Having grown up on the Left, I am acutely aware how certain misleading lingo can become reified and cemented into socially acceptable discourse.  Get a room full of radicals together and they will blithely substitute the word, "Imperialism," for the more common nouns of United States.  Example: "Imperialism has intervened in Afghanistan because it wants to build an oil pipeline."

Well, nostalgic Marxist-Leninists have nothing on conservative ideological zealots who have now locked in the term of "job creator" to replace the more accurate terms of  "the filthy rich."  Turn on the tube or the radio and you can now hear this obscene term bandied about dozens of times a day and always in the same context: "Oh, heavens, we can't tax the Job Creators!"

The Job Creators? Here I thought the big economic lesson we were taught by the Ginrichoids and Reaganites over the last three decades is that only pussy liberals worry about maintaining jobs and that Real Men, the Smart and Hairy Alpha CEO's, had as their principal task defending the stockholders.  Isn't that what the last 30 years of globalization, de-industrialization and mergers and acquisitions have as their underlying basis?

Weren't the really admired CEO's were those who knew how to takeover, dismantle and strip the competition?  Wasn't it some sort of great honor when this or that corporate management "shed" excess jobs and pushed up stock prices?  Isn't it the corporate class that has fought tooth and nail to oppose minimum wage increases for all those jobs they supposedly created?  Where have all these "job creators" been as literally millions of middle-class jobs got exported (by them) overseas?

You have got to be kidding. Not to go all Marxist on you, but value in commodities is actually created by the labor invested in them, not by the fluid movement of capital.  If private sector chieftans are now to be crowned as "job creators" in the public discourse, shouldn't ordinary workers now be recognized as "wealth creators?"  How do conservatives THINK the wealthy get rich in the first place? Adam Smith understood this long before Karl Marx. They get rich by extracting the value produced by the labor of others….that's what we call profit (and/or exploitation).

Let's toss in some ad hominem while we're at it.  I have interviewed a LOT of corporate managers and bigwigs in my life and I have met  almost none whose first priority is creating jobs. Their first priority is usually getting richer and usually by any means necessary. The most successful are disproportionately highly-driven, ambitious, greedy and rather ruthless ego-maniacs.

One wonderful case study of a once hallowed "Job Creator" is found in John Ronson's book, "The Psycopath Test." Check out this excerpt from a recent NPR review of the book.

Some psychologists have a theory that many of the world's ills can be blamed on psychopaths in high places.

"Robert Hare, the eminent Canadian psychologist who invented the psychopath checklist, … recently announced that you're four times more likely to find a psychopath at the top of the corporate ladder than you are walking around in the janitor's office," journalist Jon Ronson tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered.

Ronson is the author of a new book, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry. The titular test is called the PCL-R. Invented by Hare, it's a checklist of characteristics common to psychopaths: things like glib and superficial charm, grandiosity, manipulative behavior and lack of remorse.

Picture a psychopath and you might think of Norman Bates. But Ronson says successful businessmen can also score high on the checklist. While researching his book, Ronson visited the Florida home of Al Dunlap — known as "Chainsaw Al" — who as CEO of appliance maker Sunbeam was notorious for his gleeful fondness for firing people and shutting down factories.

"So I turned up at his house, and it was full of sculptures of predatory animals," Ronson says. "And he immediately started to talk about how he believed in the predatory spirit, which was word for word what Bob Hare writes about in the checklist: Look out for their belief in the predatory spirit."

But Dunlap managed to turn the psychopath test on its head, Ronson says.

"He admitted to many, many items on the checklist, but redefined them as leadership positives," he says. "So 'manipulation' was another way of saying 'leadership.' 'Grandiose sense of self worth' — which would have been a hard one for him to deny because he was standing underneath a giant oil painting of himself — was, you know, 'You've got to like yourself if you're going to be a success.'"

Job Creator! Get that man a tax break.

P.S. Is it an accident that America's most iconic "Job Creator" has burnished his fame by shouting "You're Fired!" not "You're Hired!"?