Remember the Pinkertons? Well, to add to the trend of turning back the clock to the 1880s, we can now add Pinkertons with automatic rifles guarding a Wisconsin mine from environmentalists:
There’s been a battle royal up in Wisconsin over an effort to establish a big iron mining operation near Lake Superior, to be owned and operated by a company called Gogebic Taconite. The Republican legislature approved the mine in March over environmentalists’ objections. Some protests have been staged since the operation got started. But people started to get freaked out over the weekend when the company brought in what the Wisconsin State Journal calls “masked security guards who are toting semi-automatic rifles and wearing camouflaged uniforms.”
Now masked guards in camouflage carrying assault rifles do seem a bit more mid-80s Latin American death squad than protecting some mining equipment in Wisconsin. So I started looking into the security company behind the paramilitaries, an outfit called Bulletproof Securities out of Scottsdale, Arizona that Gogebic brought in for the job.
Yes, let's bring private armies back to the United States, because they worked so well before. It's all part of the fun you get when the Gini coefficient gets higher than Venezuela's.