Entitled bastards

Washougal squatters do not intend to leave

Brett, nearly 22, and his 23-year-old brother Michael are squatters

By Tim Becker and KOIN 6 News StaffPublished: May 8, 2015, 5:13 pm Updated: May 8, 2015, 5:51 pm

WASHOUGAL, Wash. (KOIN) — Brett Marquiss smiled and laughed when he talked about where he lives in Washougal.

“This is our home town and we like it and we’re here to stay,” he said of the house on Aberdeen Drive, a few miles from downtown.

Brett, nearly 22, and his 23-year-old brother Michael are squatters. They’ve been squatting at this house for a while, since their parents were the last renters and moved out.

“We haven’t done anything really illegal. We’ve just moved in and everything,” he said. “Maybe we are squatters but we still have rights.

Neighbor Carla Baines told KOIN 6 News the house went into foreclosure around the time the brothers’ parents moved out.

The owner, Sarah Lightner, lives in Winthrop, Washington, about 8 hours north. Serving an eviction notice would cost her about $1500, money she told KOIN 6 News in an email she doesn’t have.

“We’re in a completely gray area and nobody wants to take responsibility for the home,” Baines said.

Brett Marquiss and Michael Marquiss are squatters in Washougal, May 8, 2015 (KOIN)

“Because (Lightner) walked away from the property and gave it up for foreclosure, she has no motivation at all the spend the money to help us,” Baines said.

Another neighbor, Jim Bybee, said sometimes the Marquiss brothers shoot guns at night and race cars around the house.

Brett Marquiss doesn’t see the problem. “If it’s during the day, I don’t see what the big deal is, you know?”

Neighbors also say the brothers are picking the place apart and selling it online — trees and perimeter fencing, among other items.

“I don’t know why they thought that we were selling it,” Marquiss said.

The fact the house is in foreclosure and an eviction notice is not imminent means they will likely stay at the house for a while.

Elections.

The scary part of these mid term elections is that most of the people believe that either party works for them! Too bad. The idiocy will continue whether Republican OR Democrats are in the driver’s seat. All that these politicians care about is the special interests that they sold out to BEFORE they got elected and when this group is gone, they will fill million dollar consulting jobs promised to them by the billionaires that they are on the take for. Money and power control our political system just as it does in third world countries, we just are a bit nicer about it and don’t publicly shoot politicians that we are dissatisfied with or mount coups to oust political parties.

99% getting shafted again!

Editor’s note: Sally Kohn is a progressive activist, columnist and television commentator. Follow her on Twitter @sallykohn. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) — Here’s something you don’t see every day: The 99% demonstrating in support of the 1%. But that’s exactly what’s been happening for several weeks all around New England at Market Basket grocery stores.

Sally Kohn

In 1916, Athanasios and Efrosini Demoulas, who immigrated to the United States from Greece, opened a grocery store in Lowell, Massachusetts. Almost a century later, the family has expanded it to a chain of 71 supermarkets across Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine.

In 2008, Anthanasios and Efrosini’s grandson Arthur T. Demoulas was elected president of the Market Basket board. By all accounts, Arthur T., as he is known, presided over a very successful and happy company. Not only did Market Basket continue to expand and reap profits — generating $4 billion in revenues in 2012 — but workers have thrived as well.

Full-time clerks start at $12 an hour. Cashiers with experience can earn over $40,000 a year. And managers can easily make into the six figures.

Are the super-rich obligated to do more? CNN Explains: The Occupy movement 2012: Does OWS represent the 99%?

Keep in mind that’s in a nation where the average annual salary for grocery store cashiers is $21,370 and the national minimum wage is $7.25 per hour.

The company also has a generous retirement plan, matching 15% of annual salary to employee retirement funds. What’s more, workers up and down the supply chain receive good bonuses throughout the year.

All this and Market Basket is affordable for customers, with prices regularly 10% to 20% lower than competitors. The company is profitable in an industry known for low profit margins, and has given $500 million in dividends to the nine family shareholders over the past decade.

