A few days ago, Governor Perry said:  “I would send troops back into Iraq.”  (He pronounced it “Eye-rack.”)  And he gave a thought-provoking rationale:  that the end of that occupation means that “every young man that [sic] lost his life in that country will have been for nothing.”

Well, I would like to do what Albert Einstein called a “thought experiment,” which is thinking through a hypothetical situation in order to examine its consequences.

Suppose, hypothetically, that there were a country in the Western Hemisphere called “Amurricuh,” and a country in the Middle East called “Irab.”  Lots of Irabs live in Irab.

Suppose, hypothetically, that a terrorist group destroys two very large buildings in Amurricuh, and kills a couple of thousand Amurricuns in the process. Suppose, also, that the leaders of that group reside not in Irab, but rather (with apologies to Herman Cain) in “Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan.” (Yes, this man once led in the polls to become the Republican candidate for President.) Suppose that less than 1000 Special Forces Amurricun troops overthrow the government of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan, and then force the leaders of that terrorist group out of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan. But not to Irab; to a totally different country called “Mohenjo-Daro.” 

Are you still with me?  Now this hypothetical gets really complicated.  Suppose that the leader of Amurricuh believes, regarding the leader of Irab, that “he tried to kill my Daddy.”  Real revenge stuff, like something out of “The Godfather.”  Anyway, let’s suppose that the leader of Amurricuh then tries to stir his people up against the leader of Irab by saying that the leader of Irab supported the terrorists who destroyed those two large buildings.  (A little irony here — the leader of the terrorists always refers to the leader of Irab as “the infidel,” and is, in fact, his sworn and lifelong enemy.)  Let’s also suppose that the leader of Amurricuh claims that the leader of Irab is planning to attack more large buildings in Amurricuh, with a fleet of giant dirigibles filled with hydrogen.  “We can’t let the smoking gun be a smoking balloon,” his national security chief says.  (Hypothetically, an oil company named Chev-Ron named an oil tanker after her, but that is neither here nor there.)  Suppose that Amurricuh’s Minister of “Defense” says that an invasion of Irab will pay for itself, and that Irabs will greet Amurricun soldiers as liberators.

I know that this is really farfetched.  But just suppose.

OK, so Amurricun forces invade Irab, and overthrow the leader of Irab.  They capture him, and he is executed.  But suppose that the Irabi government collapses in the process, that certain groups use this occupation as an excuse for ethnic cleansing, that approximately 500,000 Irabs die, and two or three million become refugees.  Also, no electricity and no clean water for millions of Irabs, for years.  Oh, and the Amurricuns tell the Irabs that Irab needs to turn over its oil wealth to foreign oil companies for “development.”

Suppose also that the Amurricun forces find no dirigibles, and no hydrogen.  Not even any helium.  Like, nothing.  And, of course, no evidence that the leader of Irab ever supported the leader of the terrorists, because actually, they despised each other.

Now let’s suppose that for several years, Amurricun soldiers look for dirigibles that aren’t there, which makes them very hard to find, while Irab becomes just as dangerous for Irabs as Somalia is for Somalis.  Let’s also suppose that during that time, the war in Irab costs the Amurricun people four trillion frogskins (so called because the currency is green).  This is more than 13,000 frogskins per Amurricun, and roughly eight percent of Amurricuh’s net worth as a nation, accumulated over two centuries.

Also, let’s suppose that almost two million Amurricun soldiers eventually get shipped to Irab, and 250,000 return from Irab with permanent brain abnormalities.  Hypothetically.

Let’s suppose that the Irabs eventually get their act together, and have an election.  And every major party in that Irabi election pledges to get the Amurricun forces out of the country, for the simple reason that Irab has become a shambles since they came.  Plus no one likes to have his country occupied by a foreign army, comprising soldiers of foreign races and faiths, who doesn’t speak his language (the language of Irabic).  Just suppose.

OK, so the Irabs negotiate an agreement with the Amurricuns, in which the Amurricuns insist on staying for three more years.  The Irabs say, “whatever,” but at least they know the Amurricuns are going to leave.

Now let’s suppose that during this three-year waiting period, 100,000 Amurricun soldiers are target practice for IEDs.  More deaths, and lots and lots of head injuries.

