WEBVTT - Wizards of the Coast Deploys the Pinkertons 0:00:05.080 --> 0:00:07.960 Welcome Dick. It Happened Here a podcast about things falling 0:00:07.960 --> 0:00:10.399 apart and sometimes about how to put them back together again. 0:00:11.160 --> 0:00:15.760 I'm your host, Na Wong. This is a we are 0:00:15.800 --> 0:00:19.560 once again talking about Wizards of the Coast. Now this 0:00:19.600 --> 0:00:21.880 time is not about dungeons and dragons. It is about 0:00:21.920 --> 0:00:25.079 their other property, Magic the Gathering, which if you don't know, 0:00:25.200 --> 0:00:28.200 is Wizards of the Coast's trading card game that's at 0:00:28.200 --> 0:00:31.560 the forefront of some truly wild stuff. Right now. Now 0:00:31.600 --> 0:00:34.400 you could ask Mia, why are we even talking about 0:00:34.440 --> 0:00:38.239 this about Magic the Gathering on this show, And you know, 0:00:38.280 --> 0:00:42.600 there's multiple answers. One of them is that as industrial 0:00:42.640 --> 0:00:45.159 profit rates have been decreasing in the last half a century, 0:00:45.520 --> 0:00:48.239 capital has increasingly turned towards entertainment as a way to 0:00:48.240 --> 0:00:52.000 make money. Magic is now a billion dollar brand, partnering 0:00:52.040 --> 0:00:54.720 with everything from Fortnite to The Walking Dead to and 0:00:54.920 --> 0:00:57.320 this is not a joke, being in the process of 0:00:57.320 --> 0:01:00.480 releasing an entire set of Lord of the Rings card. 0:01:01.080 --> 0:01:03.920 As capital is flooded into the entertainment industry and Magic 0:01:03.960 --> 0:01:07.000 in particular, our silly little hobbies are suddenly the front 0:01:07.040 --> 0:01:10.720 lines of class struggle. Workers at TCG player, this year, 0:01:11.400 --> 0:01:13.959 given the job of sorting through literally tens of thousands 0:01:14.000 --> 0:01:17.360 of cards that TCG player processes finally won their second 0:01:17.400 --> 0:01:20.959 attempt to form a union after two devastating union busting campaigns. 0:01:21.760 --> 0:01:26.480 And this is where things get very, very weird. Now 0:01:26.640 --> 0:01:29.240 bear with me here, dear listeners. We have to talk 0:01:29.280 --> 0:01:32.440 about a little bit of Magic minutia to understand what 0:01:32.480 --> 0:01:34.400 has happened in this incident, and then we will get 0:01:34.440 --> 0:01:36.640 back to what the show is usually about, which is 0:01:36.680 --> 0:01:40.880 corporations killing enormous numbers of people. So a few days ago, 0:01:41.200 --> 0:01:44.160 Dan Cannon, a man who runs a very small Magic 0:01:44.200 --> 0:01:48.160 YouTube channel called Old School EMPTG, bought what he thought 0:01:48.200 --> 0:01:50.640 were cards in the latest Magic the Gathering set called 0:01:50.680 --> 0:01:55.200 March of the Machine. Now Magic releases new cards periodically 0:01:55.280 --> 0:01:59.760 and what are called sets. These sets have plots and characters, 0:01:59.840 --> 0:02:02.960 They've written stories. They are enormous sort of lower events, 0:02:03.160 --> 0:02:06.440 they have enormous hype behind them, And March of the 0:02:06.480 --> 0:02:09.480 Machine story wise, is basically the version of an Avengers movie. 0:02:09.520 --> 0:02:14.239 Giant apocalyptic threats, all the heroes crossing over, people, hopping 0:02:14.240 --> 0:02:17.919 through multi versus, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, okay, 0:02:18.000 --> 0:02:21.320 this has happened before. You know, Wizards does big sets. 0:02:22.160 --> 0:02:25.080 It wasn't that weird, but Wizard decided to do something 0:02:25.200 --> 0:02:29.040 very very weird, which is they printed, for the first 0:02:29.040 --> 0:02:32.680 time ever, a mini set called March of the Machines 0:02:33.120 --> 0:02:37.400 March of the Machine Aftermath. Now, the regular March of 0:02:37.400 --> 0:02:40.040 the Machine set has three hundred and eighty seven cards 0:02:40.040 --> 0:02:44.359 in it, Aftermath has fifty. Now, I don't know why 0:02:44.400 --> 0:02:46.600 they decided to do this. They've never done anything like 0:02:46.600 --> 0:02:49.400 this if they've never printed just a tiny set they 0:02:49.440 --> 0:02:52.680 release a bit after the regular set before and you know, 0:02:52.720 --> 0:02:55.000 the names are very very confusing, right, one is called 0:02:55.000 --> 0:02:56.320 March of the Machine and the other one is Marching 0:02:56.400 --> 0:02:59.560 the Machine Aftermath. How is a regular person supposed to 0:02:59.600 --> 0:03:03.080 keep track of this? The mind boggles, et cetera, et cetera. 0:03:04.120 --> 0:03:07.240 Either way, So Dan Cannon tries to buy cards from 0:03:07.280 --> 0:03:10.240 the regular March of the Machine set. What he gets 0:03:10.240 --> 0:03:14.600 in sent instead are by accident March of the Machine 0:03:14.600 --> 0:03:18.960 Aftermath cards. Now, these cards are still secret. They have 0:03:19.040 --> 0:03:20.919 not been revealed yet, no no one, no one knows 0:03:20.960 --> 0:03:22.720 what they are. No one's supposed to know what they are. 0:03:24.000 --> 0:03:27.280 Before every set, there's an incredibly elaborate process where Wizards 0:03:27.320 --> 0:03:31.160 gives cards to influencers to reveal them to the public, 0:03:31.200 --> 0:03:33.720 and on a certain date, everyone reveals, you know, your 0:03:33.760 --> 0:03:35.960 influencer reveals what their card is, and there's this whole 0:03:36.280 --> 0:03:38.680 hype cycle on Reddit, and everyone argues about how good 0:03:38.680 --> 0:03:40.280 the cards are, and I'll call the art is and 0:03:40.280 --> 0:03:43.240 what it means for the story. It's sort of it's 0:03:43.280 --> 0:03:46.040 sort of similar to the sort of hype cycles that 0:03:46.080 --> 0:03:48.800 would happen around trailers from Marvel movies, or people would 0:03:48.800 --> 0:03:51.800 be analyzing every detail of it, etcetera, et cetera. And 0:03:52.040 --> 0:03:54.280 these are these spoiler seasons, as they're called, are a 0:03:54.320 --> 0:03:58.960 huge deal for Wizards. Date. Wizards tries to heavily control 0:03:59.040 --> 0:04:03.000 the entire process, but sometimes cards leak out. Now Dan 0:04:03.080 --> 0:04:06.080 Cannon suddenly has been handed a bunch of cards no 0:04:06.080 --> 0:04:08.280 one has ever seen before. So he does what you know, 0:04:09.000 --> 0:04:12.080 every person who just suddenly has magic cards that haven't 0:04:12.080 --> 0:04:15.200 been revealed yet do and have been doing for years 0:04:15.200 --> 0:04:17.440 and years and years. He makes a video showing off 0:04:17.480 --> 0:04:22.360 the cards. Now, importantly, this is not illegal. I need 0:04:22.400 --> 0:04:24.200 to stress this because of what what's going to happen, 0:04:24.279 --> 0:04:28.679 What is going to happen next? You you know, it's 0:04:28.760 --> 0:04:31.560 it's it's it's very very easy to look at the 0:04:31.720 --> 0:04:34.599 at the sort of severity of what's going to happen 0:04:34.680 --> 0:04:36.360 to this guy and assume that he broke a law. 0:04:36.400 --> 0:04:38.159 But no, he did not. He did not break a law. 0:04:38.320 --> 0:04:40.840 Nothing he has done he is illegal. Literally, what he's 0:04:40.880 --> 0:04:42.720 done is he bought some magic cards from someone who 0:04:42.800 --> 0:04:45.480 screwed up and accidentally broke the street date for selling 0:04:45.520 --> 0:04:48.440 cards because he confused March of the Machine with March 0:04:48.440 --> 0:04:52.039 of the Machine aftermath, Wow, how can anyone make that 0:04:52.120 --> 0:04:54.960 mistake right? The genius of Wizards of the Coast marketing 0:04:55.040 --> 0:04:57.800 is unmatched. Everything they do is incredibly clear, et cetera, 0:04:57.839 --> 0:05:01.839 et cetera. Now in the pros says because of how 0:05:01.880 --> 0:05:04.760 many cards he bought and how small the set is, 0:05:04.800 --> 0:05:07.279 he reveals most of the cars that are in the set, 0:05:08.560 --> 0:05:13.480 and then the Pinkertons show up to his house, forced 0:05:13.480 --> 0:05:16.920 their way through his door, make his wife cry, threaten 0:05:17.000 --> 0:05:19.119 to arrest him, and threaten to put him in prison 0:05:19.160 --> 0:05:21.719 for ten years with two hundred thousand dollars fines for 0:05:21.760 --> 0:05:25.320 copyright infringement on the grounds of him having stolen material. 