil stuff, they also send one
hundred detectives to break a strike of the mostly black
Brotherhood of Timber Workers, which is an IWW affiliate in Louisiana.
Now they break this They try to break this union
by walking into a union meeting shooting forty four people
and killing four of them. There are like forty more
(34:21):
stories of a guy with the Pinkerton walks in and
shoots amongst people that I could put here. I had
to find the limit at some point to how many
stories about Pinkerton's murdering people that I could I could
sort of put. But you know, there's an interesting shift
that starts to happen in the in sort of as
the nineteen hundred, you know, the nineteen hundreds turn into
(34:41):
nineteen tens. The Pinkertons start to figure out that it's
more effective to form mobs of vigilantes than it is
to fight unions directly. And there's a few benefits here, right,
There's less danger to Pinkerton detectives themselves. It's easier to
deploy large numbers of people. Instead of having to sort
of like pay an enormous amount of money for bunch
of like eight hundred detectives and weapons and logistics, you
(35:02):
would just sort of whip up a mob, we get
them to do the shooting, right. The Pinkerdons also get
plausible deniability, which is very helpful for their reputation. And
you know, the Pinkertons are very much ahead of the
curve here. The government, you know, who is going to
displace the Pinkertons is sort of the main force opposing
the IWW in later sort of like Cio union organizing
that you know, turn into the two Red Scares. They're
(35:24):
going to start taking pages from the Pinkerton's book, and
eventually they are going to you know, instead of like
sending the US Army to invade Nicarago, which is what
they would have done in the eighteen hundreds, by you know,
by the time he gets in the nineteen eighties, right,
they are sending people to train Nicaraguan desk squads. And
so we can track the shift here. Right as the
(35:46):
nineteenth century comes to a close and we get to
sort of the October Revolution of the height of the
Red Scare, we're in a place where they're starting to
be enough cops and enough federal agents to do the
job the Pinkertons had done in previous generations. And you know,
there's sort of robust arguments in the sort of historiography
about to what extent J Edgar Hoover and the FBI
(36:10):
were influenced by the Pinkertons. I think there's decent evidence
that they that they were influenced by them. But the
FBI kind of turns into what the Pinkertons are. You know,
they're the people who suddenly are like showing up and
shooting people, showing up and arresting union organizers, deporting union
organizers from the country. But this puts the Pinkertons in
kind of a weird spot, right, The Pinkerton name has
(36:32):
become synonymous with sort of this this kind of like
they're called sort of like feudal retainers, right, these sort
of lawless private armies that are not supposed to exist
in a democracy. And so you know in the nineteen
thirties when the Wagner Act like makes strikes legal, right.
I talked about the Wagner Acts a long time ago,
(36:53):
an episode called The Eden Makes Us Strong. But after this,
they tried Robert Pinkerton, the second who's the new sort
of owner with the Pinkertons, tries to do a rebrand
and he has this great quote. That's quote he's talking
about union busting. That is a phase of our business
that we are not particularly delighted or proud of and
we're out of it. However, there was nothing illegal about
(37:16):
it at the time. Now, okay, you could say a
lot about what was or wasn't illegal in a period
when you know, you could order a drink that was
cocaine mixed with wine and you know, you could just
get like opium prescribe to your baby, But torturing and
murdering people was still illegal back then. Now, I guess
if you're you know, if you really wanted to have fun,
you can get into an argument that like, nowhere in
the Constitution is murdered specifically banned, but like you don't
(37:39):
have fun with that. But FDR and the New Dealers
go after the Pinkertons very hard. And this is a
lot of interesting effects. What it means is, on the
one hand, you can't have some guy with a detective
badge who works for a corporation walked into a union
meeting and start the killing. But it also means that
when you need someone to smash a union by force,
it's going to be the state doing it. And the
(38:00):
aposteosis of this sort of one of the internal contradictions
that destroys a new Deal is that it's reliance on
the state to contain the worst exis of capitalism means
that you know, they have in turn directly enormously empowered
the state and the state's military capacity. And this means
that in the nineteen eighties, unions are going to be
destroyed by the state that the New Deal had built.
