West of Here: California's Long-Suffering Masters of the Universe

By California Correspondent Carmen Sternwood

California's high-tech Masters of the Universe just can't help themselves.  It's not their fault that every time they open the mouths they embarrass themselves in public.  It's just that because when you had one idea that netted you billions and are now surrounded by sycophants who tell you that every word that comes out of your mouth is brilliant, you can't help believing it. 

Today's exhibit is a lump named Marc Benioff.  A number of years ago, he had a good idea: what if you used web-based spreadsheets to keep track of your sales force? That's it.  That's the idea.  

It worked, allowing CEO's to axe the layers of middle management who devoted themselves to making sure that their salesmen were out there selling and not just drinking and whoring on the company dime.

As a result of this one good idea, Benioff is now worth more than $8,000,000,000.  Now other people have good ideas too.  Last night at Mass. General Hospital, a nurse had a good idea about a medication problem with a critically ill patient, possibly saving their life.  Last week a teacher in the Boston Public Schools had a good idea about reaching a disaffected student, putting them on track for a successful future.

Those yucky homeless ruin Marc Benioff's day

Notice that, unlike Benioff, the teacher and the nurse didn't haul in $8 billion for their good ideas, despite the positive effects they had.

The reason for this is, according to centibillionaire Jeff “Which Way to Muscle Beach?” Bezos's house organ The Washington Post, “freedom.”

That may sound nonsensical to you but to a narrow plurality of white racists and the thousand or so plutocrats who stir them up, it makes perfect sense.

No self-respecting Master of the Universe thinks they only have one good idea in them, so recently Benioff has uncorked two new ones for public delectation:

First, the Mad King should call out the National Guard to bulldoze homeless people into the Pacific Ocean so Marc doesn't have to look at them.

Second, he is willing to share his salesman-tracking application with ICE, to help them keep track of their body snatchers.  After all, you don't want either your salesmen or your masked secret policy twiddling their thumbs when they could be making their numbers, either in sales or lives destroyed.

We'll start with homeless people.  To the Masters of the Universe their existence in California is the worse failing of government, because (1) sometimes the Masters have to see them should they choose to walk to a three-star dinner in San Fransisco and (2) being insanely rich, they have no other pressing need that government could fulfill (unlike everyone else).

Which is why Benioff came out in favor of calling out the National Guard and the police to rid him of this menace:

Speaking by telephone from his private plane en route to San Francisco, he lamented that he has to pay for hundreds of off-duty law enforcement officers to help patrol the convention area and said that San Francisco needed to “re-fund” the police.

The city never actually “defunded” its police force, and San Francisco’s violent crime rates are below those in many other U.S. cities.

But San Francisco has struggled to recruit and keep officers,... It has about 1,500 police officers, and Mr. Benioff says it needs another thousand.

“You’ll see. When you walk through San Francisco next week, there will be cops on every corner,” he continued. “That’s how it used to be.” ...

Since the pandemic, he has mostly lived on the Big Island of Hawaii, where he has bought up numerous parcels of land. He said that he wasn’t sure how many days he spends each year in San Francisco, but that he is never in one place for more than a day or two.

We've been to San Francisco numerous time since about 1972.  That's never how it used to be.

The outcry to his call for lynching the homeless eventually caused this Master to do something that Masters never do, at least in public: back down.

But Hawaii Man had other ideas too:

This makes sense: the same web-based technology that allows a few bosses to track hundreds of salesmen to make sure they are making enough sales calls also allows Kristie Noem and her boyfriend to track thousands of ICE agents to make sure they are snatching enough women and children most of whom are seeking various lawful forms of immigration relief.

You don't want your salesmen or your body snatchers just running around town drunk and stupid, like this:

An ICE agent, who is being arrested for drunk driving and nearly killing his little kids & others, tries to stop the arrest by racially profiling the officers arresting him. Amazing to watch the courtesy given to him as he is belligerent and uncooperative

[image or embed]

— David Bier (@davidjbier.bsky.social) October 17, 2025 at 11:11 AM

Benioff's goons prepared a wide variety of BS pitches to immigration enforcement agencies:

Other Salesforce documents included a spreadsheet of ICE “opportunities,” the company’s term for possible contracts, as well as an internal brainstorming slide deck about how artificial intelligence agents might help ICE evaluate information sent to the agency’s tip line and improve investigations. 

