Pinkertons 2: Climate Change Boogaloo

April 11, 2019 9:04 AM

NYT: Climate Chaos Is Coming—and the Pinkertons Are Ready. The Pinkertons, perhaps the world's first private security firm, has long been known for its role breaking strikes for Andrew Carnegie in the 19th century. As it sails past its 150th anniversary and attempts to reinvent itself for 21st, it's relying on a simple pitch. "As Jack Zahran, the president of Pinkerton, put it to me, Pinkerton is a 150-year-old start-up, still pitching the same basic vision: You aren’t prepared enough, and the government is too clumsy to save you."

As the article mentions, "The best outcome for these new data-driven Pinkertons is that this century lapses into the kind of lawlessness and disorder that makes it look more like the 19th — which many scientists and economists think it could." This ties in nicely with the NYT Magazine's current "Climate Issue", which also touches on other lovely topics like pricing the impact of climate change, "hedging against the apocalypse" (A+ headline writing), and transnational lawsuits against polluters.

Pinkertons previously: Pinkerton sues Rockstar for their historical appearance in Red Dead Redemption 2

posted by redct (43 comments total)

Dear William Gibson,
Please take your future back. We don't want it.
thanks
posted by kokaku at 9:08 AM on April 11, 2019 [54 favorites]

From the article:

In the decades since, the Pinkertons have undertaken several rebrandings, each aimed at lowering their public profile, though through it all they never gave up the lucrative specter of their name: the Pinkerton Agency, Pinkerton’s Inc., Pinkerton. During the first half of the 20th century, the company protected wartime factories and later began to seek out new markets in parts of the world, like India and China, where authority could still be outsourced.

I have a sudden urge to go watch War, Inc.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:15 AM on April 11, 2019 [3 favorites]

The Pinkertons have a terrible history, and I'm not surprised that they have become a kind of Blackwateresque entity grifting the post-Reagan Americas, but this last paragraph struck me as darkly funny, in a way:

When López Portillo finished, Paz Larach admitted that thinking that far out was still difficult for him. He was 33 and just married. What the most immediate future held for him was a new home in Miami, where he and his wife had just bought an apartment on the water. It had always been their dream. When I asked him about sea-level rise — something with which Miami is practically synonymous — he paused for a moment, then said, “We know it’s a risk, but we looked at it and decided it was worth it.” And anyway, the apartment wouldn’t be ready until 2021. They’d deal with it then.

I'd recently read an article by Sarah Miller, who went undercover to buy a condo in Miami. She kept asking the real estate agents questions about whether it makes sense to buy in a city that is slowly going underwater, but everyone seems fine with it, because someone else is taking care of the problem.

I imagine a world a couple decades away where things are so bad that the mercenaries that the rich people need are all trapped in their apartments somewhere in hi-rise islands off the coast of Neo-Florida, waiting to be evicted by yet other mercenaries for not paying their underwater mortgages.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:23 AM on April 11, 2019 [28 favorites]

Sounds like an offshoot story to The Water Knife.
posted by kokaku at 9:31 AM on April 11, 2019 [6 favorites]

Dear capitalists,

The Tonton Macoute were not the good guys.

Sincerely,
Everyone who is not you.
posted by JohnFromGR at 9:46 AM on April 11, 2019 [11 favorites]

It’s going to be pretty wild when the rich realize they’re paying their captors good money for the privilege
posted by The Whelk at 9:54 AM on April 11, 2019 [3 favorites]

Feels like a Jack Womack novel.
posted by doctornemo at 9:58 AM on April 11, 2019 [3 favorites]

Private security? How are these not just paid thugs
posted by GoblinHoney at 9:58 AM on April 11, 2019

It is worth noting that the Pinks weren't a good private army the first time they tried this. They got their asses handed them at the Homestead Strike, and the militia had to be called in, ending the strike but damaging business arguments that the government had no place in regulating labor disputes.
posted by ckridge at 10:04 AM on April 11, 2019 [7 favorites]

All I know is that it's my favorite Weezer LP.
posted by jetsetsc at 10:09 AM on April 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

They got their asses handed them at the Homestead Strike

Not before murdering seven people, though.
posted by praemunire at 10:10 AM on April 11, 2019 [2 favorites]

They sucked his brains out!: I'd recently read an article by Sarah Miller, who went undercover to buy a condo in Miami.

