Not long ago, I posted an article debunking the claim that giant corporations and wealthy investors are "job creators".*  In fact, the 1%ers who control at least 50% of the investment assets in this country care far less about creating jobs than avoiding taxes.   For the multi-millionaires and billionaires, the annual IRS capital-gains giveaway is the gateway to the Promised Land.

There is much irony in the fact that the vulture capitalist who is the current front-runner in the race for the Republican nomination claims to be a job creator.   Mitt Romney, the presidential candidate, is the same guy who made millions off 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".  In Romney's world, efficienicy 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.

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.

The super-rich Romney actually wants us to believe that he is not only a world-class job creator, but also 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 just prior to Obama's election in the fall of 2008.   Now, three years later, the economy is showing early signs of recovering.  For example, the increase in jobs for January 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 is more likely to focus on creating jobs, Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, let's agree to focus on facts, not the fantasy that the money-worshippers for whom Wall Street is the moral equivalent of Mecca really give a damn what happens to lowly wage-earners.