The Myth of the Job Creators

by Rob C.

Why the Rich Keep Winning, the Rest Keep Struggling, and the Stock Market Is Just a High-Stakes Magic Trick

The Stock Market Is Not the Economy

Let’s start with a dirty little secret Wall Street doesn’t want you to know: the stock market has almost nothing to do with your life. Unless you’re a Fortune 500 CEO or a hedge fund manager doing God’s work from a Hamptons beach house, the daily tick of the Dow means jack.

The stock market tracks shareholder profits, not national prosperity. It celebrates layoffs, rewards outsourcing, and throws a party every time a company squeezes another dime out of its workers without giving them a raise. And while Wall Street sips champagne, small businesses—the actual backbone of our economy—get left out of the conversation entirely. They don’t have stock tickers. They just have rent, payroll, and hope.

Billionaires Don’t Create Jobs—You Do

Here’s the con: we’re told that rich people are magical unicorns who birth jobs out of thin air if we just give them enough tax breaks and don’t look them in the eye. But the truth? Jobs come from demand—when people (that’s you and me) have money to spend, and businesses step up to meet that need.

Small businesses hire when their community supports them—not when Jeff Bezos sneezes. Yet we still shower giant corporations with tax incentives, zoning gifts, and corporate welfare so they’ll “create jobs.” And when they do? It’s often minimum wage work with no benefits, while the CEO cashes a $100 million bonus and fires half the staff the next quarter to “increase shareholder value.”

Spoiler alert: Shareholder value ≠ human value.

Pollute, Crash, Repeat

Let’s take a moment to appreciate the sheer genius of the corporate scam. First, they pollute your air and water. Then, they crash your economy. Then, they take your tax dollars to fix it—and still give themselves a raise.

Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Banks—hell, Big Everything—have turned crisis into a business model. Crash the system, walk away with a bailout, and let the public foot the bill. Accountability? Please. They’ve got more lawyers than conscience.

Meanwhile, you try missing one student loan payment, and you’re in collections faster than a bank exec can say “golden parachute.”

The Real Bosses: BlackRock, Vanguard & Friends

You may not know their names, but they own everything. BlackRock and Vanguard are like financial horcruxes—pieces of the corporate soul embedded in every major company on Earth. Together, they control tens of trillions of dollars and are the largest shareholders in nearly every industry: tech, oil, finance, food—you name it.

They don’t just influence the economy—they dictate it. They lobby quietly, pull strings behind closed doors, and manipulate markets while the public stares at shiny objects like meme stocks and presidential tweets. This isn’t free market capitalism. It’s a slow-motion hostile takeover of democracy.

Let’s Kill the Lie

The American worker is not lazy. The American economy is not failing because of regulation or diversity or whatever scapegoat is on Fox News this week. It’s failing because the rules have been rewritten by people who treat your life as a line item.

You are the job creators. Every person who wakes up and puts in the work, opens the store, drives the delivery van, teaches the kids, writes the code, or stocks the shelves. The economy doesn’t trickle down—it gets built from the ground up.

So no, we don’t need to worship billionaires. We need to tax them, regulate them, and stop letting them run this country like a rigged Monopoly game.

Because the myth of the job creators is exactly that—a myth. And if we don’t break the spell soon, the only jobs left will be cleaning up the mess they leave behind.

Art by – Matt Wuerker for Politico

Please support this work.

Get the book – “Democracy for Sale – How Corporate Greed is Corrupting Democracy and Endangering the Planet.”

Available @ AMAZON and Booksellers everywhere