0:05:26.240 --> 0:05:31.440 The Pinkertons also harass his elderly neighbors. Literally. Just today, 0:05:31.480 --> 0:05:35.440 as I'm recording this, a story broken gizmoto that revealed 0:05:35.440 --> 0:05:37.760 that Wizards of the Coast have used the Pinkertons before 0:05:37.800 --> 0:05:42.680 to go after stolen goods. Now, some of you may 0:05:42.680 --> 0:05:45.760 be asking who are the Pinkertons, And I think some 0:05:45.800 --> 0:05:49.440 of you probably know in very broad outlines who the 0:05:49.440 --> 0:05:52.920 Pinkertons are. But in order to really get at the 0:05:53.279 --> 0:05:56.880 core of what this organization is and why they look 0:05:56.960 --> 0:05:58.920 the way they do today as compared to how they've 0:05:58.920 --> 0:06:01.800 looked in the past, we need to ask another question, 0:06:02.160 --> 0:06:05.159 which is how has the balance of military power between 0:06:05.160 --> 0:06:08.599 the state and corporations changed over time? And this seems 0:06:08.640 --> 0:06:12.880 like a very weird question, but the Pinkertons emerge in 0:06:12.920 --> 0:06:17.480 a very weird period of time in this balance. They 0:06:17.480 --> 0:06:20.720 are what fills in the gap between corporations directly having 0:06:20.839 --> 0:06:24.680 armies that could conquer nations and modern corporations who, instead 0:06:24.680 --> 0:06:27.320 of having their own personal armies, have intelligence of vast 0:06:27.320 --> 0:06:30.120 intelligence agencies, but also rely on the police and the 0:06:30.160 --> 0:06:33.520 governments as the people who do violence for them. So 0:06:33.920 --> 0:06:36.200 let's go back and tell the story from the beginning 0:06:36.240 --> 0:06:39.400 by taking a brief look at the most infamous corporate 0:06:39.480 --> 0:06:42.320 army of them all, the army of the East India 0:06:42.360 --> 0:06:46.000 Trading Company. The East India Trading Company was formed in 0:06:46.040 --> 0:06:49.680 sixteen hundred and it was given a vast state monopoly 0:06:50.720 --> 0:06:53.200 over trade in what they called East India, which is 0:06:53.320 --> 0:06:55.520 an area we would broadly call Southeast Asia and the 0:06:55.520 --> 0:06:59.200 South Pacific today. And at the start these guys are 0:07:00.880 --> 0:07:04.839 optimistically they are half trading group half pirate. The level 0:07:04.839 --> 0:07:09.359 of piracy is really high, especially in the early days. 0:07:09.920 --> 0:07:13.360 They you know, trade for spices. They steal a lot 0:07:13.400 --> 0:07:16.080 of other people's spices from places like Java and they 0:07:16.160 --> 0:07:17.880 bring them back to England. They make a lot of 0:07:17.920 --> 0:07:21.760 money now over the course of their actions. And again 0:07:21.760 --> 0:07:25.240 it's worth noting these people are kind of the descendants 0:07:25.240 --> 0:07:28.600 of the British privateers, people like Thomas Drake, who'd been 0:07:28.680 --> 0:07:31.200 you know, just pirates who have been hired by the 0:07:31.280 --> 0:07:34.160 government to only go after like Spanish ships instead of 0:07:34.280 --> 0:07:38.440 English ships. So they are, you know, from the beginning, 0:07:38.480 --> 0:07:41.080 the East India Company has this sort of dna of 0:07:41.560 --> 0:07:45.400 army in it, and over the course of about two 0:07:45.400 --> 0:07:49.280 centuries they are going to conquer with their own army 0:07:49.680 --> 0:07:52.400 most of what is now India and Pakistan, and that 0:07:52.560 --> 0:07:55.800 territory is either going to indirectly or directly come under 0:07:55.840 --> 0:07:59.000 the rule of the East India Company. And the EASTERNDA 0:07:59.040 --> 0:08:02.240 Company is fighting war everywhere again. They seize Indian Pakistent 0:08:02.280 --> 0:08:05.880 by force, they are fighting wars in Afghanistan. They kill 0:08:06.160 --> 0:08:10.080 unfathomable numbers of people. The worst of these events is 0:08:10.120 --> 0:08:13.480 the Great Bengalf Famine. There's a Behind the Bastard's episode 0:08:13.600 --> 0:08:15.880 about this that you can listen to if you want 0:08:15.920 --> 0:08:20.320 a really sort of long thing about the East India 0:08:20.360 --> 0:08:22.880 Company and the famine. But I want to talk about 0:08:22.880 --> 0:08:26.760 the famine a little bit, because so the Great Bengalf 0:08:26.760 --> 0:08:32.360 Famine of seventeen seventy kills ten million people. And I 0:08:32.480 --> 0:08:35.360 knew this intellectually, right, I studied a bit in college. 0:08:35.400 --> 0:08:38.880 But what I had never actually looked up somehow, what 0:08:38.920 --> 0:08:41.480 I'd never seen was the percentage of the population of 0:08:41.559 --> 0:08:44.200 this famine kills. And this famine is directly the fault 0:08:44.200 --> 0:08:47.320 of the East India Company. This is something that all 0:08:47.360 --> 0:08:49.360 historians who of look at this agree is that this 0:08:49.760 --> 0:08:52.200 is directly the fault of these India Company and the 0:08:52.240 --> 0:08:55.520 combination of their agricultural policies and their tax extraction. The 0:08:55.640 --> 0:08:59.520 sort of put into perspective how bad this gets. The 0:08:59.600 --> 0:09:02.440 highest serious estimates for the number of people who die 0:09:02.440 --> 0:09:05.320 in the Great Leap Forward stands at about thirty million dead. 0:09:06.040 --> 0:09:09.000 This is an unfathomable atrocity. It is a scale of 0:09:09.000 --> 0:09:11.319 death at which the human mind breaks down and loses 0:09:11.320 --> 0:09:13.920 the ability to process. Some of my family lived through it. 0:09:13.920 --> 0:09:16.959 It is horrific in ways that are difficult to even 0:09:17.000 --> 0:09:21.920 begin to describe. The Great Leap Forward killed about five 0:09:21.960 --> 0:09:26.160 percent of China's population. The Great Bengal Famine killed thirty 0:09:26.320 --> 0:09:29.319 percent of the population of India that the East India 0:09:29.360 --> 0:09:34.480 Trading Company controlled thirty percent. That's not just sort of 0:09:34.679 --> 0:09:38.079 small populations statistics either. Right, It's not like they killed 0:09:38.800 --> 0:09:41.040 thirty percent of a country with thirty people in it, right. 0:09:41.080 --> 0:09:44.320 They killed ten million people. This isn't you know. This 0:09:44.400 --> 0:09:47.400 is an unbelievable force of human evil. They are capable 0:09:47.440 --> 0:09:53.840 of killing people in numbers that defy comprehension. They're able 0:09:53.880 --> 0:09:55.680 to do this because they have an army that is 0:09:55.720 --> 0:09:59.040 the size of a great power in nation state. The 0:09:59.080 --> 0:10:02.040 East India Trading comp Company's army in eighteen hundred had 0:10:02.040 --> 0:10:06.840 two hundred thousand soldiers. That is a massive army today. 0:10:07.600 --> 0:10:10.440 That is like the size of the active Ukrainian army 0:10:10.480 --> 0:10:13.280 in twenty twenty two. It is more than twice the 0:10:13.320 --> 0:10:16.560 size of the British army eighteen hundred. And you know, 0:10:16.600 --> 0:10:19.520 in eighteen hundred it's not like the British aren't fighting wars, 0:10:19.640 --> 0:10:21.600 right they are. In eighteen hundred the British are fighting 0:10:21.679 --> 0:10:25.880 the war the Second Coalition. So there they are fighting Napoleon, right. 0:10:25.920 --> 0:10:30.760 So this isn't a sort of you know, completely half 0:10:30.800 --> 0:10:34.680 assed like peacetime British army. This is a you know, 0:10:34.720 --> 0:10:37.160 this is a serious military force. And even once they 0:10:37.240 --> 0:10:40.320 like fully build up their army at the peak of 0:10:40.320 --> 0:10:44.880 the Napoleonic Wars thirteen years later, the entire size of 0:10:44.920 --> 0:10:47.200 the British army is about two hundred fifty thousand troops. 0:10:48.640 --> 0:10:50.680 That's not much larger than the East India Company's army. 0:10:50.720 --> 0:10:53.520 At the same time, and at the height of the 0:10:53.600 --> 0:10:57.520 East India Trading Company there are army swells to again 0:10:57.600 --> 0:10:59.920 two hundred and fifty thousand, which is again the size 0:11:00.080 --> 0:11:02.840 of the regular British army at in the most desperate 0:11:02.920 --> 0:11:06.280 war that the British had fought to that point. The 0:11:06.320 --> 0:11:10.480 Anitierating Company is a full on military great power, right. 0:11:11.240 --> 0:11:13.440 But and this is this is this is something that 0:11:13.480 --> 0:11:17.160 is going to shape an enormous amount of the sort 0:11:17.200 --> 0:11:21.640 of arc of the relationship between corporate and military power. 0:11:22.240 --> 0:11:25.720 It is unbelievably expensive to maintain an army like this 0:11:27.160 --> 0:11:30.520 the the East, the British Stateia Company, even though they're 0:11:30.559 --> 0:11:35.280 they you know, they are looting entire nations, right they 0:11:35.280 --> 0:11:37.320 have they have they're there are entire states where they 0:11:37.360 --> 0:11:39.560 fully taken over the tax services. They're just walking into 0:11:39.559 --> 0:11:44.600 temples and taking stuff. But even with all of that profit, 0:11:44.760 --> 0:11:46.480 right they you know, they have the ability to mint 0:11:46.520 --> 0:11:49.320 their own coins in a lot of these areas, but 0:11:49.360 --> 0:11:50.960 they still lose money. And they still lose money again 0:11:50.960 --> 0:11:54.520 because they're maintaining this on two hundred and fifty thousand 0:11:54.559 --> 0:11:59.920 strong army. And you know, so you have this problem, right, 0:12:00.320 --> 0:12:02.000 which is that you have this item on your balance 0:12:02.040 --> 0:12:04.079 sheet that is unfathomably expensive. And then you have a 0:12:04.120 --> 0:12:07.040 second problem, which is that if you have an army, 0:12:07.040 --> 0:12:09.280 there's always a danger. But the army goes into revolts, 0:12:09.960 --> 0:12:13.520 and that's what happens in eighteen fifty seven, the British 0:12:13.559 --> 0:12:16.679 managed to piss off their own army, which is almost 0:12:16.760 --> 0:12:20.240 all composed of Indian troops, and they fight an incredibly 0:12:20.280 --> 0:12:22.440 bloody war. Notice either this is the boy mutiny to 0:12:22.440 --> 0:12:27.880 suppoy uprising and the British win, and they after victory 0:12:27.920 --> 0:12:31.240 they strap a bunch of prisoners bodies to canons and 0:12:31.480 --> 0:12:35.440 shoot them so they can't be properly buried. But the 0:12:35.480 --> 0:12:42.000 consequence of this sort of horrifying war, and particularly the 0:12:42.080 --> 0:12:45.520 sort of fear it invokes in the minds of you know, 0:12:45.559 --> 0:12:48.200 the British populace of like, oh my god, these non 0:12:48.240 --> 0:12:52.199 white people can actually fight us, is that they directly 0:12:52.240 --> 0:12:55.360 seize control of India from the East India Trading Company. 