‘Cause when you think you might be heading into a period of massive income inequality and strife, the Pinkerton’s record in the 19th century is REALLY the thing you should be trying to invoke, apparently.
Some key bits from the article:
The Pinkertons wanted me to picture myself in a scene of absolute devastation. “A hurricane just wipes out everything, and you need to feed your children,” Andres Paz Larach said. The power grid is down, shipments of food are cut off, the water is no longer potable — how do you get what you need to survive? What risks do you take?
…
Pinkerton began noticing a growing set of anxieties among its corporate clients about distinctly contemporary plagues — active shooters, political unrest, climate disasters
…
You’re going to turn to desperate measures,” he said. Everybody will. The other Pinkertons nodded.
…
He gave the example of a drought. “If a client has food and water and all the other stuff,” he said, “then they become a target.” López Portillo and Paz Larach uttered small words of consensus in Spanish, while scanning through email on their phones. “And if and when desperate people discovered that cache of water and food,” he continued, it was the Pinkertons’ job to protect it at whatever cost.
…
Later, after Paz Larach took his turn on the range — during which he emptied a Galil ACE assault rifle into a human-shaped cardboard cutout, then quickly drew his nine-millimeter, grouping four shots in the chest-cavity bull’s-eye — he offered the example of Hurricane Maria. On the day the Category 4 hurricane made landfall in Puerto Rico in 2017, he received more than 30 calls from American businesses and multinationals. He wouldn’t go into detail but explained that many chief executives felt blind to the situation and effectively tendered a blank check if Pinkerton could provide security. Over the next few days, as the company deployed hundreds of agents to the island, some of them, Paz Larach claimed, reported seeing firearms brandished at gas stations. “We had to escort the cargo with real agents, have cars chase the main truck,” he said. “Those who did not have protection were having their cargo hijacked.”
Aware that he might end up sounding vampiric, Paz Larach hesitated, then eventually confessed what he’d wanted to say in the first place: The future looked pretty good for Pinkerton.
…
Paz Larach rattled off a suite of services that were not, strictly speaking, covered by that piece of paper: armed warehouse defense, executive extraction, 24-hour surveillance, chartered helicopters and planes, escorted cargo shipments. “If you abandon your property, you’re kind of just blindfolding yourself,” he said — checking news, hoping for the best. “We’re your eyes and ears on the ground.” During the 2017 hurricane season, the Pinkertons chartered half a dozen planes across the Caribbean, each of them full of food and under armed escort, to the tune of around $100,000 each. Ordinarily, Pinkerton bills on a relatively cheap hourly basis, but during a state of emergency, the rate soars, something Paz Larach compared to Uber’s surge pricing. By the end of the season, after Maria, Harvey and Irma, Paz Larach told me the company billed tens of millions of dollars.
…
Later, at the racetrack, we watched three young men suit up in ski masks to shoot paintballs at our S.U.V. Even among my Pinkerton handlers, the theater of exercise seemed to strain the reasonable connections between tactical response and climate change. Throughout my visit, I wondered whether I had caught Pinkerton in the midst of an awkward organizational transition, or if the company stood merely to capitalize on the world’s growing panic — and if the difference really mattered. They had, after all, taken me to fire automatic weapons, ostensibly as a training exercise against desperate, disaster-ravaged people. It was impossible to experience that and not project it into a future in which, in the absence of true climate policy or mitigation, capital felt free to protect itself from outside risks — whatever form they may take.
Take note of what they’re emphasizing as needing protection: cargo, goods, resources, executives. Wealth. They try to spin a wealthy person hoarding necessities like food and water as being someone in need of protection, rather than the desperate poor with no access to the essentials of life.
And more significantly, they make a point of selling potential and active customers on the idea that the people who will come after their hoards will be like paramilitary goons themselves, equipped with high-powered guns and numbers. They frame this hypothetical attack as being like an invading army has come for you, not starving refugees fleeing environmental disaster brought on by the policies of the same companies now hiring Pinkerton.
They want to scare their clients into believing they need to sit in fortified mansions atop stores of wealth while a private army protects them from the rabble.
“As the science of climate chaos has become vastly clearer in the past two decades, and the warnings more stark, the rearguard action fought by climate denialists has grown fiercer and their attacks more vicious. Fact-based arguments will never serve their purpose; trolling is the last refuge of the discredited. We can expect much more of the same.”
“For the 5.4 million people who live in Russia’s permafrost zone, the new climate has disrupted their homes and their livelihoods. Rivers are rising and running faster and entire neighbourhoods are falling into them. Arable land for farming has plummeted by more than half, to just 120,000 acres in 2017.
In Yakutia, an area one-third the size of the US, cattle and reindeer herding has plunged 20 per cent, because the animal battle to survive the warming climate’s destruction of pasture land. Siberians who grew up learning to read nature’s subtlest signals are being driven to migrate by a climate they no longer understand.”
For anyone with no understanding of what’s happening to Kurds right now, here’s a little (simplified) history lesson for you….
Kurds have been living on the land they call home now for thousands of years. After WW1 and the fall off the Ottoman Empire, the British and French promised Kurds they could continue to reside in those areas peacefully because they intended to create a country called Kurdistan. They went back on that promise and split the Kurdish homeland into four with the creation of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria.
All four of those countries have persecuted their Kurdish populations ever since. Turkey has committed the worst atrocities during that time, and up until recently, the Kurdish language, Kurdish names, and more were all banned. Turkey even refuses to call the people Kurds, and refers to them as “Mountain Turks” - a slur designed to brand Kurdish people as barbaric and uneducated.
