Today, President Obama meets with 20 of the nation’s top CEOs to discuss ways to revive the economy. He will also try to improve his relationship with the nation’s captains of industry after months of acrimony between the White House and business.

According to the president, the meeting is to “find new ways to spur hiring, put Americans back to work and move our economy forward.”

Judging by the guest list, however, most of the CEOs involved are probably interested in spurring hiring, putting people back to work and moving the economy forward. However, the economy they will be moving forward is China’s, India’s and Mexico’s. The workers that are being hired are making pennies on the hour and do not contribute to the economy.

The guest list is like a who’s who of outsourcing American jobs. Represented at the meeting will be CEOs from Boeing, Intel, Motorola, General Electric, Eli Lilly, Dow Chemicals and Pepsi. Each of those companies has been known to outsource production and American jobs, weakening the economy.

In exchange for their “patriotism” and loyalty, those business leaders are likely to ask the president for less regulation, lower taxes and more trade agreements like the one recently signed with South Korea. And the cycle will continue.

If pressed, those CEOs would likely claim that, in order to be globally competitive, they must take advantage of the cheap labor available in the developing world. That, however, is simply not true.

In Germany hourly manufacturing compensation was at roughly $48 per hour. In the U.S., it was just $32 per hour. Despite the higher wages, Germany is still one of the world’s leaders in exports, does not suffer from as high of an unemployment rate as the U.S. and it still holds some of the world’s most recognizable companies.

“Here, our chief export has been the jobs and factories that once turned out products for export,” Washington Post columnist Harold Myerson writes. “Defenders of corporate offshoring assert that we can’t compete with low-cost labor in China and other developing countries. Clearly, though, Germany has shown that you can retain a manufacturing sector by producing products of high added value even when labor costs are correspondingly high.”

To create good American jobs and improve the economy, the president could simply ask the CEOs to be more like German companies, which have an actual sense of patriotism. But asking them to stop outsourcing American jobs is probably a bridge too far.

“Asking American corporations to invest in America may be asking the leopard to change his spots,” Myerson writes.

“Americans are fearful, rightly, about the decline of their country’s economic leadership, and they see the offshoring of manufacturing as a primary cause of that decline. Obama needs to do more than just ask our CEOs to invest here.”

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