In other words, at a time when corporate executives and wealthy investors regularly try to argue that companies cannot pay workers well and be successful in generating profits, Market Basket has been an impressive and stunning example to the contrary. Market Basket has been a good company all around — until recently, when things changed.

So what happened? Well, the family board switched sides, ousted Arthur T. and installed his cousin Arthur S. Demoulas as president.

One of the first acts under Arthur S. was to distribute $250 million in profits to the nine family shareholders, what a Boston Globe editorial called “an uncharacteristic act of greed for a firm known for its generous treatment of its workers and concern for price-conscious shoppers.”

There have been other ominous signs that Arthur S. and his allies plan to push profit at all costs — at the expense of workers and the values of the company. And so in an unprecedented mobilization, managers and workers have protested at Market Baskets across New England, calling for their beloved CEO Artie T. to be reinstated.

Last week, more than 6,000 Market Basket workers and managers joined in a peaceful march outside the company’s headquarters in Tewksbury, Massachusetts. If you go to any Market Basket store around New England right now, you’re likely to find employees and even some customers holding up signs protesting the new executive and supporting the ousted Artie T. Employees are also using social media to get their message out, using hashtags like #MarketBasket.

Of course, if you go inside a Market Basket you’re not likely to find much; even the warehouse workers are on strike. These protests aren’t being organized by unions; after all, Market Basket workers aren’t unionized. They’re being organized by the employees and managers of the company.

Already, eight managers have been fired for helping lead the protests. But the protests continue. As a result, the company is reportedly losing $1 million a day.

A reporter interviewed one of the Market Basket workers at a protest. “I have a friend who works at Walmart,” she said, “and I asked her, would they ever do this for their CEO?” The woman laughed. But what has become of capitalism in America is not funny: the extreme greed of a few overrunning the best interests of everyone, including workers, communities and a healthy growing economy.

Just like the Occupy Wall Street protesters before them, the Market Basket workers are not protesting against capitalism. They’re protesting for a certain kind of capitalism, a capitalism that works for owners as well as for workers and communities. It’s the kind of capitalism that has made Market Basket a successful business for generations, the kind of capitalism that once meant shared prosperity and opportunity in America.

The Market Basket managers and cashiers and bag boys joining in protest aren’t just holding signs, they’re also holding the aspirations of the majority of Americans. Those of us concerned about the growing economic inequality in America don’t want to “eat the rich” — we simply don’t want the rich to chew up and spit out everyone else.

 

-FROM ME- Yet again, the inherited privileged assholes attempt to decimate one of the few businesses left that give employees a fair shake. Give people the means to educate themselves and move up the ladder, and you eliminate people that would rather sit and collect welfare. Getting rid of decent paying jobs erodes the economy and proves even more that the 1% are international and will leave this country for the next one after they have turned it into a land of poor people. 

The shit thru the fog.

Well, dear reader, we have been assailed,yet again, by superfluous shit straight from the mouth of the very people who have nothing but corporate interest in mind! We have assholes on the border in Murietta, CA. hurling insults at children in busses, accomplishing nothing in an issue meant to distract us from the important bullshit that is benefitting the 1% of those that actually control politics! Yeah, fuckers! This is coming from me, the one person who still refers to illegal immigrants as such and doesn’t give a shit who cares. Yes, I know that the microeconomic impact of this problem is immense, but I also recognize that the powers that be are using this problem to distract people from the most important of social problems.
Today we have a version of socialized medicine placed before us, but don’t realize that the real problem was, in fact, socialized education. We had forsaken this for medicine, not realizing that education would have lead us to this and would have put us back in the innovation forefront, but this was not the intention of the handlers of the assholes that we put in office to represent the billionaires over us, the general public. The 1% have been carefully dismantling the public education system for the last 30 years in an effort to create the second class nation that we have today. We bitch and moan and pass bond measures that end in school closures anyway and blame the opposing political party for the failures. The truth of the matter is that if the general public used skeptical thinking, critical thought and logic to analyze what was transpiring, they would have come to the conclusion that they were being duped by a higher entity, and they would have worked to thwart this divisive bullshit. Instead they choose to fight each other and tie the answers up in the partisan politics of the Left and Right!
The divide of Left and Right has lead to the ultimate demise of the American dream and made it easy for the oligarchs to seize control of absolutely everything! The controllers have made it so that families are cared for by those complicit in the destruction of freedom! Those that dissent are dealt with swiftly and efficiently so that others believe that they were wrong to have a different opinion of how things should be! Totalitarian regime anyone?!
Wake up and understand that this could happen anywhere anytime! You have drones watching you 24/7 by YOUR OWN MANDATE OF LAW! You put this in place! Is your front fucking lawn and your 2.000sq ft house enough payment for the demise of the security you enjoyed under the sacrifice of your WWII soldiers? Most of our pHD candidates are foreign born, is that O.K with you?? Wake up an return control of this country to those who actually respect freedom! Quit paying attention to these divisive peripheral issues and give your kids a free education! Learning equals freedom, period!