0:12:55.920 --> 0:12:58.480 And for all your nationalization fans out there, the British 0:12:58.480 --> 0:13:01.880 assuming direct control of India is actually a nationalization. It's 0:13:01.920 --> 0:13:04.199 not actually inherently socialist, guys, you have to be a 0:13:04.200 --> 0:13:08.439 bit smarter than this. But that aside, right, this marks 0:13:08.440 --> 0:13:11.640 an enormous shift in the sort of political economy of violence. 0:13:12.559 --> 0:13:14.959 What is happening here is that states are assuming direct 0:13:15.000 --> 0:13:18.160 military control over their colonies intead of operating through corporations. 0:13:19.240 --> 0:13:22.120 And this means that what you see is a shift 0:13:22.160 --> 0:13:25.000 from direct corporate armies to corporations using the state to 0:13:25.040 --> 0:13:28.520 do violence for them. And this doesn't mean that corporations 0:13:28.559 --> 0:13:31.040 don't use force directly today, and it also doesn't mean 0:13:31.040 --> 0:13:35.199 that the governments, you know, weren't acting as the armies 0:13:35.200 --> 0:13:40.560 of corporations and like the eighteen hundreds, but what's happening here, 0:13:40.600 --> 0:13:44.720 and specifically the direct seizure of India from the East India, 0:13:44.800 --> 0:13:47.440 the direct seizure of India from the East India Company, 0:13:48.320 --> 0:13:52.160 marks a dramatic shift in the balance of forces away 0:13:52.240 --> 0:13:56.640 from corporations with armies doing violence towards states doing violence 0:13:56.679 --> 0:13:59.720 on their behalf. And this is one of the things, 0:13:59.760 --> 0:14:02.160 alongside sort of slave catchers in the US, that leads 0:14:02.160 --> 0:14:04.959 to the formation of the police. You see this but 0:14:05.120 --> 0:14:08.440 both both both in Britain and in sort of France, right, 0:14:08.679 --> 0:14:12.240 you start to get police agencies that are you know, 0:14:12.480 --> 0:14:16.240 largely tasked putting down their own working class. And this 0:14:16.320 --> 0:14:17.680 is one of the things, one of the sort of 0:14:17.840 --> 0:14:20.960 inexorable marches that happens over the course of the twentieth century, 0:14:20.960 --> 0:14:24.320 and it's also happened in nineteenth century too. There is 0:14:24.360 --> 0:14:28.240 a sort of mass centralization of state and police power, 0:14:28.280 --> 0:14:32.000 and particularly that's an expansion of the bureaucracy. Right the 0:14:32.000 --> 0:14:35.560 American state in eighteen forty is barely a functional state 0:14:35.640 --> 0:14:39.120 by today's standards, right, Like, they have an incredibly difficult 0:14:39.160 --> 0:14:40.880 time even figuring out how many people there are in 0:14:40.920 --> 0:14:44.040 the country that they're provisioning of services is a joke. 0:14:45.760 --> 0:14:48.720 Nobody has like geek cars, Like people don't even have 0:14:48.760 --> 0:14:52.640 birth certificates for the most part. And that's something you know, 0:14:53.480 --> 0:14:56.000 and that's only that changes right over the course of 0:14:56.040 --> 0:14:58.920 sort of the eighteen and nineteen hundreds, is that you 0:14:59.000 --> 0:15:01.440 get a massive bureauocracy. The bureaucracy is built on the 0:15:01.440 --> 0:15:04.320 model of the police, and they get bigger and more powerful, 0:15:04.880 --> 0:15:06.800 and by the time you're you know, you're halfway through 0:15:06.840 --> 0:15:09.560 the twentieth century, you get you get a modern standing army. 0:15:10.320 --> 0:15:12.840 And that's something that is very, very weird. The Founders, 0:15:12.880 --> 0:15:15.480 who you know, suck ass in enormous numbers of ways, 0:15:15.880 --> 0:15:19.120 are also fundamentally and deeply opposed to standing armies because 0:15:19.160 --> 0:15:21.640 you know, they are students of Roman history and they 0:15:21.680 --> 0:15:24.000 know that standing armies have this, you know, this sort 0:15:24.000 --> 0:15:28.280 of way of seizing power. But we've led it in 0:15:28.320 --> 0:15:30.320 a situation where you know, they don't really need to, right. 0:15:30.440 --> 0:15:32.240 The US Army is kept in check by the fact 0:15:32.240 --> 0:15:34.960 that it has it basically unlimited budget that increases every year, 0:15:35.000 --> 0:15:37.040 so you can't even like talk about cutting it without 0:15:37.040 --> 0:15:40.520 getting accused of treason. But it didn't used to be 0:15:40.640 --> 0:15:42.560 like that in the eighteen hundreds. Right after a war 0:15:42.600 --> 0:15:45.920 would end, you know, entire parts of the like they like, 0:15:45.960 --> 0:15:48.200 you know, all the US cavalry for example, sometimes which 0:15:48.200 --> 0:15:50.640 just get disbanded. Right, there'd be these massive reductions in 0:15:50.680 --> 0:15:53.440 troop size in behitry wars, and you know that's that 0:15:53.480 --> 0:15:57.280 like doesn't happen anymore, right, But the product of this 0:15:57.480 --> 0:16:02.160 was that, you know, there weren't that many like armed 0:16:02.240 --> 0:16:06.120 agents of the state running around with guns. And that's 0:16:06.160 --> 0:16:09.360 the thing that is completely and utterly ubiquitous in modern 0:16:09.400 --> 0:16:12.320 American life. I mean, modern American life has reached a 0:16:12.360 --> 0:16:15.760 point where people you can't even imagine what it would 0:16:15.760 --> 0:16:18.080 be like if there weren't cops literally everywhere, and if 0:16:18.080 --> 0:16:20.720 you didn't have the ability to call the police about anything. 0:16:21.240 --> 0:16:22.880 And that was just the sort of the state of 0:16:22.880 --> 0:16:24.560 affairs for a lot of the eighteen hundreds in the 0:16:24.600 --> 0:16:27.560 US is that just you know, they're really weren't police. 0:16:30.120 --> 0:16:34.520 And you know, there's kind of midpoint in the level 0:16:34.560 --> 0:16:36.720 of sort of bureaucratic development and the level of sort 0:16:36.760 --> 0:16:42.880 of the bureaucracy of violence, that is the police happens 0:16:43.040 --> 0:16:49.280 after a bit after the Civil War, where there are 0:16:49.320 --> 0:16:52.000 not enough police to develop the kind of sort of 0:16:52.400 --> 0:16:55.400 to deploy against the kind of violence that companies need 0:16:55.440 --> 0:16:58.600 to stop unions informing. And you know there's a secondary problem, right, 0:16:58.640 --> 0:17:01.480 which is okay, so you know there are armed troops 0:17:02.320 --> 0:17:04.840 in a state, but the armed troops are the militia. 0:17:05.000 --> 0:17:07.439 And you know a lot of the times the militia 0:17:07.440 --> 0:17:10.160 can be relied upon to choose striking workers and break them. 0:17:10.160 --> 0:17:12.520 But there's always a chance that you ordered the militia in, 0:17:13.280 --> 0:17:17.960 and the militia are people from the towns where you 0:17:17.960 --> 0:17:19.520 know where the striking workers are from. But this is 0:17:19.520 --> 0:17:22.520 a real problem with sheriffs too, right, is that in 0:17:22.560 --> 0:17:23.840 this period, you get it, you get a lot of 0:17:23.920 --> 0:17:28.280 sheriffs who just won't prosecute workers because the entire town 0:17:28.840 --> 0:17:31.760 and the sheriff are all pro union. And this is 0:17:31.800 --> 0:17:36.479 where we come to the pinkertons. But first, and this 0:17:36.560 --> 0:17:38.760 is something that the Pinkertons would have approved of some 0:17:38.840 --> 0:17:54.639 ads and we're back. So who are the Pinkertons. The 0:17:54.680 --> 0:17:58.520 Pinkertons are founded by a guy named Alan Pinkerton. Alan 0:17:58.560 --> 0:18:02.480 Pinkerton's an interesting guy. He's he's kind of a radical 0:18:02.520 --> 0:18:05.280 when he's young, he's like he's a hardcore abolitionist who 0:18:05.320 --> 0:18:09.879 like funds John Brown. Right, there's a whole debate about 0:18:09.880 --> 0:18:12.040 the extent to which she was involved in a sort 0:18:12.040 --> 0:18:17.040 of British workers reform movement called the chartlists every source 0:18:17.119 --> 0:18:21.280 I've read disagrees about how much he was involved in it. 0:18:21.280 --> 0:18:24.640 It's I mean, one's disagreements are basically penning the radiology. 0:18:24.760 --> 0:18:25.760 I don't know if I ever going to get a 0:18:25.800 --> 0:18:28.879 good answer about how involved in it he is. But 0:18:30.160 --> 0:18:33.120 Pinkerton briefly and kind of by accident, becomes a bounty hunter. 0:18:33.240 --> 0:18:37.280 But he just like walks across it, just runs into 0:18:37.320 --> 0:18:40.040 a camp of people who seem to clearly be counterfeiters. 