Meanwhile, the leader of a hypothetical country called “France” decides to remove the leader of another hypothetical country called “Libya.”  He accomplishes this without landing a single “French” soldier in “Libya.”  The total cost of this operation for “France” is 413 million frogskins, WHICH IS LESS THAN THE COST OF THE WAR IN IRAB EVERY SINGLE DAY.  (Please excuse the capitalization.  I just find hypotheticals incredibly exciting.)

So the Amurricun troops leave, almost nine years after the occupation began.  Hypothetically, there is a governor of a rather large Southern state who wants to be President of the Confederacy, but finds out that it is 150 years too late for that.  His name is Governor Cretin.  (That’s pronounced “Creh-Teen,” with a Southern drawl.  And it’s really wrong of you to make fun of his good family name.)  Governor Cretin says that God has told him to run for President of Amurricah, but he never says which aspect of God – the Father, the Son, or . . . what’s that third one?  Oops.

Now let’s suppose that Governor Cretin is in a Presidential debate, and he says that Amurricuh must re-invade Irab.  Governor Cretin ignores all lies about how Irab helped the terrorists attack Amurricuh; the dirigibles that weren’t there; the Irabs who died, were injured, or lost their homes; the enormous expense of the occupation; the terrible effect it had on Amurricuh’s reputation in the world; and the rather unflattering comparison to what “France” was able to accomplish for microscopically less in money and blood.  Forgetting all of that, he says that we must throw good lives after bad, because if not, then all of those earlier deaths “will have been for nothing.”

And that is the sad, sad conclusion of this thought experiment.  Maybe they were lost for nothing.  Maybe they were. 

Courage,

Alan Grayson

I have to agree with Mr. Grayson – current dandidates like Rick Perry are of appallingly poor quality.  Can’t the Republican Party come up with a candidate that is educated and neither corrupt nor a crackpot?  Who in their right mind could vote for such a person?

Is it too late to restore the standing of the individual?  Are we in a runaway condition in which corporate power has already passed the point where it can be curbed?  Will regulation of business be gradually eliminated until corporations are the dominant force in politics and the economy at every level and around the world?  Are we beyond the point where practical regulation of business at a national or global level is possible?  Will the ability of people to understand, let alone influence, the world around them be reduced to that of most people in the dark ages?  In 1990 my corporate strategy professor at The University of Michigan Ross School of Business said that there were then 100 corporations with more resources than all but the 7 largest countries in the world.  How much more lopsided has this ratio become since then?

Corporations can’t be viewed as people for many reasons.  The most fundamental is rarely cited, however: corporations have only one goal, profit, and there is no natural conscience to keep the corporation from creating a war that kills millions, for example, if that might have a positive return on investment.  Humans, except for sociopaths and similar sick people, have scruples, a conscience, a sense of ethics and morality, a sense of responsibility to friends and family, and a general understanding that there is more to life than money.  Corporations have none of this except in the rare instance where a founder or top executive puts their own principles into the running of the company.  Sadly, shareholders will see only that the company could have made more money for them if it had been more single-mindedly profit-focused, and a CEO with a conscience will be replaced for lackluster performance due solely to socially responsible behavior.  In cases where either the shareholder base share similar goals or the company is closely or privately held, the leadership will still eventually retire or move on, after which it is likely the profit motive will take over as the single prime motivator for the firm. 

The transition from socially responsible to greedy can be seen in many companies.  Look at how Disney changed after Walt passed away.  Some family remained on the board of directors, and there were years of infighting over the direction the company was taking, but eventually it became another greedy major conglomerate, albeit with a glowing history.  It is natural that a founder would want to sell his company eventually or otherwise move on (with huge financial reward in some cases), and that turns the firm over to “the sharks”.  These sharks are people with generally good intentions, but whose jobs are essentially to increase profits for their employer, a direction which almost always supersedes all others.

Executives don’t mean corporations to be “sharks”, but they can’t help it.  When you are running a publicly held company you are responsible for shareholder profits, and shareholders have the power to fire you if they don’t think you are doing enough for them.  Neither customers nor employees have such power, so they naturally get only secondary consideration, and can rarely be allowed to get in the way of profits. 

Corporate management teams naturally demonstrate “groupthink“.  It is instructive to realize that members of corporate management teams identify form small, relatively-closed groups.  They work with each other a great deal, a lot of their time spent in meetings with their peers, so they share ideas and world views on a constant basis and build a micro-culture that is only somewhat related to the culture of the organization as a whole or the countries in which they are operate.  This insulates them from consideration of their effects on outside groups including customers or society.  As a result they often feel little or no sense of responsibility to individuals or groups affected by the way they do business, and make decisions based almost solely on the profit involved.