Immigration DID make this country strong and continues to do so, but accepting hordes of unskilled workers from all over the globe is overwhelming the country’s ability to absorb those without training. Regulation IS needed to keep a steady, controlled flow of entrants to this country so that it can both employ and assist immigrants in a smooth transition into American society. Intentionally overwhelming the financial ability of this nation to process entrants amounts to the most foolish of undertakings that will eventually bankrupt the resources that were designed to help these people. With no financial resources to ease the transition, the immigrant population is left to spread over a penniless economy that can no longer suffer the burden. What is the outcome? Possibly assimilating into a society as bankrupt as the one that was left behind, to a life of hard scrabble just as bleak as the previous one? Where is the economic logic in this? Why would the oligarchs pit the opposing political parties against one another so that hands are tied and problems grow unchecked? Maybe the answers lay in the fact that these rich assholes are international and have no loyalties to any country and just milk a system dry and move on to the next growing super power.

Common sense dictates that unstable circumstances be brought under control, this includes the problem of immigration, this includes controlling dispersal of firearms, population control, and societal contributions to the less fortunate without contract to educate or eventually separate them from Federal and state assistance. As long as we have walls between nations and unchecked greed, we, as common people, need to have sensible controls agreed upon by all citizens regarding social contract, fair treatment under the laws and control of the population as to regulate and share valuable resources.

Right now we have warring political factions carrying out the mandates of people who live above the law and who use the public as pawns to achieve their goals, whatever the fuck their goals are! I assume that it lies in the halls of power and resource, because money is just paper that is used by many to purchase goods. It is backed by neither gold or silver and is just fancy paper with expensive ink and pretty pictures. The true controlling factions do not waste their time accumulating worthless pieces of paper and believing that they are wealthy, they corner resources and transportation networks to deliver those resources so that they can exercise true control. The Gold Standard hasn’t existed on the dollar for years.

The following is an explanation of the suspension of the Gold Standard meant to enlighten you a bit as to the insignificance of common power based on the money that we earn.

The Fed was formed in 1913, the same year the income tax was first allowed. As most readers know when the Fed was formed the American money was “Redeemable” in Silver or Gold, mandated by the U.S. Constitution.

In about 1917-1918 WW I broke out in Europe.
The U.S. got involved and the Fed began to issue way more dollars than the Treasury had in Gold { @ $20 per ounce} to pay for the war expenses.

When WW I ended there were way too many unbacked American dollars in circulation which led to a period called the roaring 20’s because there was too much money in circulation which caused stock prices to climb way up, by investors spending their extra dollars by investing in stocks.

In 1929 investors suddenly realized all the dollars in circulation couldn’t possibly be backed by Gold, which caused a mass sell off of stocks called the “crash”.

By 1932-33 the Treasury department realized that so many Gold backed American dollars had gone overseas, if the overseas people decided to cash them in for Gold the Treasury couldn’t pay off,,,which led to Roosevelt signing an excutive order confiscating all Americans privately owned Gold, to cover the Treasury’s shortage.