Previously, active discussion (and some derail about the ethics of going undercover).
posted by RedOrGreen at 10:44 AM on April 11, 2019

I'd just like to throw Andrea Phillips' near-future (or possibly recent-past) The Revolution, Brought to You by Nike into the ring, here.
posted by Leon at 10:46 AM on April 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

I'm starting to get a bit uncomfortable with how plausible The Division 2 is turning out to be...
posted by aramaic at 11:18 AM on April 11, 2019

Dear William Gibson,
Please take your future back. We don't want it.
thanks

I would totally read the novel though. Who would not want to read about the Continental Op at the End of Days?
posted by ckridge at 11:45 AM on April 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

Among their most popular new services is the Pinkerton Dedicated Professional, in which agents join a client’s company like any other new hire, allowing them to provide intel on employees. By 2018, the agency said it could count among its clients about 80 percent of Fortune 1,000 companies.

Of course they do. As they ever did.
posted by clawsoon at 11:53 AM on April 11, 2019 [8 favorites]

Fun fact about Pinkerton, they are a subsidiary now of Securitas AB

A number of Securitas employees have been outed as neo-nazis and white nationalists over the years:

- James Fields, the murderer from Charlottesville
- Matthew Blais and Bogdan Gerasimyuk, members of Portland's Daily Stormer local group
- A security guard for a refugee camp in Germany involved in an attack in Chemnitz: https://www.zdf.de/politik/frontal-21/pressemitteilung-interner-polizeibericht-chemnitz-100.html

I think we can assume that some people working for the higher-end services of Pinkerton have similar politics but are probably a little smarter and savvier than your average white nationalist rent-a-cop.
posted by JauntyFedora at 12:34 PM on April 11, 2019 [16 favorites]

How rich and stupid do you have to be to believe that in a true collapse your mercenaries will still be listening to anyone but each other?
posted by snuffleupagus at 1:36 PM on April 11, 2019 [8 favorites]

Why would (anyone expect) the guys with the guns and ammo to keep "the customers" around?
posted by billsaysthis at 2:05 PM on April 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

Perhaps they're not aiming for a true collapse. Perhaps they're aiming for a feudalization, in which case it's perfectly plausible that the knights will get their rewards even as the kings keep their power.
posted by clawsoon at 3:35 PM on April 11, 2019 [3 favorites]

Which is to say: Why do the guys with guns and ammo keep the elite around now? This picture of the House of Lords got me thinking about that just the other week. A basic political alliance, seen across many societies at many points in time, is that between rich old men and violent young men.
posted by clawsoon at 3:38 PM on April 11, 2019 [6 favorites]

Going out into the middle of nowhere used to be without worry, but after Bush gave massive right of ways to energy companies and other "infrastructure, the worry of running into guys like these when you are camping...'specially if you are the wrong anything, yeah.
posted by Oyéah at 4:10 PM on April 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

There was an article a while back by a guy who would get invited to talk to super-rich types, and I forgot what his expertise was, but they'd end up asking him about planning for the Collapse, and how to keep the security guys loyal. And he'd say that something like feudalism was the way- treat them well, earn their loyalty and keep their families close to yours. And that that would just bounce off these rich dudes who wanted some kind of technological fix to force loyalty without having to get to know them as people.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 4:35 PM on April 11, 2019 [7 favorites]

They wanted like bomb collars so I’m not too worried about the 1% leading the charge in the Collpase.

The guys with the guns however...
posted by The Whelk at 4:42 PM on April 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

How rich and stupid do you have to be to believe that in a true collapse your mercenaries will still be listening to anyone but each other?

When you are used to having people act on your desire because you have money you are gonna think that's what will happen in the future.

Depending on how 'true collapse' goes - the "joke" about not needing to be faster than the bear and just faster than you may very well work for such a line of thinking.