Yes, Benioff, great salesman that he is, promises to unleash the full power of AI, most recently seen generating crude animations of the Mad King poop-bombing protesters, to help the body snatchers figure which schools, churches, bus stops, and other public places will lead them to the largest number of helpless families. Genius! 

It's not yet clear how happy Benioff's fellow Masters of the Universe are with his pitch, given their reliance on immigrant labor to write their code and mow their lawns.

Salesforce can double your yield of crying toddlers!

Possibly it's unfair to single out Benioff for special obloquy.  Really he's only one among many insufferable Masters of the Universe who have devoted themselves to polishing the Mad King's taint (like Jeff Bezos or Tim Apple) or more ominously spending billions to bring fascist dictatorship to America, like Peter Thiel.

They are more alike than different in their insufferable arrogance and depraved indifference to the lives of the peons who toil for them and dare to breath the same air.

Their endless whining about having to encounter homeless human beings while being chauffeured to their private jet is a common theme.

The public existence of the homeless to the Masters of Woodside is taken as a telling critique of California state and local government, who have failed to “solve” this problem to their satisfaction.

Now many thinking people who are poorer than these Silicon Valley plutocrats have noted that homelessness is a complex problem.  Some of it relates to mental health and drug and alcohol addiction.

But a lot of homelessness arises from the inability of the homeless to – afford housing.  Smart people without private Hawaiian islands have looked at the data:

A new analysis of rent prices and homelessness in American cities demonstrates the strong connection between the two: homelessness is high in urban areas where rents are high, and homelessness rises when rents rise.

It so happens, as Californians never cease to tell you, that some of the highest real estate prices can be found in the great metropolitan regions of San Francisco and Los Angeles.  This is because lots of people want to live there (demand) and it's difficult and expensive to build housing (supply).  

The obvious solution to this market failure would be for the government to build more affordable housing, not to mention offering more and better residential mental health and addiction programs.

All this takes money.  Lots of it. And it's not as if California's political leaders are oblivious.  The state has spent over $1.6 billion to build over 12,000 units of affordable housing in the past five years.  But California probably needs ten times that much.

Where's the money to build hundreds of thousands of new affordable homes going to come from?

Funny you should ask.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, almost all the gains from 1980 to 2021 have gone to the richest:

And the proportion of those gains which have flowed to the Masters of the Universe in the top 0.01% is insane:

Maybe the solution to the homeless problem that so afflicts our beloved Masters of the Universe when they are not ensconced on their private Hawaiian islands would be for these billionaire plutocrats to pay more in taxes to build more affordable and supported housing.  

Maybe it's not the fault of those feckless California Democrats.  Maybe the fault lies with the insane greed of a handful of billionaires.

We'll let you know the Masters' response as soon as their Gulfstreams land. 

War - Whom is it good for? Absolutely the Mad King!

By War Correspondent Douglas MacArthur with Legal Editor Saori Shiroseki

We’ve always been interested in the thoughts of national security expert and former FBI official Asha Rangappa on the situation we now face in the regime of the Mad King, because we know we can count on her for a moderate, cool-headed assessment based upon her hard-won expertise from years toiling in the law enforcement Establishment.

Here’s what she had to say last week:

As we continue our free fall into autocracy, there still appears to be no rock bottom in sight. 

Hoo boy. That sounds bad.

But wait -- it gets worse!

Trump needs a reason to escalate his takeover of blue states and cities. If he can provoke confrontation between civilians and the military — perhaps one where there is open gunfire or anything that he can use to claim that our military is under attack or in harm’s way — he can then justify arbitrarily designating Americans as military targets. We are already seeing this with his executive order declaring Antifa a “domestic terrorist organization” (this is not a real thing). ...Notice how [Hegseth] states that they struck people of a “Designated Terrorist Organization” (again, not a real thing)…but he doesn’t say which organization. This is a move to begin conflating ordinary crime, and even ideological beliefs, with “terrorism,” and then using the “terrorist” label as an excuse to use military force.... To bring [America] under his total control and target Americans using military force under the guise of combating “terrorism,” Trump would need a military that is willing to follow illegal orders and commit war crimes.