0:18:41.200 --> 0:18:44.800 And he eventually becomes a detective around Michigan and then 0:18:44.800 --> 0:18:49.240 in Chicago, and then he becomes a postal cop. And 0:18:49.320 --> 0:18:52.520 in the process of being a postal cop, he figures 0:18:52.560 --> 0:18:55.040 out something that is more lucrative. He figured out a 0:18:55.040 --> 0:18:57.280 more lucrative way to detective work than just working for 0:18:57.320 --> 0:19:01.240 the state, which is working for the railway. So by 0:19:01.280 --> 0:19:04.080 eighteen fifty he has a full detective agency going that 0:19:04.160 --> 0:19:08.399 he renames the Pinkertons. Now, you know, this is the 0:19:08.400 --> 0:19:11.560 eighteen fifties, right, you are rapidly coroaching the Civil War, 0:19:11.640 --> 0:19:15.040 dreaming the Civil War. He is hired by George McClellan, 0:19:15.320 --> 0:19:19.400 the just the worst union general. He runs a spy 0:19:19.480 --> 0:19:22.240 network in the Confederacy that absolutely sucks, Like all the 0:19:22.280 --> 0:19:26.240 spies get caught. His intelligence being awful. It's one of 0:19:26.280 --> 0:19:29.240 the things that leads McClellan to suspect, you know, that 0:19:29.240 --> 0:19:31.919 there's like secretly way more Confederate troops that there actually are. 0:19:31.960 --> 0:19:33.960 So he just never does anything for the entire world. 0:19:34.480 --> 0:19:37.320 He's like the worst union general until he gets replaced. Yeah, 0:19:37.040 --> 0:19:41.359 when McClellan is asked, Pinkerton is also out, but you know, 0:19:41.400 --> 0:19:45.800 the agency is still around and the detectives are initially 0:19:45.800 --> 0:19:52.639 known as Sidered as cinder Dix for complicated a railroading reasons. Yeah, 0:19:53.160 --> 0:19:55.000 I don't know about that one, but it's very funny 0:19:55.520 --> 0:19:58.840 and what they sort of do, right, is in this 0:19:58.920 --> 0:20:01.240 early phase, they have this massive network of sort of 0:20:01.240 --> 0:20:04.639 informants and spies that they sell to the highest bidder. 0:20:05.440 --> 0:20:07.760 They're not sort of when you know, they are detectives 0:20:07.840 --> 0:20:11.080 right in sometimes, but they're not detectives in the Sherlock 0:20:11.200 --> 0:20:13.920 sense where you have a guy who sees a bunch 0:20:13.920 --> 0:20:17.480 of evidence and then uses logic and uses an investigation 0:20:17.560 --> 0:20:21.959 to deduce like who did the crime. Pinkerton detectives are operatives. 0:20:22.000 --> 0:20:24.520 They do infiltrations. This is basically their one trick, right 0:20:24.600 --> 0:20:27.800 is they send a guy undercover and then he gets 0:20:27.800 --> 0:20:29.439 people to talk to him, and then they catch the 0:20:29.440 --> 0:20:33.639 guy because someone talked. Right now. The other thing that 0:20:33.640 --> 0:20:36.640 the Pinkertons are really really good at is spinning mythology 0:20:36.680 --> 0:20:41.119 around them. Pinkerton claims that he saved Lincoln from an 0:20:41.160 --> 0:20:47.280 assassination plot, and you know, he successfully convinces Lincoln to 0:20:47.359 --> 0:20:50.920 flee a building in a disguise. Right. The problem is 0:20:50.960 --> 0:20:53.480 that you know, as early as like the next day 0:20:53.600 --> 0:20:58.080 after this like supposed plot happens, assassinating assassination plot happens, 0:20:58.480 --> 0:21:01.479 people were already claiming that there was one. And you know, 0:21:01.560 --> 0:21:03.879 I think the evidence for their not being one is 0:21:03.920 --> 0:21:06.080 bolstered by the fact that no one was ever like, 0:21:06.760 --> 0:21:08.480 not only was no one ever tried for this, no 0:21:08.480 --> 0:21:11.399 one was ever even arrested for again, a plot to 0:21:11.440 --> 0:21:15.080 assassinate the president of the United States. So I am 0:21:15.240 --> 0:21:18.120 inclined to suspect that this was fake. So sorians disagree 0:21:18.160 --> 0:21:21.880 about this, but he's able to milk this for incredible 0:21:21.960 --> 0:21:24.200 pr right, He's you know, he's like, I'm the guy 0:21:24.200 --> 0:21:25.960 who saved the president. And he does this whole sort 0:21:26.000 --> 0:21:29.080 of like, ah, if I had been there when I 0:21:29.280 --> 0:21:32.000 if I, if I had only been there when Lincoln 0:21:32.160 --> 0:21:35.080 was being gunned down by John wielks Booth, ah, I 0:21:35.080 --> 0:21:37.880 would have saved him. And you know this this makes 0:21:37.920 --> 0:21:43.239 him very famous. They also start doing you know, it's 0:21:43.240 --> 0:21:44.920 sort of word noting, right, the kind of crime that 0:21:44.960 --> 0:21:48.720 they're doing, these guys are, they're they're basically a corporate 0:21:48.720 --> 0:21:52.840 anti crime group, right. They they solve crimes, but the 0:21:52.880 --> 0:21:57.560 crimes that they solve are people stealing from corporations. So, 0:21:57.800 --> 0:22:00.560 for example, they do a lot of solving bank robberies. 0:22:00.560 --> 0:22:03.120 They do a lot of security to stop train robbers, 0:22:03.200 --> 0:22:07.680 they do counterfeiting. These are all kinds of crimes that 0:22:07.920 --> 0:22:11.480 affect rich people. And you know, and so the Pinkertons 0:22:11.560 --> 0:22:14.000 are slowly starting to gain this reputation to sort of 0:22:14.119 --> 0:22:18.440 like the hired hands of capital. Now they're also sort 0:22:18.480 --> 0:22:21.600 of doing like frontier outlaws stuff. There's a gang of 0:22:21.800 --> 0:22:23.879 people who this is a gang sort of bandits who 0:22:23.880 --> 0:22:28.359 they very successfully break up, but they also go after 0:22:28.440 --> 0:22:32.760 Jesse James. And Okay, we need to tell the story 0:22:32.800 --> 0:22:37.480 of Jesse James briefly here because it's an important thing 0:22:37.560 --> 0:22:41.240 to get an understanding of what the sort of conflict 0:22:41.240 --> 0:22:43.080 that's going on in the West is at this point. 0:22:43.520 --> 0:22:45.720 And the thing that's incredibly important to understand about the 0:22:45.720 --> 0:22:47.959 story of Jesse James versus the Pinkertons is that there 0:22:48.000 --> 0:22:50.600 are no heroes here. Every single person involved in all 0:22:50.640 --> 0:22:54.879 sides is just an absolutely terrible person. So Jesse James 0:22:54.920 --> 0:22:57.840 is an ex Confederate terrorist who somehow managed to make 0:22:57.960 --> 0:23:02.720 robbing trains uncol by doing it and a KKK rope 0:23:02.760 --> 0:23:06.040 with the aim of like restoring the honor of the Confederacy. 0:23:07.320 --> 0:23:09.320 So this sucks. And this is where part of the 0:23:09.359 --> 0:23:13.000 sort of like rebel flag like that, part of the 0:23:13.040 --> 0:23:15.520 sort of like lost cause myth those comes from. Right there, 0:23:15.520 --> 0:23:17.320 are you know, there are these sort of frontier outlaws 0:23:17.359 --> 0:23:20.480 who are like ex Confederates whose things like yeah, we're 0:23:20.480 --> 0:23:22.280 like against the man and like the man is like 0:23:22.720 --> 0:23:25.679 you know, the north Right. But these people suck right. 0:23:25.680 --> 0:23:27.040 These are these are these are these are people who 0:23:27.040 --> 0:23:31.720 fought and died for slavery. I Jesse James in particular, 0:23:31.800 --> 0:23:34.199 like he's again he's in this group of like gorillas 0:23:35.080 --> 0:23:39.399 who are fighting in Kansas and Missouri, and they do 0:23:39.920 --> 0:23:44.639 they do things that are genuinely unspeakable. So these people 0:23:44.680 --> 0:23:46.480 suck right. But the problem is the people going after 0:23:46.520 --> 0:23:49.000 them are the Pinkertons. And we're gonna learn a lot 0:23:49.119 --> 0:23:52.359 about the Pinkertons by what they managed to accomplish by 0:23:52.400 --> 0:23:55.199 going after again ex Confederate terrorists who are like some 0:23:55.240 --> 0:23:58.119 of the worst people whove ever lived. So the Pinkertons 0:23:58.119 --> 0:24:00.919 take this case in eighteen seventy one. He sends in 0:24:00.920 --> 0:24:02.639 a bunch of agents try to infiltrate the gang, and 0:24:02.680 --> 0:24:05.840 Jesse James just like smokes them all. So, in a 0:24:05.920 --> 0:24:08.760 very sort of modern cop move, the Pinkertons do a 0:24:08.880 --> 0:24:12.680 raid on Jesse James's house. So they throw in this 0:24:13.160 --> 0:24:21.040 weird pseudo It's a very weird kind of explosive device 0:24:21.200 --> 0:24:25.560 thing that I don't know. They claim that they were 0:24:25.560 --> 0:24:28.840 just trying to scare like the family out of the 0:24:28.880 --> 0:24:32.359 house so they could arrest them. But the family sees 0:24:32.440 --> 0:24:34.240 this thing that looks like a bomb and they throw 0:24:34.280 --> 0:24:37.760 it into their fireplace and it blows up, and instead 0:24:37.760 --> 0:24:40.440 of smoking the family out, they have now blown up 0:24:40.560 --> 0:24:43.680 Jesse James's nine year old step brother and maimed his mom. 0:24:45.119 --> 0:24:47.760 So the Pinkertons absolutely suck right like so far in 0:24:47.800 --> 0:24:50.080 there at Kemp to catch Jesse James. They have managed 0:24:50.119 --> 0:24:53.720 to blow up a child and maame a woman. Now 0:24:53.800 --> 0:24:56.119 you could ask the question, right, Okay, so they have 0:24:56.280 --> 0:25:01.840 killed a child, they have maimed a woman. Get Jesse James. No, no, 0:25:01.960 --> 0:25:04.840 they don't. They never get him, because that's what happens 0:25:04.840 --> 0:25:06.920 when you know, you have an ex Confederate in places 0:25:06.960 --> 0:25:08.880 where with a bunch of ex confederates, with a bunch 0:25:08.920 --> 0:25:11.960 of people who support the Confederacy right, they won't turn 0:25:12.040 --> 0:25:14.800 over their own people. And you know, and when