Later he changed the official value of an ounce of Gold from $20 an ounce to $35 dollars an ounce, where it remained until 1971.

In 1971 the world’s Gold supply & demand factor kicked in sending the European price to over $38 dollars per ounce, which caused Europeans to cash in dollars for Gold until Nixon decreed that the U.S. dollar was no longer redeemable in Gold.

Mass inflation followed in the U.S.

Congressman Ron Paul {elected in 1976} & Senetor Jesse Helms of North Carolina tried to reinstate the Gold standard by forming a group called the U.S. Gold commission. From the beginning the commission worked against them since other members of the commission were bought off by the Fed to oppose a re-instatement of the Gold standard, (and while I am describing how worthless our currency has become, I am certainly not endorsing the political party of the creators of The Gold Commission).

Currently the world is flooded with unbacked American dollars, bringing the value down, as it now takes many more of them to buy an ounce of Gold that used to be worth $20.

Now I know that there was an extended focus on immigration at the beginning of the article, but this was used as an illustration of the current divide in American politics and an example of the foolish policies adhered to by both the left and the right. The fact that the public is not reading cost analysis for many of these problems attests to the educational problems in this country. Intelligent informed skeptical thinkers would insist upon justification for Govt. policy BEFORE it was enacted, but most Americans lack even the basic understanding of their own Govt/Financial system and choose to remain with heads planted firmly in the sand. Why, in the medical field most pamphlets given to the public have been printed at the 3rd and 4th grade level due to the complete and abhorrent lack of general education and basic literacy! Most people are too busy watching American Idol, or that cavalcade of fucking idiocy Duck Dynasty, to fight for the preservation of a once great public school system! Skepticism is born of education and continued study throughout one’s life, not by pablumizing one’s mind with insipid nonsense fed to the masses by mass media in attempt to distract them from real and present dangers.

I speak on these peripheral nonsense issues and their power over the public at every turn, and actively sign petitions, give money and exercise my voice in an effort to change public focus to the issues that actually carry weight. I frequently ask the intelligent people to recognize divisive tactics in politics and to ignore distractions meant to pit people against one another. The key lies in common sense, reason, logic and skeptical thought. While many chase the Supreme Court decision over the Hobby Lobby case, the power brokers broker ever larger contracts for greater influence literally ‘fiddling as Rome burns.’ They don’t have to worry, they can move on, we, the common people are left to pick up the remnants of a shattered economy.

The key is education, and a quality, well rounded education that teaches one to learn from their past mistakes. Rebuild the school system and most of these problems will all of a sudden be recognized by fresh intelligent people. Dummy our children down and we can look forward to desperate uneducated masses grateful for  jobs paying shit wages from cradle to grave. Our choice.

 

The rich JUUUST get richer!!

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Congressman Paul Ryan says America has a problem in culture of poverty
• Eric Liu: Actually, we live in a dysfunctional culture of concentrated wealth
• He says certain antisocial values and behaviors have taken root among the rich
• Liu: The wealthy rigged the political and economic games to amplify their gains

Editor’s note: Eric Liu is the founder of Citizen University and the author of several books, including “The Gardens of Democracy” and “The Accidental Asian.” He served as a White House speechwriter and policy adviser for President Bill Clinton. Follow him on Twitter@ericpliu. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) — When Congressman Paul Ryan opined recently that there was a “real culture problem” in poor communities, “in our inner cities in particular,” and that this culture was behind some of the country’s economic troubles, he didn’t realize how half right he was.

People are continuing to debate fiercely what Ryan said and whether he meant to propagate racially coded explanations of poverty’s roots. But put that aside for a moment. Here’s what he was right about: There is indeed a culture in America that is pathological and now threatens our social fabric. It’s not the culture of poverty, though. It’s the culture of wealth.

We live in an age of extreme concentration of wealth in America. The problem is not just that the 1% have managed to nearly triple their share of national income in the last three decades. Nor is it just that the 1% increasingly are fed, schooled and housed in a bubble apart from the rest of their fellow citizens.

