Written by Thomas Magstadt   

A few months ago I posted a piece* on the self-serving and fraudulent claim that giant corporations and wealthy investors are "job creators". Logic and bitter experience point to a very different conclusion.

When capitalists create jobs (which, in fairness, many do) the reason has nothing to do with the general welfare and everything to do with making a fat profit. When the wealthy invest it has nothing to do with the general good and everything to do with making a killing while avoiding the kind of taxes the rest of us pay on earned income. For the 1%ers, the sign above the gateway to the Promised Land reads CAPITAL GAINS.

Corporate raider and Republican front-runner, Mitt Romney made millions from companies Bain Capital acquired and ran into the ground, but not before reaping big profits, using the companies' assets as leverage for other investments, loading them up with debt, and making them more "efficient". To vulture capitalists like Romney, efficiency is a euphemism for laying off workers, cutting benefits, and selling off the profitable bits before declaring bankruptcy and shutting the enterprise down for good. To quote Romney: "I love firing people."

Of course, Romney is not the only member of the 1% club who was doing this sort of thing and getting filthy rich during the Golden Age of the Great American Bubble Economy (GABE). But he IS the only one who, having victimized more working class people in this country than anyone else in the race, now has the balls to boast about his surpassing skills and great success in business.

No wait, it's worse than that. Much worse.

Romney actually wants us to believe (as he apparently does) that he is the mother of all job creators! That he alone is the true champion of the middle class. And that Obama is secretly plotting to transform America into something more closely resembling Bulgaria before the fall of Communism than "the shining city upon a hill" Reagan so famously evoked.

But facts are stubborn things, especially when they come in a form that is impossible even for the bland mainstream news media to ignore. Facts like this one: job growth in the first month of 2012 brought unemployment down to its lowest level (8.3%) in nearly three years. That's two months in a row of good news about job growth. And payrolls increased by 243,000, beating Wall Street's expectations.

One more fact Obama's detractors cannot deny: the recession we are now apparently putting behind us started in 2007 (when George W. Bush was still ensconced in the Oval Office), and the banking crisis occurred prior to Obama's election in the fall of 2008. Now, three years later, the economy is showing signs of recovery. For example, the recent increase in jobs is broad- based and includes such struggling industries as manufacturing and construction, as well as professional and business services, retail, and leisure and hospitality.

Also, revised figures from the past two years indicate 1.82 million jobs were created in 2011 alone, higher than previously thought. Not bad for a president supposedly bent on destroying the economy as we know it.

Of course, with 19.3 million American still unemployed or out of work, there's no reason for complacency. But when we decide who cares more about people and creating jobs, Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, let's agree to focus on facts, not the fantasy that the money-worshipers for whom Wall Street is the moral equivalent of Mecca really give a damn what happens to lowly wage-earners.

*Godot, RSN, "Job Cre(m)ation and the Profit Motive," 12/28/11