And illegally blonde Attorney General Pam “What Epstein Files?” Bondi made the connection between supposed foreign drug smugglers and her fellow citizens explicit: 

Although the regime has provided exactly zero evidence proving the dead sailors were in fact smuggling drugs into the United States, it boasts about their murders and now threatens to issue the same license to kill Americans:

“This ain't St. Mere Eglise!”

Bondi said the administration intended to “take the same approach” to antifa as it did with foreign drug cartels — an unsettling vow in light of a series of deadly military strikes against civilian boats in international waters that Trump has ordered as part of a formal “armed conflict.” 

The regime policy of using the military to attack random boats on the high seas and kill their unarmed crews is, to use a highly technical term, a huge f**king crime, both under international and U.S. law. Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer, explains:

There is simply no credible argument that an armed conflict exists involving the United States and whoever was on that boat. Nor is there any credible argument that those on the boat presented an imminent threat of armed attack against the United States that could have triggered the initiation of an armed conflict. With neither of these facts being present, we are left with the premeditated killing of human beings, not in armed conflict and not in self-defense. Although the criminal liability of individuals is a matter for the courts, Americans engaging in such conduct would normally risk very serious charges.

Crime and war are different? Who knew?

To sum up where we are as a country, the Attorney General of the United States, with the endorsement of the President (to the extent he is still able to comprehend such things) has vowed to use the U.S. military to kill Americans with the same impunity that is now illegally used against foreigners on boats. The excuse is that something called Antifa is a terrorist organization, like those guys trying to fish in the Caribbean, and therefore [?} the military can mow them down in the absence of anything resembling armed conflict.

Conveniently for the regime and its lickspittles, there is no such entity as Antifa. You can’t head over to the Tony Stark building to visit their headquarters. You can’t donate to their cause and get a nifty tote bag in return. You won’t get plaintive texts from the President of Antifa telling you the triple match on your donation expires at midnight. Antifa doesn’t exist. Therefore apparatchiks like Bondi and confessed puppy killer and Botox abuser Kristi Noem can lie their lifted asses off and declare anyone opposing the regime is Antifa, thereby subjecting them to immediate summary execution. 

We're looking forward to this fall's Supreme Court summary docket,when such executions will be justified by Supreme Lord Brett Kavanaugh and his five fellow doges as a trivial inconvenience by whipping out arguments like this:

The interests of Antifa individuals who are illegally interfering with the enforcement of immigration law is ultimately an interest in evading the law. That is not an especially weighty legal interest.

To add some exciting footage to this nonsense, the regime is considering calling out a crack military detachment: the 82d Airborne, into the raging cauldron of war that is Portland, Oregon. 

This 82nd Airborne? 

 

Like John Wayne in The Longest Day? Or Ryan O’Neal and Robert Redford in A Bridge Too Far? That’s a lot of A-listers for a stint in Portland, Oregon.

You would think that a plan to use deadly force on unarmed Americans opposing government action by dressing up as frogs in front of ICE buildings would shock and appall every single one of us. You'd be wrong,

Just this week, 51 of 53 Republicans voted to give the regime a blank check to carry out such murders including lovable moderate Sen. Susan “Troubled” Collins.

You're following orders from this guy?

If it were us, we wouldn’t vote to reopen the government without a prohibition on invoking the Insurrection Act or using military forces against U.S. citizens without a new authorization from Congress, but we don’t have the keen insights into the popular will of a Hakeem Jeffries or a Sen. Amy “Hot Mess” Klobuchar. 

The public reaction to treating protesters like the Wehrmacht has not been especially positive.  According to recent polling, only 39% (including 79% of Republicans) approve of sending active-duty military forces into American cities.

It's good that the Mad King's latest war on America is opposed by most Americans.  And yet, after watching the madness, chaos, cruelty, and illegality of the Mad King Restoration almost 40% of your fellow citizens approve the destruction of American democracy.  So no one should underestimate the challenge before us.  But no one should despair either. 

And just a reminder to our military: while the Supreme Court has extended immunity to any Republican President committing a crime in office and to any Supreme Court Justice who has committed sexual assault or harassment, they have thus far not extended such immunity to all members of the armed forces. 

Restorations of absolute monarchies tend not to last.  If this one falls, any legitimate government will (or at least should) investigate the crimes committed on its orders. 

So the military (and their civilians enablers) should keep in mind what happens to those who commit crimes to please the Mad King.  Among other indignities, Botox and fillers aren't available to federal prisoners.  If you don't believe us, ask Ghislaine Maxwell.

