Stop Kidding Yourselves -- Americans Have Nothing to Celebrate this Labor Day

As Bill Clinton lines up for shameless photo shoots in preparation to march with organized labor down Michigan Avenue in Detroit this morning, Americans have very little to celebrate this holiday.

Americans are forced to choose between two people who've done nothing to support domestic job growth and who personify government created class separation. On one end is the ostensibly socialist Clinton who's a cheerleader for NAFTA and the TPP -- two job killing pieces of tyrannical legislation. And, on the other end is Donald Trump, who pretends to be for American jobs while gaming the U.S. visa system to hire temporary foreign workers and pay them pennies on the dollar.

In case you haven't noticed, no matter which puppet is in office, the upside down funnel over the country continues to suck everything upward. The commoners keep eating shit and grinning, while the government-connected elite continues to fleece the population through a rigged system.

The ruling elite in the United States quite literally hand-pick politicians and pay for their campaigns to put them in office. More than half of all donations provided to the 2016 presidential candidates, in both parties, proves this notion as they came from a mere 158 families.

The 158 families, who've donated billions of dollars to these candidates, have entirely different reasons for choosing their politicians versus Joe Sixpack. Consequently, it is for this reason that Joe Sixpack's requests are completely ignored by the next puppet to be placed in office who claims to represent him.

But Donald Trump isn't beholden to these elite, his supporters will claim -- which is complete hogwash. As Ron Paul pointed out, Trump's fortune was amassed largely due to his abuse of the corrupt constructs of the US government and the loopholes created by him and for him.

The United States government is, by design, a machine to redistribute wealth. This wealth redistribution, however, is not what the political blowhards on the TV and radio say it is.

Since the inception of the income tax, and the Federal Reserve, the United States government has become excellent at separating you from the product of your labor.

While you're told by the Sean Hannitys of the world that the government takes from the rich to redistribute to the poor, the reality is actually the opposite. The state fleeces the poor and middle class in America, and that money is, in turn, redistributed to the most wealthy Americans.

As Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, David Cay Johnson, points out, the result of such a government system are,

"policies that take from the many and redistribute to the already rich few through stealth techniques that rarely make the news but can be found in the public record. Among these policies are a failure to enforce the laws of business competition, severe restrictions on unions and subsidies galore for big companies."

Nothing illustrates this point more clearly than the labor market in the US. As the elite suck wealth from the lower classes, the capital to create new business and job growth disappears. This upward suction of capital enriches the elite while leaving the commoners broke and jobless.

While democrats blame capitalism and conservatives blame democrats, both parties remain completely oblivious to the elephant in the room -- corporatism.

While August's numbers have yet to be released, the July numbers from the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics are out. There were 255,000 jobs added in July, and the unemployment rate remained at 4.9 percent! Whoohoo!!! Before you grab the champagne glasses and fill them with your Labor day budweiser, however, here's a look at how anticlimactic and skewed those numbers really are.

Thanks to the nature of bureaucratic statistics and the state's ability to remove data from their results by altering definitions of inputs, Uncle Sam can make an ominous situation look like something to celebrate.

The official unemployment rate is defined as "total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force." Simple enough, right?

The "total unemployed," however, excludes a surplus of individuals, who are deliberately removed from the data to show bogus growth.

According to the BLS, to be counted in the total unemployed, or U3 data, an individual has to have looked for work actively within the four weeks prior to the unemployment survey. If the active search for work was in the last year, but not in the last four weeks, the individual is considered a “discouraged worker” by the BLS and is not included in the data.

Here is where the bureaucracy works its magic to keep you in the dark. Once a person moves from the 'official' total unemployed (U3) to the (U6) data range (all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force), they no longer matter.

Aside from simply counting heads, the U6 data set, or rather, the real number of unemployed Americans, is defined out of existence for political convenience.

When we look at real unemployment versus what the government tells the citizens, there is a staggering difference.

According to the latest ShadowStats data, there is nearly a 20 percent difference in what the state says the unemployment rate is, versus what the real unemployment rate is.

In July, the nation’s civilian noninstitutional population, consisting of all people 16 or older who were not in the military or an institution, reached 253,620,000. Of those, 159,287,000 participated in the labor force by either holding a job or actively seeking one.

What that means is that a whopping 94,333,000 people remain without a job, and the US government and their lackeys in the mainstream, are somehow celebrating this. Yea Labor Day!

The 255,000 jobs "created" in July that everyone is cheering about, accounts for only one-tenth of one percent of all unemployed people.

Let that sink in.

However, it is not all doom and gloom. Humanity and the market have a way of fighting back against the labor controllers and the job growth and wealth created by legal weed is just one example.

 

On top of the thriving cannabis industry, entrepreneurs and web developers are building flourishing online economies in which people can make money without ever leaving their homes.

Steemit is one of those places. This uncensorable network is a blockchain-based social media platform where anyone can earn money. It works in a similar fashion to Reddit, however, instead of being banned or censored for posts, if other users like your content, you make money.

It's time America takes back this holiday from the state.

In a time where robots are replacing minimum wage workers in fast food chains, the outlook can tend to appear bleak -- and, it could very well be that way for a while. However, as long as humans are aware of their surrounds and resist the state's control and influence over their livelihoods, the possibilities are endless.

Matt Agorist | The Free Thought Project