Corporate leadership culture can excuse actions that seem “evil” to outsiders.  Executives give each other ideas and direction in a way that excuses antisocial or ecologically irresponsible behavior.  In many companies executives are relatively isolated and deal mostly with each other, besides a few direct reports.  As a result they have trouble getting information from outside at the same time that they build a body of knowledge, cultural and otherwise, that can cause them to create policies poorly suited for the business or its relationship with society.   In essence, there are so many authority figures involved that they can subconsciously regard suggestions, however good or bad, as coming from authority, and that leads to a syndrome similar to that revealed in the Milgram experiments - most people are capable of doing terrible things if directed by a figure they perceive as having sufficient authority.  These combined factors result in executive groups that will approve policies and actions harmful to employees, customers, and the countries and geographic regions where they operate.

The expanding markets created by overpopulation foster corporate irresponsibility.  As the world population explodes faster than at any previous time in history, demand for products also explodes, but even faster as the poorer people work to move up the socioeconomic ladder and adopt the comforts of the developed countries.  When there are so many customers that a business begins to feel it can abuse them and still be profitable, and expect to be more profitable in the short term, corporate abuses are bound to result.  If markets were static companies would have to compete much more for repeat customers, and would have to behave in much more responsible ways.  As it is, however, corporations can chase short-term profits with relative impunity, and do business where they can most cost effectively operate, even it if means feeding corruption and breaking laws, local and international, to do so.

Globalization fosters corporate irresponsibility.  Social, political, and economic differences between countries, along with different resource bases, populations, infrastructure, etc., allow companies to shop around for markets with little regulation and supply situations that have the lowest cost even as they allow the highest levels of pollution and abuse of the land, people, and other resources.  Now that it has become so inexpensive to move materials and information around the globe, companies have the flexibility to move their assets and focus their markets where the highest profits will result, even though that may mean the country (and global ecology) suffers severe and sometimes irreversible damage.  As corporations “go multinational” they owe less and less to their countries of origin, and see opportunities for increased profit such as those that come from operating in countries with few regulations, few taxes, and an appetite for bribery.

A prime example is Nigeria, where Shell and other major energy corporations have done heavy damage to the rain forest and the Niger river delta, destroying the livelihood and lives of millions.  The government of Nigeria has deployed troops many times over the past fifty years or more, even going so far as to use Shell-provided helicopters for military missions to shoot residents from the air with machine guns.    (It is perplexing that there is a great outcry over Syria’s government using violence against peaceful protesters when a much worse situation in Nigeria has gotten no such attention.)  To this day, ecological and human destruction on an almost apocalyptic scale continues in the Niger river delta, all to support the profits of Shell, Chevron, and a list of other multinational energy corporations as well as corrupt government officials.  Your retirement funds may be helping support such atrocities.

Corporate power continues to grow, with predictably bad results.  Given the strong predilection to profit over social and ecological responsibility, and the growing power of corporations to move quickly and cheaply across borders and buy off individuals and governments, I can’t help but be pessimistic.  I see no sign that the situation is going to get any better any time soon.  We can expect corporate power to increasingly eclipse that of national governments, let alone individuals, resulting in increased abuses such as the limiting and reduction of wages to unreasonably low levels, the elimination of unions and any other form of recourse available to individuals, increasingly widespread ecological destruction, and corporate domination of national political systems. 

It is highly probable that corporate feudalism, still around, will expand greatly.  As we see the rise of company-owned housing in China we can’t help but think of the conditions that spawned the American labor movement – the company towns and stores, and the millions whose lives were made miserable or ended as a result of corporate corruption and profit-over-people policies.  Corporate feudalism has many similarities with the feudalism of the middle ages in Europe, where most people were regarded as property of the local lord or king, whose power over them was almost infinite.  There is every reason to think that, without strong and coördinated regulation by national governments, corporate feudalism is going to expand through a lot more of the developing countries and increasingly become a divisive influence on the developed countries as well.

Corporate feudalism has proven worse than the feudalism of the middle ages.  While historical feudalism represented a great potential for abuse of individuals, it was still run by people with complex motivations and (most) with a sense of social responsibility.  The lord of the fief could not expect to get what he needed from his property and people unless he acted from the standpoint of having responsibility for them.  That factor does not exist in corporate feudalism, as our exploding population has created markets where making sales is relatively easy and impersonal, and corporations don’t have to be particularly responsible to their customers, the environment, or the countries in which they do business.  Brownfield pollution, for example, remains for decades after the company responsible has been bought and sold many times, or gone out of existence, leaving the public to suffer from it and pay for cleanup, usually through their taxes.  While history records the existence of company towns intended to improve the lives of employees, most of them were created by companies still run by their founder or the family of the founder – people with guiding principles other than the pure profit motive that drives almost all publicly held corporations. 