The Siege of Chicago II

 

By Chicago Correspondent Walter Burns

On the list of things that didn't really need to be revived, right up there with Baywatch, is the Siege of Chicago, a wonderful metropolis which over the years has earned infamy as the site of some of the most brutal battles waged by armed forces against their imagined enemies.

The latest episode occurred this week, when an entire apartment block on the South Side of Chicago was invaded and its occupants taken prisoner by unidentified forces claiming to be acting on behalf of the United States.

According to battlefield dispatches,

A massive immigration raid at an apartment in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago tormented residents in the early hours of Tuesday morning. 

Some 300 federal agents, per NewsNation, raided the building, arresting 37 people, with the Department of Homeland Security alleging that “some of the targeted subjects are believed to be involved in drug trafficking and distribution, weapons crimes, and immigration violators.”

Agents rappelled in from helicopters, broke down doors, used flash bangs, tore tenants from their units, and detained several people—including numerous U.S. citizens—for hours before leaving the building ravaged, according to multiple reports.

Pertissue Fisher, who lives in the building, told ABC7 Chicago that ICE agents forced everyone out and only asked questions later. Fisher said she was handcuffed and questioned before being released at around 3 a.m. The officers, she noted, “just treated us like we were nothing,” and, “It was scary, because I had never had a gun in my face.”

Another ABC7 interviewee ducked upon hearing flash bangs detonate, and was then distressed by the sight of children detained. “They was bringing the kids down too, had them zip-tied to each other,” she said. “That’s all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where’s the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, ‘f*** them kids.’” 

Prior to the January 20, 2025 coup against America, armed police and federal agents were prohibited by the Fourth Amendment from rousing peaceful inhabitants out of their apartments solely on the suspicion that in at least one of those apartments there might be an immigrant subject to removal.

Not anymore. 

Now it is something that the regime boasts about and executes with apparent impunity:

Although the federal goons claimed the operation was aimed at supposed members of a Venezuelan gang, exactly two were arrested on suspicion of being gang members.

 Is it really true that Gov. J.B. Pritzker can do nothing to stop these assaults because of the Constitution's Supremacy Clause, which has generally been construed to immunize federal officers acting within their authority from state law? 

From CBS News Chicago

Consider the case of a federal official shooting someone on Fifth Avenue.  If that official is the President, John Roberts and his fellow Lords have immunized him.  But if a federal official out for coffee decides to gun down say his ex, there's no immunity because there was no action under color of federal law.

Was there immunity here?  The conduct was clearly unconstitutional and therefore outside the scope of the federal agents' lawful authority.  If only there were courts in Chicago that Gov. Pritzker could turn to for a definitive resolution of this question. 

And that's not the only violent lawless actions that VD Amin's goons have undertaken in poor suffering Chicago over the past week.   A few days earlier, a CBS Chicago correspondent lawfully carrying out her duties was assaulted by apparent federal officers:

Illinois State Police and the Broadview Police Department are investigating after a pepper ball was shot at a CBS News Chicago reporter over the weekend.

It was around late morning Sunday when reporter Asal Rezaei visited the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview, Illinois, to see if there was any activity near the 25th Street entrance. There were no protests or protesters at the scene, except for a person with the Broadview Fire Department.

"It's not really clear why that officer took a shot at me. My car has been here several times, although I did not identify myself verbally as a member of the press," she said in a report.

Rezaei said she was not close to the ICE facility nor the fencing surrounding the building, adding she was alone in her truck with the driver's side window down.

As reported to police, she was leaving the area when she said a masked ICE agent shot a pepper ball about 50 feet from the inside of the fence, hitting her truck's driver's side panel. The chemicals then engulfed the inside of her truck.

"An ICE agent who was masked shot directly at my car," Rezaei recounted on camera after the incident. "He saw my window was open."

The chemicals from the shot caused burning to her face, leading to her vomiting outside her truck.... 

It wasn't the first battle of Chicago.

Rezaei captured a picture the moment right before the pepper ball was fired, showing a nearly empty parking lot and two federal agents standing dozens of feet away. One of them appeared to have been readying his weapon. She said she believes that it was the agent who fired at her car. 

Note that state officials are at least investigating whether they have jurisdiction over the lawless attack on a known journalist driving on an open public street.

