Meaningless Senate Vote Offers A Cheap, Bitter Sort Of Hope For The Unemployed

CNN recently reported that members of our broke-ass Senate managed to put down their health insurance lobbyist-provided crack pipes just long enough to succeed in a bi-partisan vote in favor of pushing forward a bill designed to create jobs for people who actually need a bailout: Us.

But, before you pay up on that bet you made that the government doesn't care about us, I've got some good news (or bad news, depending on how you look at it): You haven't lost that bet after all.

See, the $15B bill is a sickly, pathetic shadow of the original $85B draft, and, moreover, the vote was only  "bi-partisan" in that a handful of Republicans (five, to be exact) went the way of the Democrat majority only in a procedural sense: The vote simply moves the bill forward, toward actually being voted on.

Now I'm not going to push stimulus/redistribution of wealth as the end-all to economic troubles, but as a general rule, a true free market only works if you're willing to accept potential total collapse as part of your commitment to being as far from communism as possible. I don't know about you, but I think money shuffling is far preferable to a financial apocalypse. I also think the government and corporate America agree with me. (As we learned during the corporate bailout frenzy — and as I discussed previously — America is capitalist, not pure free market.)

So, if we acknowledge the redistribution of hundreds of billions of dollars as acceptable when it saves businesses that we deem "too big to fail," why are we suddenly such penny pinchers when it comes to saving individuals by unfreezing the job market?

The Senate should give this a lot of thought, especially considering that most economists agree that personal consumption is a major contributor to the GDP, accounting for upwards of 70% of it. And with so many economists and officials whining that the economy can't recover until 'we the people' start spending our money (what money?), is there any question that serious help is needed at the bottom of the economic food chain?

Uh, no. But apparently the Senate has some questions when it comes to providing real help to people who can't afford to hire lobbyists.

What they've applauded as a promising bi-partisan effort to help us out smells like something altogether different to me. Even if what remains of the bill's funding survives the political meat-grinder, it'll be months before the bureaucrats decide which campaign contributors get the biggest pieces of this relatively tiny pie.

Sometimes democracy feels a lot like sodomy — the non-consensual kind.