'Job creation' can mean all sorts of things, as Paul Muni demonstrates.

How comforting that Barack Obama was scheduled to have another closed-door meeting last night with CEOs from America’s largest companies. Did he talk to them about job creation? Did he go so far as to urge them to “start hiring,” as he allegedly did at previous meetings?

I guess we’re supposed to feel good about these meetings, even though they’re always held in private, and with no representatives of working people present. What sorts of jobs were discussed, and what pay rates? Was there talk about narrowing the wide gap between rich and poor?

As John Wayne and Buddy Holly would say, “That’ll be the day.”

For decades the one percent has complained that speaking out against income inequality is tantamount to engaging in class warfare. They’re right — we are in a class war, and the one percent is winning, arguably because both major political parties are on their side.

The significance of this war is all but ignored by the corporate media and, of course, by most politicians. Not only by the Republican establishment, which unequivocally believes in government by big business, but also by Democrats such as Obama, who aren’t even talking about saving or replacing the decent jobs that middle- and lower middle-class Americans once took for granted.

Ned Resnikoff on this sorry situation:

… When neoliberal pundits and policymakers talk about “job creation,” they’re rarely talking about a specific sort of job. Instead, they’re using the word job as a generic indicator to mean “a state of affairs in which some individual is somehow compensated to do something for whatever length of time under whatever conditions…” This is the danger of talking about “jobs” in the abstract: It can mean forcing people into precarious, temporary, low-wage, nonexistent-benefit work that will most likely land them back on the welfare rolls in a couple of months. Emphasis here belongs on the word forcing, because employers — faced with an oversupply of labor in the broader job market — have the upper hand in negotiations. These same employers can feel free to deprive their employees of the basic security needed to stay off welfare for good…