Eric Liu

The problem is that today’s concentration of wealth is breaking the golden link that Ryan and others take pains to emphasize — the link between work and reward.

Economist Thomas Piketty’s landmark new book “Capital”unpacks this delinking in great statistical detail. It turns out that increasing numbers of Americans in the 1%, .1% and .01% have done little to “earn” their wealth or privilege.

Contrary to myth, most of today’s plutocrats are not the kind of Steve Jobsian visionary risk-taking entrepreneurs or superstar celebrities. The .01%, for instance, tend overwhelmingly to be high-end corporate managers and executives, particularly on Wall Street, operating in interlocking networks that inflate the standard of what an executive is “worth.” Or they are the heirs of the great entrepreneurs (4 of the 10 richest Americans are children of Sam Walton), inheritors of fortunes of which it can truly be said, “someone else built that.”

An aristocracy is emerging in America, a class of insiders that corrodes the promise of equal citizenship. And with this compounding of unearned advantage, certain antisocial values and behaviors have taken root among the superrich — norms that threaten to corrupt the rest of American society.

 a inequality’s an embarrassment

s Google to blame for the income gap?

What’s in this dysfunctional culture of concentrated wealth? Look around Wall Street. You’ll find tribal insularity, short-term thinking, personal irresponsibility, cynicism about playing by the rules, an aversion to socially productive labor, a habit of shameless materialism, an inability to defer gratification and a lack of concern for what “message” all this sends to the youth raised in such an environment.

In short, you’ll find the very things typically imputed to the culture of poverty.

Now, to be sure, there are poor people who do exhibit these antisocial values and norms. And there is no question that plenty of poor people are poor because they made bad choices and behaved in self-destructive ways.

But rich people who exhibit such values have something the poor don’t: Money. Money buys exemption from bad choices. Money confers power — in particular, over the poor. It confers the power to frame public narrative and policymaking and to determine whose behavior — whose culture — is (and isn’t) called pathological.

Today, as it was during the last Gilded Age, the concentration of wealth gives the rich the political clout to further concentrate their wealth. (And now, as then, the Supreme Court greases the skids in the name of “liberty“). This clout is wielded in plain sight now, without any pretense of civic equality. And it calls to mind the warning attributed to Justice Louis Brandeis: “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

When the richest 400 families in America have more wealth than the bottom 155 million Americans combined, the danger to the republic is far more clear and present than that posed by the “welfare queens” of lore or by anecdotes of shiftless inner-city men.

That would be true even if the super-rich today had entirely benign or merely neutral policy preferences. But in fact they’ve rigged the game of policy, subsidies and tax preferences to amplify and hoard their gains.

This isn’t to suggest that all super-wealthy people are “welfare kings” (they’re not) or to imply that they have a monopoly on selfishness or sociopathic attitudes (they don’t). Yet if it’s unfair to paint everyone in the 1% with the same unflattering brush of “dysfunctional culture,” isn’t it far worse to do the same to the poorest 20%?

Wealth and advantage are as strongly self-reinforcing as poverty and disadvantage. It’s possible to recognize this fact while also championing grit, gumption and good values. In fact, it’s essential. But culture doesn’t explain everything. And where it matters isn’t only among the poor or nonwhite.

If we’re going to reform the norms in this country so that opportunity is truly reflective of effort and talent, we have to do more than pick on those with the least. We have to start at the top.

-Again, start with the 90 Billion in church tax breaks, the NFL tax exempt status and all other huge corporate tax breaks and you have a good start. Applying skeptical and critical thinking along with a good bit of research and you will find the gap between the rich and poor exponentially widening. This is due to the fact that when you have enough money and influence you can load the dice in your favor.

The billionaires do not have to observe the laws that their paid minions write because they contain built-in loop holes dictated by said overlords, AND when the politicians get out of office, they just go to consulting jobs offered by the very same businesses that paid to have the laws written in the first place, yayyyy Sheldon Adelson, Koch Bros. George Soros and the people at ActBlue!!.

