Ira Stoll on the Curse of Obama's Jobs Council

Employees who hope to keep their jobs and investors who hope their shares will rise may want to hope their executives avoid President Obama's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. When the council's members were announced February 23, among the concerns raised was that the members would use their status to the advantage of their companies, writes Ira Stoll. In fact, what's happened since then is that the 13 publicly traded companies whose executives were appointed to the council, taken together, have declined in value by about 7% through year-end, worse than the decline of about 4% in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index over the same period.