Thousands of Kurds lost their lives during the 80s and 90s fighting against their Turkish oppressions, and yet the situation barely improved.
Cue the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
When the US, UK and other Western countries invaded Iraq, Kurds fought alongside the allies, and against Saddam’s army. They managed to create an autonomous region in Iraq because of it. When ISIS began grabbing mass amounts of land in Iraq, the Kurds fought back with allied assistance and stamped them out.
When ISIS started taking land and murdering thousands in Syria, the Syrian President Assad ordered his army to leave the region and he left millions of Kurds there to die. They would have done too if it weren’t for the assistance of coalition air strikes and weapons that allowed them to push ISIS back and carve out another autonomous region in their homeland.
That region is Rojava. The people there live under a system called Democratic Confederalism which is based on workers’ rights, equality, feminism, and ecology. In principal, this version of democracy is far more democratic than any system used in a Western country today.
The Kurds didn’t want to team up with the US in Syria, they just didn’t want to die, and they were left with no option after being abandoned by Assad.
Now the US has abandoned the Kurds and left them to die too. They’re no longer “useful” and heaven forbid America is seen to be assisting a people who don’t bow to the international banking cartel, and are determined to live in a real democracy.
The US said it wanted to bring “democracy” to the Middle East, but not THAT sort of democracy.
Assad and Russia refuse to back Kurds now because they worked with the US instead of being murdered. And Turkey (the biggest oppressor of the Kurdish people, and the country that literally funded ISIS) has invaded their land with one of the largest armies in NATO with the intention of ethnic cleansing, genocide and freeing ISIS prisoners.
The Kurdish people just can’t win. Every major global power uses them when it suits their agenda, and then they feed them to the wolves.
The US won’t stand up for the Kurds. The Syrian Government won’t stand up for them, and neither will Iran or Russia. That is why every single person with a heart reading this must raise their voice now!
There’s an old Kurdish saying that goes:
“NO FRIENDS BUT THE MOUNTAINS”
Please show our Kurdish brothers and sisters that isn’t true. Do everything you can. I beg you.
More of nothere’s work can be found here and here.
Marianne found the door to her dressing room open. Her surprise turned rapidly to annoyance when she saw Agnes perched on
the corner of her makeup bureau, trying on a Galaxy Studios exclusive shade of eyeliner.
“You really ought to have said yes to that hunk of glorious Hollywood man-steak,” Agnes said without looking up. She was
wearing a curious combination of clothes from her old life as a Kansas farm girl and her new one as a cosmopolitan flapper,
a flannel work shirt over a form-fitting dress. “You don’t really think a script girl with ink on her hands is his… type…
do you?”
“I don’t remember giving you a key,” said Marianne, shutting the door behind her and flopping down on the small threadbare
couch she’d rescued from the Galaxy Dumpster.
“Since when have I ever needed one?” Agnes said with a toothy grin. She tossed a well-wrapped package at Marianne. “Here,
oh ungrateful cousin of mine. I don’t know why I bother if you’re going to be so rude.”
Marianne tore into the package with her teeth, eagerly baring its contents: bitter dried herbs, tied up in a bale. “These
are the real thing?” she said. “You know what’ll happen if they’re fake.”
“Yeah, yeah, real as the America Galaxy Studios is selling at a quarter a pop. But you know it won’t do you any good if you
keep getting yourself mixed up with starry-eyed idiots who… how did Mr. Man-Steak put it? Light into you pretty good?”
Her mouth full of herbs and two more handfuls on their way in, Marianne looked up. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “This will help.”
“Uh-huh. Just like it helped at the Winter Ball when Missy Capaldi had that dance with Carson Smith instead of you?” Agnes
laughed. “She still can’t walk right on that leg, you know.”
“She’s lucky she didn’t get worse,” Marianne snarled. “But it’s okay. I have everything under control.”
“Do you?” Agnes turned to face her cousin, the makeup thick on her face. “There’s a reason our folks don’t come to the city
much. When we lose our tempers, things tend to get out of hand. Especially when it’s that time of the month.”
“I don’t care,” Marianne said through a freshly herbed mouth. “None of our folks are ever going to get anywhere other than
Kansas if we don’t try. I’m going to be in pictures, and that’s that.”
“Well, okay,” Agnes said. “But if you don’t blow off some steam, there’s gonna be an explosion. I know you too well, Annie.”
Read the rest in WEREWOLVES VERSUS: HOLLYWOOD! Download the entire issue for any price on Gumroad or Itch.io! Your purchase will benefit all of the contributors to this issue.
The House by the Cemetery will be re-released on Blu-ray on January 21 via Blue Underground. The 1981 Italian horror film has been newly restored in 4K from the uncensored original camera negative. It features both English and Italian audio options.
The three-disc limited edition set includes the new transfer
on Blu-ray, a second Blu-ray filled with special features, a CD of Walter Rizzati’s (1990: The Bronx Warriors) score, and a booklet with an essay by
Michael Gingold.
Lucio Fulci (Zombie, The Beyond) directs from a script he co-wrote the script with Dardano Sacchetti (The Beyond) and Giorgio Mariuzzo (The Beyond). Catriona MacColl, Paolo Malco, Ania Pieroni, Giovanni Frezza, Silvia Collatina, and Dagmar Lassander star.
The House by the Cemetery includes reversible artwork and a lenticular slipcover with its first pressing. Special features are listed below.
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