Important questions abound.  Is there any way that the expansion of corporate power can be limited?  Regulation by a single government will just drive a corporation to relocate, and their economy will be harmed.  Is there any sort of regulation that will make corporations act in responsible ways when they can just as easily move their headquarters across borders, set up new facilities, and carry on just as before?  Like the population explosion, this is a huge problem nobody will talk about, though it is keeping attention away from the population explosion and related concerns, essentially helping humanity destroy itself and possibly a lot of the planet with it.  Certainly you’ll never see it in the media (they’re almost all owned by corporations, or at least are beholden to corporations for their existence).  What can we do?  It seems like the less we do or attempt, the more we and our descendants will suffer.

As always, I welcome your comments.  — Tim

The truth is out there, somewhere, hopefully, maybe …

Corruption dominates the international trade in honey.  The Chinese in particular, largest packers of honey in the world, have gone to great lengths to “launder” their honey, which is often processed to remove pollen that would identify its origin, through processing plants in other countries.  After that it is sold through nearly untraceable import channels into North American markets for both retail and processed food use. 

Honey presents more problems than just knowing its source.  Unfortunately there are many ways to adulterate honey with other sweeteners, food colorings, etc. so that it is no longer pure honey, even though it is then sold as such.  Chinese honey has also been found contaminated by heavy metals and industrial chemicals. 

There is evidence the FDA has not been doing its job.  While the FDA has defined anything other than pure honey with natural pollen content as NOT honey, its record of testing and following up on cases of adulteration is horrible.  This is evidenced by independent tests establishing that over 70% of honey on supermarket shelves and in the processed food industry is not technically “honey”.What concerns me now isn’t just the honey, however. 

What does this say about our food supply and the FDA?  The story of adulterated and illegal honey sales is especially frightening because of what it says about the performance of the FDA and the quality of the rest of the U.S. food supply.  If the supply of a simple product like honey has been so corrupted and manipulated, what risks do we face in the rest of the food items we buy? 

Overpopulation-driven profit drives corporate malfeasance.  Here in the middle of the population explosion, the world is so heavily populated that any product, even as simple, low cost, and widely produced as honey, generates huge profits .  When you are selling ten million of pounds of a product a decrease in cost of a penny per pound equals more money than most workers make in a year, making the change quite worthwhile from a profit perspective.  When that change means mixing in high fructose corn syrup, water, or other adulterants to cut costs we are no longer getting what we’re paying for, and may actually be unknowingly putting our health at risk. 

The consumer is again put in opposition to industry.  We all want to see more jobs created in our struggling economy, but we don’t want to give up the vision of safe food on our tables to do so.  This is a case where industry will fight to keep the FDA weak, by lobbying against regulations as well as against funding that would enable the FDA to do its job properly.  Industry supports candidates who listen to it, and candidates it sees as being easier to manipulate and keep on its side.  Corporations will do anything they can get away with to increase profits, clearly to the point of endangering customers’ health and lives, when we are so numerous they no longer worry about customer loyalty and can be profitable with one-time sales.  That leaves us, the consumers, little option except to vote and speak out to protest not only the abuses of the food industry, but the underfunding of the FDA and the constant efforts to repeal, undermine, and prevent regulation that is the only safeguard we have as consumers against being given food that can harm us.

As a voter you have power, however small, and you need to use it.  Please consider this information when you choose candidates, and please let your elected representatives know how you feel about this issue.  I am sure that you, like me, want safe food to eat and consider safety more important than cost. 

Cheap food that makes me ill is not worth what I spent on it, let alone the savings I might have realized.  Keep these things in mind both when you shop and when you think about politics and government.  I am headed for the local farmer’s market where I can buy honey grown locally from a farmer I can trust.

Labels can work for or against us.  We have a long history of hurting ourselves unnecessarily with labels, and “fat” is too vacuous a term for anyone to be accepting, so let’s all please stop using this term and any others that hurt us or are not helpful.  Instead let’s use labels that are positive and allow for the possibility that we can be lots of things we are not yet, if we only decide to be.  This sense of empowerment can be a big help in controlling our lives and our weight.