There is already collapse going on, but it is unevenly distributed. And right now having the kind of money which lets you hire Pinkerton is an example of the uneven nature of the collapse.
posted by rough ashlar at 4:48 PM on April 11, 2019 [2 favorites]

Surely a popular, ambitious general - or a few centuries of them - will come between economic stagnation and total collapse.
posted by clawsoon at 4:53 PM on April 11, 2019

vibratory manner of working, it sounds like you may be thinking of Survival of the Richest by Doug Rushkoff.

A friend recently recommended his podcast, called "Team Human". During a long drive last weekend, I listened to episode 124. It's good, but not fun. When I got to the part where they predicted that big websites, by tracking mouse movements as we visit, will know which of us will have parkinson's well before we do...

I remember when I thought the future would be a good thing. That was nice.
posted by FallibleHuman at 4:59 PM on April 11, 2019 [2 favorites]

OK then, enough of a collapse that lethal force employed by private security forces dictates who runs things. Warlords are likely, but they'll be the guys running the security forces, not employing paying them protection money.

Kings generally became and remained kings through violence. Then got rich from sitting atop the feudal system. Why would the current wealthy classes whose power requires the financial system to keep functioning expect to survive feudalization?
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:12 PM on April 11, 2019

Perhaps they're not aiming for a true collapse. Perhaps they're aiming for a feudalization, in which case it's perfectly plausible that the knights will get their rewards even as the kings keep their power.

Maybe it's a safe bet, either way. Mercenaries rarely seem to go hungry in times of crisis and war.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:18 PM on April 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

Quite right, the mercenaries do well either way.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:22 PM on April 11, 2019

The article says at least as much about Pinkerstons as it does about their employers. It's very useful to know how elite fears are rising, and how readily management reaches for violent methods.

(This isn't a new thing. Just useful data, especially looking ahead.)
posted by doctornemo at 6:01 PM on April 11, 2019

Survival of the Richest

I read scientific journals for my job, and one thing I've noticed in the last five years is a shift in the climate change conversation among those in the scientific community. It's basically shifted away from, "hey here is some policy that would help us stop breaking things" to, "hey we're addicted to carbon but here are some wild pie-in-the-sky ideas that might stave off societal collapse and extinction".

Fun stuff like:

• geoengineering a wall around Antarctica to keep the rate of icemelt low enough to give flooding cities time to build their own walls

• spraying sulfuric acid into the upper atmosphere to slow warming (never mind ongoing ocean acidification)

• building robotic bees that can substitute for the pollinators we're making extinct with pesticides (and herbicides, indirectly)

• genetic engineering of heatshock proteins into food crops to maybe better survive drought conditions

Maybe this stuff will work, but we just don't seem to have a survival impulse to see beyond a few years. Corporations own governments, and they have us locked down on a path of GDP growth, no matter what the cost. Scientists seem to see the writing on the wall and some are basically offering triage and shrugs.

The NYT article kind of hints at this, maybe, but I noticed that these Pinkertons are buying property in flood-ridden Miami, fiddling with their phones during meetings, and their target range is a makeshift cocktail bar.

I have a weird feeling that these aren't diehard mercenaries, per se, but are just sufficiently violent self-starters who dropped out of the military to grift off of Central and South American oligarchs. They aren't rich enough to colonize Mars or buy citizenship from New Zealand, like their bosses, but I get the sense that they figure the problem is far enough away that they can make some money, in the meantime.

To what end, I don't know. Do Paz and his wife intend to have kids? One can look at a country like Syria that gets hit with drought, and in the space of a decade it becomes a war zone. Not intending to show empathy for Pinkertons, but I can't say I'm not curious what kind of future they'd think their children might have, when what happened there spreads to the rest of the world. You can't eat money or bullets, but maybe the calculus is that rich people are well-fed.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:07 PM on April 11, 2019 [5 favorites]

Dear William Gibson,
Please take your future back. We don't want it.
thanks

William Gibson’s next novel was supposed to be on sale by now but instead he’s still drafting, on account of it having to be substantially rewritten because current events are turning out worse than his imagined future timeline. It’s a post apocalyptic novel.
posted by rodlymight at 6:34 PM on April 11, 2019 [6 favorites]

It’s really, really hard to think of a company that, upon becoming an employee, you could more clearly signal your own utter moral and ethical bankruptcy, your own clear disinterest in being any part of the societal march towards progress and equality for all than Pinkerton. They are, and have been, nothing but hired muscle for rich people who want things that they’ve been told they can’t have. When told no, these rich people have turned to Pinkerton and said “go do terrible things until we get what we want.”