There are many other battles being waged by federal agents against unarmed civilians on the otherwise-peaceful streets of Chicago, but we wanted to look back at the history of such assaults along Lake Michigan.

This is usually when we draw connections between past Republican attacks on democracy and human rights (like the murder of unarmed students at Kent State in 1970) and today's outrages.

The reality is violence in the service of white supremacy has been a bipartisan affair depending mostly on which party embodies it. In 1968, that honor was split between the declining white Democratic racist base in the South and big Northern cities (like Chicago!) and the nascent Southern strategy of Tricky Dick Nixon.

Norman Mailer termed the police assault on unarmed protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention the “siege of Chicago,” and for once in his sordid empty life he was right:

The violence was spurred by a young man attempting to climb a flagpole in the park and lower the American flag. Police grabbed the man down and began to beat him, according to witness interviews. ...

In response, protesters began to throw sticks, paint and bricks at the officers. Organizers were eventually able to regain control of the crowd and calm them down. But the police advanced on the crowd anyway.

According to the Walker Report, one St. Louis journalist later observed: “In the wink of an eye, the police appeared to have lost all control.” ...  

Officers chased demonstrators and beat them, hitting them in the head. Women were knocked over and trampled by the fleeing crowd. Bystanders, including both the young and the elderly, were beaten too. Some officers even threw tear gas directly in the faces of demonstrators. Photojournalists stood bloodied. ...

Upon its completion three months later, the Walker Report noted that most officers faced no disciplinary action, and argued that this could weaken police ties with the community. “There has been no condemnation of these violators of sound police procedures and common decency by either their commanding officers or city officials,” the report said.  

The violent cops were in fact lionized as heroes by the forces of white reaction, thus insulating them and their violent successors from accountability:

The country certainly appeared to sympathize with the police more than the protestors. In a Gallup poll, 56% approved of the police response to anti-war protestors and 31% did not. In a Harris survey, 66% agreed that Daley was right in the way he used police against the demonstrators, against only 20% who disagreed. 

Read all about it.  While you can.

That level of public support gave the Chicago Police all the, um, ammunition they needed to execute Black Panther activist Fred Hampton the following year.

At the time, the reaction of all the wise pundits was not shock and outrage over police murder of a young activist. Instead, it was to make fun of white people who cared enough to support besieged Black Panthers like Hampton.  Tom Wolfe's insult comedy targeting a fundraiser held by Leonard Bernstein in his magnificent apartment with his rich famous friends led to the adoption of the term “Radical Chic”.

In Wolfe's telling, adopted by all right-thinking persons, nothing was more hilarious than rich upper-class people meeting to aid oppressed Black Panthers because – well, it was just funny.

Perhaps Wolfe would have been more respectful if the fundraiser were held in the rec room of dentist Lenny Bernstein's split level in Woodmere and the assembled guests were served pigs in blankets and Schaefer beer, but we doubt it. The point was to mock white people, especially the rich Jewish ones, for the crime of daring to care about anyone less fortunate than themselves.

Humiliating anyone who opposes the Republican agenda of white supremacy, bigotry, and plutocracy has been a staple of conservative hilarity ever since.  We point you to the Presidential meme of mocking Hakeen Jeffries' concern over the denial of health care by adorning him with a stereotyped Frito-bandito mustache and sombrero. 

The point, then as now, was to change the focus from murdered activists and poor people consigned to agony and death to those wacky liberals who dare to take up those causes. 

And it won't stop until we call it out and demand that our supine media (including Bari Weiss's new toy, CBS News) stop distracting us from the true horrors at hand.

No we don't have a glib solution. But we do know that the first step in fighting a battle is to know the enemy.  In this case, we need to understand how deep police violence against dissenters and other marginalized folks runs in American culture and the relentless crude mockery of those who dare to oppose it.

Our old buddy Dwight D. Eisenhower spent months before D-Day gathering intelligence on the German defenses in France.  It was his relentless focus on preparation that led to victory, even though history does not record that Ike spent even one minute worried about the beards and waistlines of his Army.  Nor, since Tom Wolfe wasn't there to focus on what was really important, do we know what delectable tidbits his elite staff enjoyed in May and June, 1944.

Right now there's a war in Chicago and other American cities, which is itself part of a larger assault on what's left of American democracy.  You can hear it all around you if you don't let the mariachi music drown it out.