the 0:25:14.800 --> 0:25:17.520 people they're going up against are the Pinkertons, who are 0:25:17.720 --> 0:25:20.480 like the hired guns of Northern Capital, a bunch of people, 0:25:20.680 --> 0:25:22.120 you know what happens is a bunch of grand people 0:25:22.160 --> 0:25:26.480 end up dead, and yeah, but both sides of this 0:25:26.560 --> 0:25:29.199 are incredibly deeply evil. Jesse James is later shot by 0:25:29.200 --> 0:25:33.919 one of his own men, and yeah, that is the 0:25:33.960 --> 0:25:37.399 famous story of Jesse James versus the Pinkertons, which I 0:25:37.640 --> 0:25:42.159 think is useful in establishing that, like God, like, the 0:25:42.200 --> 0:25:45.120 South are obviously the bad guys in the Civil War, 0:25:45.640 --> 0:25:48.000 but a lot of the people in the Union are 0:25:49.840 --> 0:25:54.480 sort of genuinely awful hired gun for capital people. And 0:25:55.160 --> 0:25:57.200 you know that's not so much of a big deal 0:25:57.280 --> 0:25:59.920 dreamed the war, but after the war, you know, you 0:26:00.119 --> 0:26:02.399 got these battles just like, oh God, everyone here is 0:26:02.520 --> 0:26:07.840 like everyone here should simply die now. Ellen Pinkerton dies 0:26:07.960 --> 0:26:10.040 in eighteen eighty six, and he is replaced by his 0:26:10.200 --> 0:26:16.440 even worse sons. And at this point the Pinkertons cease 0:26:16.600 --> 0:26:19.200 even sort of the pretense of being a detective agency, 0:26:19.240 --> 0:26:21.920 and they devote themselves full time to being strike breakers. 0:26:23.040 --> 0:26:25.680 Now they have spies everywhere. They have you know, over 0:26:25.720 --> 0:26:28.520 a thousand of them at their peak, spread across the 0:26:28.560 --> 0:26:31.720 dozens and dozens and dozens of unions. They are spying 0:26:31.720 --> 0:26:34.680 on meetings or appointed to the pinkertons. And this allows corporations. 0:26:34.680 --> 0:26:37.200 For example, if you know who's in a union meeting, right, 0:26:37.520 --> 0:26:40.720 you can just fire all of them. And this is 0:26:40.800 --> 0:26:44.160 especially easy. And you know in this sort of pre 0:26:44.240 --> 0:26:47.280 nineteen thirties period where like there is no protected right 0:26:47.320 --> 0:26:51.000 to strike, right like you if you stop working, that 0:26:51.160 --> 0:26:55.880 is illegal. The other thing they do is provide quote 0:26:55.960 --> 0:27:00.000 unquote security for corporations Traine strikes. What this looks like 0:27:00.200 --> 0:27:03.440 practice is shooting people. And you know, sometimes those people 0:27:03.480 --> 0:27:06.080 are striking workers, like the three strikers they killed in 0:27:06.080 --> 0:27:09.600 the Pennsylvania Colt strike of eighteen ninety. Sometimes they just 0:27:09.600 --> 0:27:13.399 shoot random bystanders, like the random guy they shoteen in 0:27:13.480 --> 0:27:16.639 eighteen sixty six, while providing security. And you know, again 0:27:17.520 --> 0:27:19.920 when you're shooting a random bystander, you have to ask 0:27:20.080 --> 0:27:25.800 like security for who, Like who is the security you're 0:27:25.800 --> 0:27:28.800 providing for when you're just shooting random people, you know, 0:27:28.960 --> 0:27:31.159 anominally it's for the boss that's in a dog strike. 0:27:31.600 --> 0:27:35.080 And sometimes, like in eighteen seventy seven, they shoot children 0:27:35.560 --> 0:27:37.639 where they shot and killed a fifteen year old you 0:27:37.720 --> 0:27:41.800 a Jersey coal wharf strike, you know, and they do 0:27:41.840 --> 0:27:43.560 stuff like this all the time, right, there's a famous 0:27:43.560 --> 0:27:45.680 incident in Chicago where a bunch of people are yelling 0:27:45.680 --> 0:27:47.320 at them because again the thinker doesn't have a really 0:27:47.359 --> 0:27:50.399 bad reputation among workers at this point. And you know, 0:27:50.400 --> 0:27:52.159 there's there's a point where they're they're going by on 0:27:52.200 --> 0:27:54.400 a train and people yelled the train and the Pinkertons 0:27:54.400 --> 0:27:56.160 just bomb by, taking out the rifles and shooting four 0:27:56.200 --> 0:27:59.800 people out the window. So you know, these are these 0:27:59.840 --> 0:28:04.080 are good people, TM right. The other thing they do 0:28:04.280 --> 0:28:07.840 is they start getting into breaking strikes by being a 0:28:07.880 --> 0:28:13.040 company you can hire to import scabs, and this culminates 0:28:13.080 --> 0:28:15.200 in the Homestead strike. Again, there's another thing. There's like 0:28:15.240 --> 0:28:18.119 a giant Bastard's episode on, but we'll do we'll do 0:28:18.160 --> 0:28:21.919 a short version of the Homestead strike. So the Homestet 0:28:21.920 --> 0:28:24.520 strike is this giant confrontation between steel workers and the 0:28:24.520 --> 0:28:28.760 forces of Andrew Carnagie and Henry Frick. Carnagian Frick like 0:28:28.880 --> 0:28:31.320 locked the union out of the factory and they call 0:28:31.320 --> 0:28:33.879 a Pinkerton army to seize control of the town of Homestead. 0:28:34.720 --> 0:28:37.240 This is from the book Inventing the Pinkertons. Quote. By 0:28:37.240 --> 0:28:39.480 the end of June, he had built around the mills, 0:28:39.480 --> 0:28:43.480 a protective twelve foot fence that included rifle holes, waterman's 0:28:43.520 --> 0:28:47.200 capable of blasting strikers with boiling water, and wires attached 0:28:47.240 --> 0:28:51.040 to a generator which could be electrified. In response, workers 0:28:51.080 --> 0:28:56.280 dubbed the mills Fort Frick. Now striking steel workers and 0:28:56.320 --> 0:28:59.200 other residents of Homestead. Here the pinkertons are coming, and they, 0:28:59.640 --> 0:29:02.640 you know, they that the pinkertons are trying to land 0:29:02.680 --> 0:29:06.200 on these like invasion barges that they've modified, and so 0:29:06.320 --> 0:29:08.720 the homestead people go try to stop the barges, and 0:29:08.760 --> 0:29:11.040 the Pinkertons start shooting at them. And this is this 0:29:11.080 --> 0:29:12.880 is another thing that's very interesting about this whole story 0:29:12.960 --> 0:29:18.040 is that, Okay, every account at the time agrees that 0:29:18.120 --> 0:29:21.000 the first person the people who started shooting first with pinkertons. 0:29:21.400 --> 0:29:26.600 Later accounts suddenly, like mysteriously later on it suddenly start 0:29:26.640 --> 0:29:28.720 to claim it like, well, nobody really knows she started 0:29:28.720 --> 0:29:30.720 the shooting in these fights, or like maybe it was 0:29:30.760 --> 0:29:34.400 a worker. But like again, everyone at the time gose 0:29:34.560 --> 0:29:38.640 it was the pinkertons. So I and given given what 0:29:38.640 --> 0:29:40.440 we know about the track record of pinkertons are shooting 0:29:40.480 --> 0:29:42.440 children of shooting random people yelling at them outside of 0:29:42.440 --> 0:29:45.920 a train of shooting, just literally random people on the streets. 0:29:47.320 --> 0:29:49.400 We can be pretty sure the Pinkertons started this, and 0:29:49.480 --> 0:29:52.800 but you know, the workers in Homestead are heavily armed, 0:29:53.200 --> 0:29:56.560 and this starts a massive gun battle. I'm gonna read 0:29:56.800 --> 0:30:00.280 from inventing the Pinkertons again. This serious battle woul the 0:30:00.320 --> 0:30:03.680 next fourteen hours. After an initial surge, the Pinkertons were 0:30:03.680 --> 0:30:06.600 pinned down in their barges. After several hours, the crowd 0:30:06.640 --> 0:30:10.080 attempted to sink the barges by cannon fire. Residents borrowed 0:30:10.120 --> 0:30:12.520 the cannon that had been that the city used for 0:30:12.520 --> 0:30:14.960 commemorations and by the way, that that's a civil war 0:30:15.480 --> 0:30:17.720 cannon that they're using it in eighteen ninety to try 0:30:17.720 --> 0:30:22.800 to sink these boats. The crowd also set burning railcars 0:30:22.880 --> 0:30:25.760 rolling towards the barges and sprayed oil into their river, 0:30:25.760 --> 0:30:27.600 which they attempted a light on fire in hopaes of 0:30:27.640 --> 0:30:31.400 burning the Pikertons out of their barges. The lubricating oil 0:30:31.440 --> 0:30:33.840 thrown onto the water proved impossible to set a flame. 