Self-dislike is a loser in more ways than one.  Hurting ourselves with negativity and “working around” what we see as our faults will not help us.  We know we can do things to better manage our weight, but worry and self-dislike aren’t among them.  We continue to learn about ourselves and this particular challenge, and recognize it is an emotional challenge as much (or more) than a physical one.  We worry about how we are perceived and we really should stop that – it’s a waste of time.  From long experience we know that if we look good for ourselves, we will look good for the rest of the world, too.  (And if they don’t like it, screw ‘em – it’s none of their business anyway.) 

Positive attitudes about ourselves and our environment help.  The challenge is to learn to regard ourselves as fine, healthy people with a lot going for us regardless of how we look.  Once we accept ourselves as we are we have a far better chance of managing our weight or anything else about ourselves that we might want to change.

Those of us with self doubt are the worst at accepting compliments.  We can learn to accept compliments better, and be happier for it.  When people express happiness with some thing we’ve done or some positive way they perceive us we inwardly pooh-pooh or disregard the positives, yet we actively look for negatives and even create our own when the world fails to supply them.  These are habits we can consciously change.  One way I try to do that is to stop myself from discounting the compliments of others and actually _accept_ what they say as true, at least a bit.  I know I have the  habit of being down on myself, so I don’t have to worry too much that I’ll get a swelled head.  It feels good to say to yourself “Yes – I do look good” or “Yes – I did do well”, and simply thank people for their compliments.  The decrease in self-doubt and self-deprecation feels good every time, and making this acceptance of compliments a habit leads to greater overall happiness and less self-hounding and self-hating.

Let’s keep talking and writing about these things, and I know we can be happier with ourselves and our lives.  Bottom line: we are not fat, so let’s leave that terminology behind and spend that energy on living and loving, and  work to make better lives for ourselves and those around us.

As always, I welcome  your comments — Tim

Federal forces under your control continue to waste taxpayer money raiding legal dispensaries in California and carrying on similar actions elsewhere.  You know the statistics so I won’t go into that – it is clear that the American people want you to stop prosecuting marijuana users.

There IS a drug problem, though – crystal methedrine.  That is a drug that needs serious attention, as it destroys lives addicted after a single use, and kills people in just months.

A news item today said a retired sheriff in Colorado who had been national sheriff of the year a about decade ago was busted for selling methedrine (news).  If this drug can corrupt a man like that it is a very real danger, and THAT is what  you and the DEA should be trying to stop.

Marijuana has NO such track record, and has long been known to be more benign than beer (and is responsible for no deaths I know of, compared with alcohol’s millions). 

Please do the right and sensible thing and focus on drugs that are harming, not helping people.

- Tim Prosser

As always, your comments are welcomed.  – Tim

So what was it like before No Fault was put in place?  In the days before No Fault all motor vehicle accidents had to be litigated in court, and a judge had to decide which party was at fault, after which damages for the not-at-fault party would be assessed and the at-fault party would have to pay them.  Not only did this system seriously clog the judicial system and delay the hearing of many more important cases, but it often led to civil lawsuits that tied up the courts even more and cost both parties huge sums in legal fees and court costs.  No Fault unclogged the courts, greatly simplified the legal processes around auto accidents, and did away with most of the civil suits, all of which produced huge savings for the state and its citizens.  Insurance companies, however, objected to the situation and have since sought every means possible to cap their cost of providing medical benefits to the injured.  Certainly they have passed those costs on to the individuals long since, but that’s not good enough for them as health care costs and the number of accidents rise.  While the severity of accident-related injuries has been reduced through better safety standards and improved automotive design, insurance companies are all about profit (not the good of citizens) so they will forever keep pushing to improve their profits with no consideration for cost to the individual or the state.  Corporations are not people, no matter what the supreme court says, and have no interest in the common good.  My immediate reaction to news of this attempt to impose benefit caps is to not believe them when they say my insurance costs will go way up – they always want to do that to us anyway and have many times proven they will say anything to get more of our money.  That leaves me feeling that this change to the No Fault law is not good for me or the state, and I oppose it on those grounds.

Now it remains to be seen whether the law will be changed, and whether, if it is not, the insurance companies will arbitrarily jack our premiums up just so they can say “I told  you so.”