(38:23):
The Pickerchins are replaced by Hoover and the g Men,
and the g Men are eventually sort of become known
as the dreaded modern fat who you know, lurks at
every doorstep eating babies and is the terror of every
sort of political movement in the US. Now. The Pinkertons,
for for their part, right with union busting now technically illegal,
(38:44):
and when I say union busting like I mean walking in,
shooting people stop and performing a union, they start working
basically as regular security guards. And then they move on
to selling surveillance equipment and trainings for government organizations. And
this reflects a kind of large shift in what what
kinds of military operations the corporations run, which is that
(39:07):
instead of directly running armies or hiring groups like the
Pinkertons to do violence for them, now what they're in
the business of is intelligence operations. And this changes the
way that corporations kill people enormously. You know, when when
Coca Cola now needs to kill union organizers, right, they
have paramilitaries for this. Now, some of these guys are contractors,
some of them are paid under the table, some of
(39:28):
them are in it for ideology, some of it for money.
But it's not, you know, it's not quite like Coca
Cola has its own military force like it would have
been in the eighteen hundreds, in the early eighteen hundreds.
It's also not there is just like a private but
there's not like it's not they're not. They're not also
not like hiring a specific private military contractor. Right the
(39:49):
way they do, way they do it tends to be
they you know, sort of semi clandestinely arm paramilitary. Now,
there are limited exceptions where sort of like oil companies
will have at armies and places where civil wars are
going on, but that's usually a thing that happens when
they're in a place that doesn't have state capacity. When
they're in a place that does have state capacity, like
(40:10):
for example, Nigeria, you get a very very different story.
So Nigeria is a major oil producer, and this has
a number of consequences on the places where that oil
is extracted. A huge amount of it comes from the
Niger Delta, where the government faces an almost perennial insurgency. So, okay,
why is there an insurgency there?
Speaker 2 (40:29):
Right?
Speaker 1 (40:29):
Part of the reason is that there is an indescribable
amount of wealth coming out of the oil and Niger Delta,
and that money goes mostly to I mean, might I
say mostly ninety percent of it, right, goes to Nigerian
elites and corrupt for and oil companies. And you know,
another part of the reason this turns into an insurgency
is that people try nonviolence of disobedience in the Niger
(40:50):
Delta to protest the sort of horrific environmental consequences of
companies like Shell doing oil extraction, you know. And they
have these marches that will draw out three hundred thousand
people in places where this is half of the population,
half of the total population of the ethnic group being affected.
The Nigerian government responds by publicly executing one of the
(41:12):
movement's leaders, the famous activist Ken Sarrowewa, by hanging him
and then dissolving his body and limes we couldn't be buried,
which is a real British empire shit. And okay, so
at this point you've come to the sort of crossroad
of a nonviolent movement, right where the government's answer to
non violence we will publicly hang you and you get
you get to this question do you take up arms?
(41:32):
And the answer is yeah, a lot of people do. Right.
This is this is this is a very complicated insurgency
in a lot of ways that you know, we can't
do justice here too. But I want to read something
from this interview from a guy for the Movement for
the Emancipation of the Niger Delta Men, which is one
of the like many many, many, many many like militant
groups that appear in the Delta over the last twenty
five years. Quote, this is our territory. The soldiers dare
(41:56):
not come here. Now they came, and we defeat them.
He says. We are civilized people, educated people, and we
do not want our children to be deprived as we
have been deprived so other people can get rich from
what is under our feet. The oil companies have had
many years to treat us rights. They have never done that.
Now we are making them think now if this is
(42:18):
you know, eighteen twenty, right, and Shell is dealing with
people taking up arms and cutting off their ability to
sort of like extract profits of oil. They would form
an army of semi literate Belgian and British barbarians, arm
them with cannons and conquer the region and in place
the entire area under direct corporate rule. You know, if
this was say, like the eighteen nineties, right, they would
hire the Pinkertons and the Pinkertons to go shoot these
(42:40):
people for them. But this is the nineteen nineties, in
the two thousands, so instead, what Shell does is literally
pay the salaries of Nigerian cops you go slaughter protesters
in the streets. And eventually they moved to spending hundreds
of millions of dollars just just between two thousand and
seven two thousand and nine alone directly funding equipping and army,
(43:02):
the Nigerian army and a special like war crimes task
force called the Joint Task Force the JFT, which is
this like it's this sort of incredible thing where the army,
the navy, and the police do a fusion dance to
massacre civilians. And you know, I say this hundreds and
millions of dollars. Right, that's an underestimate, that's just three years.
That's just what we know about. The actual total that
(43:24):
they sunk into sort of like literally funding the Nigerian
Army is enormous. Now, what's interesting here is that Shell
does have its own security guards, but the ratio of
what they spend in the Nigerian Army versus what they
spend on their own security guards is two to one.