0:30:34.520 --> 0:30:37.880 So the Pickertons like try to surrender, but by this 0:30:37.920 --> 0:30:40.640 one people hate them so much that every they showed 0:30:40.680 --> 0:30:43.440 this four times and each time someone will hold up 0:30:43.480 --> 0:30:45.600 a white flag and a sniper will shoot the flag 0:30:45.640 --> 0:30:48.880 and refuse to let them surrender. On try five, the 0:30:48.880 --> 0:30:52.720 Picckertons are finally allowed to surrender and the Pickersons are crushed, 0:30:52.960 --> 0:30:55.240 but unfortunately, the state militia is brought in to sort 0:30:55.240 --> 0:30:57.440 of break the strike and the union movement in Pennsylvania 0:30:57.480 --> 0:31:03.080 is essentially destroyed. But why this is terrible from the Pinkertons, 0:31:03.960 --> 0:31:06.640 and they start trying to do like a giant pr 0:31:06.720 --> 0:31:08.840 op to sort of recover the reputation, and a lot 0:31:08.880 --> 0:31:11.120 of what the sort of popular image of the Pinkertons 0:31:11.200 --> 0:31:13.880 right comes from the pr op the agency does, like 0:31:13.920 --> 0:31:16.440 after the homes distruct that gets reproduced by like TV 0:31:16.520 --> 0:31:20.400 producers later on. So fast forwarding a little bit to 0:31:20.480 --> 0:31:23.120 some other stuff that they were involved in. In late 0:31:23.200 --> 0:31:26.280 nineteen oh five, someone blew up the notoriously anti union 0:31:26.280 --> 0:31:29.120 governor of Idaho who'd sent troops to kill striking workers 0:31:29.120 --> 0:31:34.400 a few years ago. Now Idaho hires a Pinkerton detective 0:31:34.440 --> 0:31:36.960 to just torture a guy into confessing to the murder 0:31:37.040 --> 0:31:40.800 and then also claiming that like basically every instance of 0:31:40.880 --> 0:31:44.600 violence in the last five years in that part of 0:31:44.920 --> 0:31:48.040 the US was committed by the IWW, who are THEWW 0:31:48.160 --> 0:31:52.080 are a very very radical union whose thing basically was 0:31:52.120 --> 0:31:56.440 that society should be run by like confederations of direct 0:31:56.480 --> 0:31:59.360 democratic unions like run you know, all all of society, 0:31:59.360 --> 0:32:03.040 all production should be run by workers in these in 0:32:03.120 --> 0:32:05.320 you know, in in in the form of like one 0:32:05.400 --> 0:32:10.040 giant direct democratic union. And people hate this, and by people, 0:32:10.080 --> 0:32:13.840 I mean like bosses absolutely hate this. Dow IWW very 0:32:13.840 --> 0:32:16.800 popularly with workers. Bosses are going to spend the next 0:32:17.000 --> 0:32:20.560 rest of there's just murdering them, you know. But having 0:32:20.640 --> 0:32:25.560 tortured this guy into saying, into fingering the industrial workers 0:32:25.560 --> 0:32:29.200 of the world in this conspiracy, they get Big Bill Haywood, 0:32:29.200 --> 0:32:31.480 who is one of the most famous and like successful 0:32:31.560 --> 0:32:35.640 organizers of the AWW, and several other IWW leaders kidnapped 0:32:35.680 --> 0:32:38.560 and taken into Idaho to stand trial for murder, which 0:32:38.960 --> 0:32:42.040 again they had nothing to do with. Heywood is defended 0:32:42.040 --> 0:32:46.040 by Clarence Darrow of the infamous Scopes monkey trial, and 0:32:46.200 --> 0:32:49.800 Heywood gets off, but the case to serious damage to 0:32:49.800 --> 0:32:52.000 the WW. If you want to learn more about this 0:32:52.040 --> 0:32:56.160 whole story, go listen to Cool People who did cool stuff. 0:32:56.160 --> 0:32:58.560 There's two episodes about the IWW in this period called 0:32:58.560 --> 0:33:01.760 the IWW In the Hobbo you saved free speech. It's 0:33:01.800 --> 0:33:05.479 good stuff, you know. I should also briefly mention, right, 0:33:05.520 --> 0:33:10.040 another thing that the Pinkertons do is Okay, so if 0:33:10.040 --> 0:33:13.480 someone if someone's wanted in one state, right, instead of 0:33:13.520 --> 0:33:16.040 having to like make you know, the government having to 0:33:16.120 --> 0:33:18.040 like the state government have to making requests, have to 0:33:18.080 --> 0:33:20.520 be having to make request to another state in order 0:33:20.560 --> 0:33:22.520 to get them to extradite someone, they would just have 0:33:22.560 --> 0:33:24.640 the Pingertons kidnap them. This is this is this is 0:33:24.680 --> 0:33:26.440 one of the sort of big services they provide. They 0:33:26.440 --> 0:33:31.160 also seemed it's very unclear. I don't know, this historical 0:33:31.200 --> 0:33:34.280 record is a bit muddled. They seem also to have 0:33:34.400 --> 0:33:36.320 been people you could hire if so if like your 0:33:36.320 --> 0:33:41.960 spouse was trying to divorce you, which sucks. Is deeply evil. 0:33:43.280 --> 0:33:47.440 They do sort of lots more deeply evil stuff, which 0:33:47.440 --> 0:33:59.960 we will get into after these ads. All right, we're back, 0:34:00.280 --> 0:34:03.120 So speaking of deeply evil stuff, they also send one 0:34:03.160 --> 0:34:05.840 hundred detectives to break a strike of the mostly black 0:34:05.920 --> 0:34:09.480 Brotherhood of Timber Workers, which is an IWW affiliate in Louisiana. 0:34:09.960 --> 0:34:12.560 Now they break this They try to break this union 0:34:12.640 --> 0:34:16.960 by walking into a union meeting shooting forty four people 0:34:17.000 --> 0:34:21.120 and killing four of them. There are like forty more 0:34:21.160 --> 0:34:24.279 stories of a guy with the Pinkerton walks in and 0:34:24.320 --> 0:34:26.919 shoots amongst people that I could put here. I had 0:34:26.920 --> 0:34:29.360 to find the limit at some point to how many 0:34:29.800 --> 0:34:33.040 stories about Pinkerton's murdering people that I could I could 0:34:33.040 --> 0:34:36.440 sort of put. But you know, there's an interesting shift 0:34:36.480 --> 0:34:38.800 that starts to happen in the in sort of as 0:34:38.840 --> 0:34:41.399 the nineteen hundred, you know, the nineteen hundreds turn into 0:34:41.440 --> 0:34:45.000 nineteen tens. The Pinkertons start to figure out that it's 0:34:45.040 --> 0:34:47.719 more effective to form mobs of vigilantes than it is 0:34:47.760 --> 0:34:50.439 to fight unions directly. And there's a few benefits here, right, 0:34:50.760 --> 0:34:53.759 There's less danger to Pinkerton detectives themselves. It's easier to 0:34:53.760 --> 0:34:57.560 deploy large numbers of people. Instead of having to sort 0:34:57.600 --> 0:35:00.239 of like pay an enormous amount of money for bunch 0:35:00.280 --> 0:35:02.360 of like eight hundred detectives and weapons and logistics, you 0:35:02.360 --> 0:35:03.880 would just sort of whip up a mob, we get 0:35:03.880 --> 0:35:06.200 them to do the shooting, right. The Pinkerdons also get 0:35:06.239 --> 0:35:09.879 plausible deniability, which is very helpful for their reputation. And 0:35:10.040 --> 0:35:12.160 you know, the Pinkertons are very much ahead of the 0:35:12.200 --> 0:35:14.799 curve here. The government, you know, who is going to 0:35:14.800 --> 0:35:18.400 displace the Pinkertons is sort of the main force opposing 0:35:18.440 --> 0:35:21.640 the IWW in later sort of like Cio union organizing 0:35:22.280 --> 0:35:24.759 that you know, turn into the two Red Scares. They're 0:35:24.800 --> 0:35:27.120 going to start taking pages from the Pinkerton's book, and 0:35:27.160 --> 0:35:29.319 eventually they are going to you know, instead of like 0:35:29.920 --> 0:35:32.200 sending the US Army to invade Nicarago, which is what 0:35:32.200 --> 0:35:34.080 they would have done in the eighteen hundreds, by you know, 0:35:34.160 --> 0:35:35.879 by the time he gets in the nineteen eighties, right, 0:35:36.840 --> 0:35:43.480 they are sending people to train Nicaraguan desk squads. And 0:35:43.520 --> 0:35:46.200 so we can track the shift here. Right as the 0:35:46.239 --> 0:35:48.520 nineteenth century comes to a close and we get to 0:35:49.360 --> 0:35:51.480 sort of the October Revolution of the height of the 0:35:51.520 --> 0:35:53.759 Red Scare, we're in a place where they're starting to 0:35:53.800 --> 0:35:57.000 be enough cops and enough federal agents to do the 0:35:57.080 --> 0:36:00.680 job the Pinkertons had done in previous generations. And you know, 0:36:00.719 --> 0:36:06.040 there's sort of robust arguments in the sort of historiography 0:36:06.120 --> 0:36:09.920 about to what extent J Edgar Hoover and the FBI 0:36:10.040 --> 0:36:13.960 were influenced by the Pinkertons. I think there's decent evidence 0:36:14.000 --> 0:36:16.440 that they that they were influenced by them. But the 0:36:16.520 --> 0:36:21.120 FBI kind of turns into what the Pinkertons are. You know, 0:36:21.160 --> 0:36:23.320 they're the people who suddenly are like showing up and 0:36:23.360 --> 0:36:26.919 shooting people, showing up and arresting union organizers, deporting union 0:36:27.000 --> 0:36:29.920 organizers from the country. But this puts the Pinkertons in 0:36:30.000 --> 0:36:32.880 kind of a weird spot, right, The Pinkerton name has 0:36:32.880 --> 0:36:37.440 become synonymous with sort of this this kind of like 0:36:38.000 --> 0:36:40.520 they're called sort of like feudal retainers, right, these sort 0:36:40.560 --> 0:36:44.800 of lawless private armies that are not supposed to exist 0:36:44.880 --> 0:36:48.600 in a democracy. And so you know in the nineteen 0:36:48.640 --> 0:36:51.399 thirties when the Wagner Act like makes strikes legal, right. 