It’s hard to fathom someone who looks at that, and has any possible way to justify signing on. I have to think that each name signed to an employment contract with them represents an entire web of teachers, parents, neighbors, friends, that somehow utterly failed to instill any concept of humanity or awareness of social mores in that newly minted hired goon.
posted by Ghidorah at 7:04 PM on April 11, 2019 [3 favorites]

these new data-driven Pinkertons

OK, so this is unintentionally hilarious.

I’m re-reading Bruce Catton’s 3-volume history of the Army of the Potomac, and in Mr. Lincoln’s Army he goes into great detail about how Allan Pinkerton was in charge of military intelligence for McClellan in 1862, and Pinkerton fed McClellan’s worst cautious impulses by steadily and consistently vastly overestimating the strength of Lee’s army during the Penninsula campaign. By, like, a factor of 2.

As a result, McClellan, who was slowly but steadily advancing on Richmond with double Lee’s numbers, was convinced the whole time that he was outnumbered. He complained bitterly and constantly about how he needed more troops to have a chance against the vast Rebel army. So he withdrew once Lee started to counterattack, despite never having engaged anything like his whole army at once, and the war continued for 3 more years. Because Allan Pinkerton was terrible at counting.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 7:08 PM on April 11, 2019 [9 favorites]

Two thoughts:

1. I can't see them doing it pro bono, but I wonder whether Pinkerton would refuse money to protect an abortion clinic and maybe beat up a clinic bomber or two (assuming the Pinkertons are not also being hired to disrupt the clinic.)

2. If enough cash could be raised, could someone hire Pinkerton and aka Blackwater to fight each other to the (organizational) death? THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE.
posted by zaixfeep at 7:16 PM on April 11, 2019 [5 favorites]

Considering all these PMCs are run by the same class of white supremacist billionaire ghouls, I'm going to say no.
posted by Reyturner at 7:50 PM on April 11, 2019 [4 favorites]

I might be the only Mefite to have actually hired the Pinkerton’s! They did what I needed. They weren’t all bad at the time I used their services.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 9:39 PM on April 11, 2019

They did what I needed.

Dare I ask?
posted by paper chromatographologist at 5:43 AM on April 12, 2019 [3 favorites]

I wonder whether Pinkerton would refuse money to protect an abortion clinic

Doesn't seem like much reason to suspect that they would. Pinkerton is owned by Securitas AB which is a huge multinational security firm, including the regular Securitas security guards, Burns security, a whole bunch of regional private security companies in the US, Diebold electronic locks, etc. It's very likely they already protect some clinics in one way or another.

They're one of those companies that are so big that you probably interact with them on a daily basis, entirely without realizing it. Pinkerton is just a brand at this point.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:57 AM on April 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

Privatizing the security response to global warming? I'm reminded of the episode of The Simpsons where they're all stuck in a hole and Homer says, "we'll dig our way out!"
posted by runcibleshaw at 6:41 AM on April 15, 2019

I read scientific journals for my job, and one thing I've noticed in the last five years is a shift in the climate change conversation among those in the scientific community. It's basically shifted away from, "hey here is some policy that would help us stop breaking things" to, "hey we're addicted to carbon but here are some wild pie-in-the-sky ideas that might stave off societal collapse and extinction".

Fun stuff like: building robotic bees that can substitute for the pollinators we're making extinct with pesticides (and herbicides, indirectly)

Please tell me someone responded to that paper with a reference to the Black Mirror episode "Hated In The Nation".
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:59 AM on April 15, 2019

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Said Climate Change and Immigration Are Connected — Here's Why She's Right: In this op-ed, writer Lucy Diavolo breaks down why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is correct to point out how far-right politicians ignore that climate change is creating refugees.

I wonder if the Pinkerton's and their ilk will be sent after climate refugees. There are already volunteer vigilantes doing it.
posted by homunculus at 5:55 PM on April 21, 2019 [2 favorites]