And this goes to demonstrate the point that I've sort
of been making this episode, right, which is that there's
(43:46):
been a shift in you know, if you are a
company like Shell, right who has a need, you know,
who are horrifically exploiting a bunch of people to the
point where you need to shoot them in order to
keep them in line. Instead of going to like a
private detective agency or having your own army, they are
increasingly simply funding the state. And you know this means
(44:09):
that right again, instead of the Pinkertons, the actual trigger
pullers are cops. They are the police, There are the military,
they're weird special forces groups. And you know where that
sort of leaves space for groups like the Pinkertons now
is the area that's left for them is in corporate intelligence,
(44:31):
and this seems to be most of what the Pinkertons
have been up to recently. Amazon hired them in the
last few years to work and to work with their
intelligence division, the Global Security Operations Center, which they use
to try to stomp out union organizing in their warehouses.
And Amazon isn't just sort of spying on union organizers,
spying on basically every social group but they can get
(44:52):
their hands on. Here's from WECE. In twenty nineteen, Amazon
monitored the yellowfst movement known as the jele jean as
roots uprising for economic just to spread across France and
solidarity movements in Vienna and protest against state repression in Iran.
They've been deployed deployed againt strikes of communication workers in
West Virginia, Google and Facebook deploys them against their own
(45:14):
employees to prodout leakers. Now, this is all in line
with the pivot of sort of corporate repression towards mass surveillance. Interestingly,
the Pinkertons have been planting stories in the press about
going back to their roots as mercenaries, pitching themselves. As
you know, the force that can stop climate chaos with
ex military forces. The company claims to have been deployed
(45:35):
by corporations in Puerto Rico after the hurricane and after
Hurricane Ria in twenty seventeen. I don't know if that's true.
This is possible, but again it's something that they have
to be very careful with the Pinkertons is that they
are very, very brand obsessed, even though they're now owned
by like a different sort of Swedish security company, and
(45:56):
they lie constantly, so it's very difficult to stort up
the myth from the fact when myth making has been
such a vital part of their branding from the beginning.
For another example, here's from New York Times magazine. Among
their most popular news services is the Pinkerton Dedicated Professional,
in which agents join a client's company like any other
new hire, allowing them to provide intel one employees. By
(46:21):
twenty eighteen, the agency said it could count among its
clients about eighty percent of Fortune one thousand companies. Are
these numbers correct? Who knows? They absolutely could be lying right.
On the other hand, here's Gizmoto talking about the current
reach of the Pinkertons in Magic the gathering. There are
other connections between Wizards of the Coast and the Pinkerton Agency.
(46:44):
Robert M. Klemmick, who has been the director of Security
Risk Management at Hasbro, Inc. Which is the parent company
Wizards of the Coast for twelve years, was previously the
director of supply chain Security Practice at Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations.
The current manager of Global Investigations just all to a
floor of Pinkerton agents. So what we saw in the
(47:04):
fact that you know, Wizards of the Coast said the
Pinkertons after a guy who made a YouTube video showing
some cards that he bought from someone else, is you know,
you can see in that the arc of the arc
of of what the Pinkertons are trying to do. Right,
You have, on the one hand, the Pinkertons falling back
into their sort of intelligence role. You also have them
(47:28):
like specifically trading on their reputation to intimidate people. And
you know, the reputation they acquired by killing unfathomable numbers
of people between the eighteen hundreds, which they use to
sort of intimidate people by just sort of the power
of their reputation. You can see something very interesting, which
is that the Pinkertons don't arrest Dan Cannon directly, right,
They're able to leave with the sort of goods. But
(47:52):
what they threatened Dan Cannon with is the regular police.
And that is I think a very important aspect of
what the story actually is, which is it's a story
about the modern division of labor, of violence against people
who corporations don't like, and that division of labor runs
through security. You know, you have your major, you have
(48:12):
a major corporation. That corporation has its own security division.
That security division is connected to the Pinkertons. They use
the Pinkertons as an intelligence network, and they have done
several times now. And then you know, when it comes
time to you know, you can use the Pinkertons as
like the people will the stop you booth. But when
it comes time to actually do violence against someone, when
(48:34):
it comes time to arrest someone, that's the state's job.
And that, I think is the thing that's that you know,
that that's very important to understand about the way all
of this stuff works is that the thing that is
true now about the year twenty twenty three that was
not true about the year like eighteen seventy three. Is
(48:55):
that the the sort of primary driver of corporate violence
in you know, in in in the US and abroad
is not necessarily private security companies. It is the state,
and it is the police. And yeah, this has been
it could happen here. Uh, the police, suck acab get
(49:17):
rid of them.
Speaker 2 (49:22):
It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts,
you can find sources for It could Happen here, updated
monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Host
Robert Evans
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