0:36:51.440 --> 0:36:53.319 I talked about the Wagner Acts a long time ago, 0:36:53.400 --> 0:36:56.759 an episode called The Eden Makes Us Strong. But after this, 0:36:56.920 --> 0:37:00.200 they tried Robert Pinkerton, the second who's the new sort 0:37:00.200 --> 0:37:02.480 of owner with the Pinkertons, tries to do a rebrand 0:37:03.600 --> 0:37:07.759 and he has this great quote. That's quote he's talking 0:37:07.760 --> 0:37:10.480 about union busting. That is a phase of our business 0:37:10.520 --> 0:37:13.040 that we are not particularly delighted or proud of and 0:37:13.080 --> 0:37:16.680 we're out of it. However, there was nothing illegal about 0:37:16.680 --> 0:37:19.040 it at the time. Now, okay, you could say a 0:37:19.080 --> 0:37:21.280 lot about what was or wasn't illegal in a period 0:37:21.560 --> 0:37:23.480 when you know, you could order a drink that was 0:37:23.520 --> 0:37:26.400 cocaine mixed with wine and you know, you could just 0:37:26.440 --> 0:37:29.759 get like opium prescribe to your baby, But torturing and 0:37:29.840 --> 0:37:32.919 murdering people was still illegal back then. Now, I guess 0:37:33.000 --> 0:37:34.520 if you're you know, if you really wanted to have fun, 0:37:34.520 --> 0:37:36.440 you can get into an argument that like, nowhere in 0:37:36.480 --> 0:37:39.080 the Constitution is murdered specifically banned, but like you don't 0:37:39.120 --> 0:37:42.480 have fun with that. But FDR and the New Dealers 0:37:42.560 --> 0:37:44.920 go after the Pinkertons very hard. And this is a 0:37:44.920 --> 0:37:48.200 lot of interesting effects. What it means is, on the 0:37:48.239 --> 0:37:50.440 one hand, you can't have some guy with a detective 0:37:50.440 --> 0:37:52.640 badge who works for a corporation walked into a union 0:37:52.680 --> 0:37:55.080 meeting and start the killing. But it also means that 0:37:55.080 --> 0:37:57.120 when you need someone to smash a union by force, 0:37:57.640 --> 0:38:00.040 it's going to be the state doing it. And the 0:38:00.080 --> 0:38:02.920 aposteosis of this sort of one of the internal contradictions 0:38:02.920 --> 0:38:05.680 that destroys a new Deal is that it's reliance on 0:38:05.719 --> 0:38:08.360 the state to contain the worst exis of capitalism means 0:38:08.400 --> 0:38:13.120 that you know, they have in turn directly enormously empowered 0:38:13.120 --> 0:38:16.320 the state and the state's military capacity. And this means 0:38:16.320 --> 0:38:19.160 that in the nineteen eighties, unions are going to be 0:38:19.640 --> 0:38:22.360 destroyed by the state that the New Deal had built. 0:38:23.600 --> 0:38:25.960 The Pickerchins are replaced by Hoover and the g Men, 0:38:26.000 --> 0:38:29.120 and the g Men are eventually sort of become known 0:38:29.160 --> 0:38:31.680 as the dreaded modern fat who you know, lurks at 0:38:31.680 --> 0:38:35.279 every doorstep eating babies and is the terror of every 0:38:35.360 --> 0:38:40.120 sort of political movement in the US. Now. The Pinkertons, 0:38:40.160 --> 0:38:44.400 for for their part, right with union busting now technically illegal, 0:38:44.400 --> 0:38:47.680 and when I say union busting like I mean walking in, 0:38:47.880 --> 0:38:51.440 shooting people stop and performing a union, they start working 0:38:51.480 --> 0:38:55.000 basically as regular security guards. And then they move on 0:38:55.080 --> 0:38:58.279 to selling surveillance equipment and trainings for government organizations. And 0:38:58.320 --> 0:39:03.839 this reflects a kind of large shift in what what 0:39:03.960 --> 0:39:06.719 kinds of military operations the corporations run, which is that 0:39:07.760 --> 0:39:11.520 instead of directly running armies or hiring groups like the 0:39:11.520 --> 0:39:14.120 Pinkertons to do violence for them, now what they're in 0:39:14.160 --> 0:39:17.960 the business of is intelligence operations. And this changes the 0:39:18.000 --> 0:39:21.480 way that corporations kill people enormously. You know, when when 0:39:21.719 --> 0:39:24.400 Coca Cola now needs to kill union organizers, right, they 0:39:24.400 --> 0:39:27.400 have paramilitaries for this. Now, some of these guys are contractors, 0:39:27.400 --> 0:39:28.680 some of them are paid under the table, some of 0:39:28.680 --> 0:39:30.760 them are in it for ideology, some of it for money. 0:39:30.800 --> 0:39:34.840 But it's not, you know, it's not quite like Coca 0:39:34.840 --> 0:39:37.759 Cola has its own military force like it would have 0:39:37.760 --> 0:39:40.000 been in the eighteen hundreds, in the early eighteen hundreds. 0:39:40.280 --> 0:39:43.759 It's also not there is just like a private but 0:39:43.840 --> 0:39:45.439 there's not like it's not they're not. They're not also 0:39:45.480 --> 0:39:49.360 not like hiring a specific private military contractor. Right the 0:39:49.440 --> 0:39:51.640 way they do, way they do it tends to be 0:39:52.160 --> 0:39:56.960 they you know, sort of semi clandestinely arm paramilitary. Now, 0:39:57.000 --> 0:39:59.480 there are limited exceptions where sort of like oil companies 0:39:59.520 --> 0:40:01.680 will have at armies and places where civil wars are 0:40:01.680 --> 0:40:04.560 going on, but that's usually a thing that happens when 0:40:04.560 --> 0:40:08.200 they're in a place that doesn't have state capacity. When 0:40:08.200 --> 0:40:10.400 they're in a place that does have state capacity, like 0:40:10.440 --> 0:40:14.080 for example, Nigeria, you get a very very different story. 0:40:14.400 --> 0:40:18.920 So Nigeria is a major oil producer, and this has 0:40:18.960 --> 0:40:21.239 a number of consequences on the places where that oil 0:40:21.280 --> 0:40:23.040 is extracted. A huge amount of it comes from the 0:40:23.120 --> 0:40:27.600 Niger Delta, where the government faces an almost perennial insurgency. So, okay, 0:40:27.680 --> 0:40:29.120 why is there an insurgency there? 0:40:29.200 --> 0:40:29.399 Right? 0:40:29.719 --> 0:40:31.799 Part of the reason is that there is an indescribable 0:40:31.880 --> 0:40:34.160 amount of wealth coming out of the oil and Niger Delta, 0:40:34.480 --> 0:40:37.680 and that money goes mostly to I mean, might I 0:40:37.680 --> 0:40:40.160 say mostly ninety percent of it, right, goes to Nigerian 0:40:40.160 --> 0:40:44.319 elites and corrupt for and oil companies. And you know, 0:40:44.360 --> 0:40:46.560 another part of the reason this turns into an insurgency 0:40:46.760 --> 0:40:50.880 is that people try nonviolence of disobedience in the Niger 0:40:50.960 --> 0:40:54.120 Delta to protest the sort of horrific environmental consequences of 0:40:54.160 --> 0:40:58.040 companies like Shell doing oil extraction, you know. And they 0:40:58.040 --> 0:41:01.120 have these marches that will draw out three hundred thousand 0:41:01.160 --> 0:41:03.759 people in places where this is half of the population, 0:41:04.280 --> 0:41:06.800 half of the total population of the ethnic group being affected. 0:41:08.280 --> 0:41:12.000 The Nigerian government responds by publicly executing one of the 0:41:12.000 --> 0:41:15.799 movement's leaders, the famous activist Ken Sarrowewa, by hanging him 0:41:15.800 --> 0:41:18.840 and then dissolving his body and limes we couldn't be buried, 0:41:19.080 --> 0:41:22.400 which is a real British empire shit. And okay, so 0:41:22.440 --> 0:41:24.360 at this point you've come to the sort of crossroad 0:41:24.400 --> 0:41:27.400 of a nonviolent movement, right where the government's answer to 0:41:27.480 --> 0:41:30.319 non violence we will publicly hang you and you get 0:41:30.400 --> 0:41:32.080 you get to this question do you take up arms? 0:41:32.120 --> 0:41:33.719 And the answer is yeah, a lot of people do. Right. 0:41:34.040 --> 0:41:36.400 This is this is this is a very complicated insurgency 0:41:36.400 --> 0:41:38.319 in a lot of ways that you know, we can't 0:41:38.360 --> 0:41:40.680 do justice here too. But I want to read something 0:41:40.719 --> 0:41:43.400 from this interview from a guy for the Movement for 0:41:43.440 --> 0:41:46.040 the Emancipation of the Niger Delta Men, which is one 0:41:46.040 --> 0:41:49.920 of the like many many, many, many many like militant 0:41:49.920 --> 0:41:51.720 groups that appear in the Delta over the last twenty 0:41:51.719 --> 0:41:56.560 five years. Quote, this is our territory. The soldiers dare 0:41:56.600 --> 0:42:00.279 not come here. Now they came, and we defeat them. 0:42:00.320 --> 0:42:03.359 He says. We are civilized people, educated people, and we 0:42:03.400 --> 0:42:05.319 do not want our children to be deprived as we 0:42:05.400 --> 0:42:08.440 have been deprived so other people can get rich from 0:42:08.440 --> 0:42:11.080 what is under our feet. The oil companies have had 0:42:11.080 --> 0:42:13.839 many years to treat us rights. They have never done that. 0:42:14.440 --> 0:42:18.239 Now we are making them think now if this is 0:42:18.719 --> 0:42:22.319 you know, eighteen twenty, right, and Shell is dealing with 0:42:22.320 --> 0:42:24.400 people taking up arms and cutting off their ability to 0:42:24.400 --> 0:42:26.919 sort of like extract profits of oil. They would form 0:42:26.960 --> 0:42:29.719 an army of semi literate Belgian and British barbarians, arm 0:42:29.760 --> 0:42:31.680 them with cannons and conquer the region and in place 0:42:31.760 --> 0:42:35.040 the entire area under direct corporate rule. You know, if 0:42:35.120 --> 0:42:38.520 this was say, like the eighteen nineties, right, they would 0:42:38.600 --> 0:42:40.480 hire the Pinkertons and the Pinkertons to go shoot these 0:42:40.480 --> 0:42:43.040 people for them. But this is the nineteen nineties, in 0:42:43.040 --> 0:42:48.080 the two thousands, so instead, what Shell does is literally 0:42:48.160 --> 0:42:51.520 pay the salaries of Nigerian cops you go slaughter protesters 0:42:51.520 --> 0:42:55.040 in the streets. And eventually they moved to spending hundreds 0:42:55.080 --> 0:42:57.360 of millions of dollars just just between two thousand and 0:42:57.400 --> 0:43:02.279 seven two thousand and nine alone directly funding equipping and army, 0:43:02.360 --> 0:43:06.760 the Nigerian army and a special like war crimes task 0:43:06.800 --> 0:43:09.520 force called the Joint Task Force the JFT, which is 0:43:09.560 --> 0:43:13.480 this like it's this sort of incredible thing where the army, 0:43:13.560 --> 0:43:15.480 the navy, and the police do a fusion dance to 0:43:15.520 --> 0:43:19.360 massacre civilians. And you know, I say this hundreds and 0:43:19.360 --> 0:43:21.960 millions of dollars. Right, that's an underestimate, that's just three years. 