Snapshot communicates details to Progressive Insurance about how you drive.   In case you missed it, this is a key function of Snapshot.  In the right margin of the Common Questions page is a very small and unobtrusive link to “read the privacy statement“, where they actually give more information on Snapshot – sort of like they were trying to hide what they didn’t want to talk about.  In this second page, under “How We Use the Data”, they say Snapshot data is “transactional”.  In the computer industry a transaction can mean the simple changing of data in a database, and it suggests that Snapshot reports every touch of the brake or accelerator as well as every tenth of a mile (or less) that your car travels and enters the change into their database – that’s a lot of detail.  They do say that the data is encrypted during its transmission to Progressive’s servers (nice of them to consider security – some hacker might find great value in intercepting your driving data).  While they don’t say how Snapshot actually transmits the data, it is possible that it has a tiny cellphone device in it that can call in and upload your data.  How often that happens is anybody’s guess, but isn’t important because the data it will send them will cover every second when someone is operating the controls of your car.  They’d probably catch it if you sat at a standstill with the emergency brake on and applied the brake.  In fact, if you stomped the brake hard a bunch of times they might mistakenly think you were making panic stops and raise  your rates.  If they looked at the data it would show you were stopped at the time, but try getting them to go back and look if they think they already have you over a barrel (I admit to being a bit cynical).

Another misleading statement, which they make at least twice, is that they are only interested in how often you make a sudden stop.  Certainly frequent panic stops may be a good indicator of driver risk, but I think Progressive is much more interested in your speed, which they don’t mention.

There are good reasons Progressive and Geico are typically the most expensive.  Add all this to the fact that Progressive is a company that advertises almost more than any other in the industry and has to pass the cost to you.  Progressive has been rated by Consumer’s Union as (along with Geico) one of the most consistently expensive auto insurance companies.

I’m not putting any spy device in my car (or anywhere) that so greatly compromises my privacy, and I am not going to buy expensive insurance that comes with a tricky gimmick designed to essentially defraud customers into paying higher rates.  People who don’t know any better will be scammed with this, unfortunately, but that’s not something I know how to help with.

Once we would never have done business with a company trying to trick us.  Why our laws and culture have forgotten about false advertising, fraud, and scams over the last few decades is beyond me.  A lie is a lie, and the teller of a deliberately misleading lie should be liable for it, whether they’re an individual or an enormous insurance company.  Although it is harder and harder to avoid doing business with predatory corporations, I think I can avoid Progressive and Geico, and find a less expensive insurance company that isn’t so obviously trying to scam me.

Why are businesses not job creators?  They hire people, don’t they?  Yes, they do.  Businesses hire people, but they don’t do it to provide jobs to anyone.  In fact, since labor cost is the biggest identifiable cost in most industries, hiring another person represents a significant reduction in company profits.  So do you really think companies are going to just “create jobs” to help the economy, the nation, or anyone else?  Of course, not.  Businesses will AVOID hiring people as much as possible.  Businesses often make their employees work overtime and make it difficult to put on their time sheets* because business is about making money, which means limiting cost.  Some businesses systematically keep employees working a few hours short of full time so they won’t have to give them expensive benefits like health insurance, and profits can be higher.  Never mind their higher turnover rates or the demotivating influence that has on their struggling employees, who rightfully feel at risk.  Thought it is short-sighted and creates higher hidden costs to do these things, it seems a common belief that no successful business can do otherwise.  That doesn’t justify this short-sighted stupidity, though.  I can’t call any company that manages its human resources this way a “Job creator” (and I wouldn’t invest in them as it is clear their profitability will be hindered by their cluelessness).

There may be radical companies that can “create jobs and the profits will follow”, hiring outstanding people and then enabling them to do their best work with the expectation that they will generate value for the enterprise.  With good, savvy leadership it is possible to pull that off, but traditional investors, banks, and other businesses on which the company depends to some extent will be skeptical, and that could hinder the business.  Where it does exist, this approach is used in businesses that need high levels of creativity, and where employees themselves have high levels of name recognition, like software startups, movie studios, and ad agencies, but they also tend to hire recognized talent and not average people.  The point is, while there may be companies one could call “Job Creators”, they are extremely few and far between.  

The other 99.9999% of companies can not be said to be “Job Creators”, and actually function as Job Creation Avoiders, proving that the words being repeated over, and over, and over in the media are simple propaganda, and while our country is suffering, those who keep saying “Job Creators” are working hard to make us all worse off so they can make more money and attain positions of power.  The evidence suggests nothing else.