This week in the War on Workers: Read carefully when business owners are quoted on their hard lives

Beware the trend story in which business owners bemoan the lazy and/or unqualified pool of applicants for the jobs they're supposedly going to great lengths to fill, or talk about how an Obama policy will stifle their ability to grow their businesses.

Amanda Marcotte takes on the former in a look at a New York Times article:

The complaints of the executives, as far as I can tell:

1) They can't find people who have the training to do the jobs they're hiring for. If these were white collar professions, of course, the solution would be to offer the training themselves, but since this is a blatant war on the working class, they're convinced that people who already don't have a lot of money should take out massive loans to get the training elsewhere in order to secure one of these blue collar jobs that don't pay enough to cover life expenses plus the massive debt they just entailed. Whose fault? Business owners, for being too cheap to offer the training themselves.

In the policy category, SteveM at Balloon Juice has a great find: You hear a lot about how small business owners are afraid of hiring more people if it would subject them to stronger health care requirements under the Affordable Care Act or more regulation or whatever else. But how many such small business owners are you hearing from? Because a lot of the time, it's the same one guy:

Joe Olivo of Perfect Printing turns up quite a bit in public discussions of this and other issues. Here he is testifying against the health care law before House and Senate committees in January 2011.  Here he is on the Fox Business Network around the same time, discussing the same subject. Here he is a few days ago, also on Fox Business, talking to John Stossel about the law. Here he is discussing the same subject on a New Jersey Fox affiliate.

That's because Olivo is a member of the National Federation of Independent Business, a conservative business lobby, and they push him to the media and Congress a lot. He's not alone in that'but if you don't pay attention to the names, you might not realize you're hearing about the same few business owners again and again, and that the reason you're hearing so much from them is there's a powerful group getting them in front of the media.