0:43:22.000 --> 0:43:24.000 That's just what we know about. The actual total that 0:43:24.040 --> 0:43:27.759 they sunk into sort of like literally funding the Nigerian 0:43:27.920 --> 0:43:32.400 Army is enormous. Now, what's interesting here is that Shell 0:43:32.680 --> 0:43:35.600 does have its own security guards, but the ratio of 0:43:35.640 --> 0:43:37.719 what they spend in the Nigerian Army versus what they 0:43:37.719 --> 0:43:39.759 spend on their own security guards is two to one. 0:43:40.760 --> 0:43:42.960 And this goes to demonstrate the point that I've sort 0:43:43.000 --> 0:43:46.040 of been making this episode, right, which is that there's 0:43:46.120 --> 0:43:50.040 been a shift in you know, if you are a 0:43:50.120 --> 0:43:53.960 company like Shell, right who has a need, you know, 0:43:54.080 --> 0:43:57.200 who are horrifically exploiting a bunch of people to the 0:43:57.239 --> 0:43:58.840 point where you need to shoot them in order to 0:43:58.920 --> 0:44:02.279 keep them in line. Instead of going to like a 0:44:02.320 --> 0:44:05.319 private detective agency or having your own army, they are 0:44:05.320 --> 0:44:09.600 increasingly simply funding the state. And you know this means 0:44:09.640 --> 0:44:13.120 that right again, instead of the Pinkertons, the actual trigger 0:44:13.160 --> 0:44:18.480 pullers are cops. They are the police, There are the military, 0:44:18.600 --> 0:44:22.279 they're weird special forces groups. And you know where that 0:44:22.440 --> 0:44:26.720 sort of leaves space for groups like the Pinkertons now 0:44:27.600 --> 0:44:31.160 is the area that's left for them is in corporate intelligence, 0:44:31.640 --> 0:44:34.920 and this seems to be most of what the Pinkertons 0:44:34.960 --> 0:44:38.920 have been up to recently. Amazon hired them in the 0:44:39.000 --> 0:44:41.040 last few years to work and to work with their 0:44:41.080 --> 0:44:45.080 intelligence division, the Global Security Operations Center, which they use 0:44:45.160 --> 0:44:47.600 to try to stomp out union organizing in their warehouses. 0:44:48.120 --> 0:44:50.840 And Amazon isn't just sort of spying on union organizers, 0:44:50.920 --> 0:44:52.879 spying on basically every social group but they can get 0:44:52.880 --> 0:44:56.840 their hands on. Here's from WECE. In twenty nineteen, Amazon 0:44:57.239 --> 0:45:00.120 monitored the yellowfst movement known as the jele jean as 0:45:00.239 --> 0:45:03.360 roots uprising for economic just to spread across France and 0:45:03.480 --> 0:45:06.880 solidarity movements in Vienna and protest against state repression in Iran. 0:45:08.200 --> 0:45:11.040 They've been deployed deployed againt strikes of communication workers in 0:45:11.040 --> 0:45:14.319 West Virginia, Google and Facebook deploys them against their own 0:45:14.360 --> 0:45:18.240 employees to prodout leakers. Now, this is all in line 0:45:18.280 --> 0:45:22.440 with the pivot of sort of corporate repression towards mass surveillance. Interestingly, 0:45:22.880 --> 0:45:25.239 the Pinkertons have been planting stories in the press about 0:45:25.280 --> 0:45:28.440 going back to their roots as mercenaries, pitching themselves. As 0:45:29.040 --> 0:45:32.080 you know, the force that can stop climate chaos with 0:45:32.160 --> 0:45:35.720 ex military forces. The company claims to have been deployed 0:45:35.719 --> 0:45:38.200 by corporations in Puerto Rico after the hurricane and after 0:45:38.280 --> 0:45:43.920 Hurricane Ria in twenty seventeen. I don't know if that's true. 0:45:44.520 --> 0:45:47.160 This is possible, but again it's something that they have 0:45:47.200 --> 0:45:49.759 to be very careful with the Pinkertons is that they 0:45:49.800 --> 0:45:52.600 are very, very brand obsessed, even though they're now owned 0:45:52.640 --> 0:45:56.480 by like a different sort of Swedish security company, and 0:45:56.719 --> 0:45:59.799 they lie constantly, so it's very difficult to stort up 0:46:00.120 --> 0:46:02.319 the myth from the fact when myth making has been 0:46:02.360 --> 0:46:04.280 such a vital part of their branding from the beginning. 0:46:05.120 --> 0:46:09.600 For another example, here's from New York Times magazine. Among 0:46:09.640 --> 0:46:13.000 their most popular news services is the Pinkerton Dedicated Professional, 0:46:13.520 --> 0:46:16.120 in which agents join a client's company like any other 0:46:16.239 --> 0:46:20.000 new hire, allowing them to provide intel one employees. By 0:46:21.600 --> 0:46:24.719 twenty eighteen, the agency said it could count among its 0:46:24.760 --> 0:46:29.040 clients about eighty percent of Fortune one thousand companies. Are 0:46:29.080 --> 0:46:32.319 these numbers correct? Who knows? They absolutely could be lying right. 0:46:32.800 --> 0:46:37.240 On the other hand, here's Gizmoto talking about the current 0:46:37.320 --> 0:46:40.440 reach of the Pinkertons in Magic the gathering. There are 0:46:40.480 --> 0:46:43.360 other connections between Wizards of the Coast and the Pinkerton Agency. 0:46:44.040 --> 0:46:46.840 Robert M. Klemmick, who has been the director of Security 0:46:46.920 --> 0:46:49.200 Risk Management at Hasbro, Inc. Which is the parent company 0:46:49.200 --> 0:46:52.799 Wizards of the Coast for twelve years, was previously the 0:46:52.840 --> 0:46:57.280 director of supply chain Security Practice at Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations. 0:46:57.760 --> 0:47:00.279 The current manager of Global Investigations just all to a 0:47:00.360 --> 0:47:04.600 floor of Pinkerton agents. So what we saw in the 0:47:04.680 --> 0:47:07.279 fact that you know, Wizards of the Coast said the 0:47:07.280 --> 0:47:10.680 Pinkertons after a guy who made a YouTube video showing 0:47:10.719 --> 0:47:15.440 some cards that he bought from someone else, is you know, 0:47:15.520 --> 0:47:18.160 you can see in that the arc of the arc 0:47:18.200 --> 0:47:20.359 of of what the Pinkertons are trying to do. Right, 0:47:20.880 --> 0:47:24.359 You have, on the one hand, the Pinkertons falling back 0:47:24.480 --> 0:47:28.399 into their sort of intelligence role. You also have them 0:47:28.680 --> 0:47:31.920 like specifically trading on their reputation to intimidate people. And 0:47:31.920 --> 0:47:35.960 you know, the reputation they acquired by killing unfathomable numbers 0:47:36.000 --> 0:47:39.120 of people between the eighteen hundreds, which they use to 0:47:39.160 --> 0:47:41.680 sort of intimidate people by just sort of the power 0:47:41.680 --> 0:47:44.680 of their reputation. You can see something very interesting, which 0:47:44.719 --> 0:47:48.279 is that the Pinkertons don't arrest Dan Cannon directly, right, 0:47:48.320 --> 0:47:51.360 They're able to leave with the sort of goods. But 0:47:52.040 --> 0:47:55.600 what they threatened Dan Cannon with is the regular police. 0:47:56.400 --> 0:47:58.880 And that is I think a very important aspect of 0:47:58.920 --> 0:48:01.560 what the story actually is, which is it's a story 0:48:01.600 --> 0:48:05.680 about the modern division of labor, of violence against people 0:48:05.680 --> 0:48:10.400 who corporations don't like, and that division of labor runs 0:48:10.560 --> 0:48:12.960 through security. You know, you have your major, you have 0:48:12.960 --> 0:48:16.640 a major corporation. That corporation has its own security division. 0:48:16.640 --> 0:48:19.600 That security division is connected to the Pinkertons. They use 0:48:19.640 --> 0:48:22.000 the Pinkertons as an intelligence network, and they have done 0:48:22.080 --> 0:48:25.800 several times now. And then you know, when it comes 0:48:25.880 --> 0:48:30.640 time to you know, you can use the Pinkertons as 0:48:30.680 --> 0:48:32.040 like the people will the stop you booth. But when 0:48:32.080 --> 0:48:34.239 it comes time to actually do violence against someone, when 0:48:34.239 --> 0:48:37.359 it comes time to arrest someone, that's the state's job. 0:48:38.320 --> 0:48:41.319 And that, I think is the thing that's that you know, 0:48:41.360 --> 0:48:44.680 that that's very important to understand about the way all 0:48:44.680 --> 0:48:47.960 of this stuff works is that the thing that is 0:48:48.000 --> 0:48:51.279 true now about the year twenty twenty three that was 0:48:51.320 --> 0:48:55.319 not true about the year like eighteen seventy three. Is 0:48:55.360 --> 0:48:59.960 that the the sort of primary driver of corporate violence 0:49:00.400 --> 0:49:05.320 in you know, in in in the US and abroad 0:49:06.280 --> 0:49:09.680 is not necessarily private security companies. It is the state, 0:49:09.719 --> 0:49:13.000 and it is the police. And yeah, this has been 0:49:13.000 --> 0:49:17.080 it could happen here. Uh, the police, suck acab get 0:49:17.160 --> 0:49:22.120 rid of them. 0:49:22.280 --> 0:49:24.760 It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. 0:49:24.880 --> 0:49:27.560 For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website 0:49:27.560 --> 0:49:29.799 cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the 0:49:29.840 --> 0:49:33.279 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, 0:49:33.800 --> 0:49:35.920 you can find sources for It could Happen here, updated 0:49:36.040 --> 0:49:40.080 monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.