Your comment about the NG acting as hired guns for the company puts me in mind of Frank Norris' "The Octopus" which takes the Southern Pacific railroad to task, among other things, for hiring death squads to kill the San Joaquin Valley farmers trying to keep their land from being stolen for the RR's right of way. I had family in that one.

Apparently this practice was fairly common in those days. There's that old blues lyric that says "some men rob with a six-gun, others with a fountain pen." How civilized we've become in primarily employing the latter tactic these days.

But I think you'd have to go a fur piece to top old Smedley Butler, who summarized his own not-too-shabby military career as being little more than "high-class muscle for big business."

(Gee, Smed, with those 2 and 9/10's CMOH's, sorry you feel that way.)