Freedom and stars ‘n’ stripes!

I find it very disturbing how accepted it is that people in power will commit crimes but will never be held accountable for them. Those who are close to or who are Government officials run around on our dime flouting the laws of the land with impunity due to their privileged positions given to them by the American public. These dicks lie to the highest officials in our legal system and are protected for it because the lies are supposedly related to their job or to protecting national security, but really the outcome is a perverted notion held by some super rich asshole who has lost touch with any notion of what the public desires. These crimes go unpunished every day due to the fact that you cannot arrest and prosecute the people who own the governments of the civilized world, the billionaires who have the law in their back pockets. 

There is conflict over whether or not people like Julian Assange and Edward Snowdon should be prosecuted, and the argument will go on forever, debated by liberals, conservatives and moderates, but the fact of the matter is, we learned most definitely that if you have the right connections, then you will NEVER see the inside of a jail cell. I don’t really think that I can put a price on what these scandals have taught the intelligent people of the world. I say intelligent meaning the small sliver of humanity that sees through the bullshit right to the value of the story. I don’t give a shit about the national security implications the Repubs keep screaming about, or the tree hugging bullshit on the opposite end of the argument, I am only concerned with the fact that it brought to stark clarity the disparity between the powerful and the powerless. Snowden said that Orwell’s 1984 was already a reality and I believe this. The fact that you can barely walk to a street corner or a building without being on camera is a glaring testament to how deeply our privacy has been violated. Republidicks will say that it helps the cops get the scum suckers. Dimmocrats will say that they don’t really like it ‘But if it makes us safer…..’ 

The bottom line is that these developments only give the power brokers a line on what the public is doing 24/7, PERIOD! The sheeple of this country, ( 80% ), have allowed the shepherds ultimate control to lead them to shear and slaughter while they sit around sucking up Duck Dynasty and Storage Wars. Anything that the average person does to try to even the playing field ends up being scrutinized and subject to the laws of the people watching from the cameras. This seems kind of paranoid, but what would YOU do if you had all the power in the world and wanted to make sure that the public wasn’t planning to French Revolution your ass? Make sense? These people are not subject to our laws and break them on a regular basis while we sit by shoving our heads farther and farther into the sand. We watch CNN and all of the other pablum factories, just sucking up their superficial bullshit and squabbling over surface issues designed to take our little sheep minds off of what we do not want to know. Control IS an illusion, an illusion that WE are unwilling to risk a thing to make real. We could exert control if we weren’t so preoccupied with protecting the small piece of the pie that the billionaires have allowed us to cull us to sleep. 

The reality is that most of us have taken the blue pill and don’t want to wake up. Those that do face an uphill battle. Just fucking plug me back into the Matrix and I’ll stop fighting. Superficial issues like God, politics, abortion, they are all peripheral issues designed to confound the senses and divide the forces and they have worked like the bell on Pavlov’s dogs! Pretty sad indictment of mankind, huh? One of the biggest reasons that I am an atheist is because I wanted to shake of the yoke of the ultimate form of crowd control; religion. More armies are divided by this than anything, and when they are united by it, it’s usually in a murderous fervor, something that I want nothing to do with. Since declaring my freedom, my mind has expanded incredibly and my ability to see through the bullshit has become exponential. Freethought has cleared and focused my mind and helped me rid myself of the blinders provided by media and other public sources. 

I may not make any difference at all, but I will not live with my head stuck in the sand ignoring the disappearing freedoms that we used to enjoy. I will end this rant and return to my futile endeavors now so remember, I’m WAAATCHING youuuuuuuu!

Bill Clinton

I am with neither party and am just common sense, so repubs AND dems hate me!

Milton Friedman!!!!!

I have always believed in that which built this country, I just don’t believe in greedy bullshitters! I built my life after living in cars for the 1st 18 years of my life. I have proven the words that this man says!! My path? GED, tech school, military, college, grad school! All self-made without welfare!

Capitalism, not runaway greed, works

Capitalism