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