Barrett Rainey's Second Thoughts

Few things are harder on my aged mind – and temperament – than having to deal with 800 phone calls. Too often people on the other end of the line speak English as a second – or third – language and have a script for “every” occasion that they cannot deviate from without getting lost.

Knowing that you likely have had these same kinds of encounters, I submit these rants in your name – as well as mine – as a sort of consumer bonding.

My latest attempt at anger management started with a call to a national communications company. The first hurdle was “speaking” to a computer for several minutes before getting a live person.

After an inordinately long wait, the person – to whom one of the Asian languages was her mother tongue – began to call me “Riney Rarrit.” Several corrections later I gave up and accepted my new moniker.

The call lasted about 15 minutes during which I repeatedly tried to state the reason for my call – a dysfunctional piece of that company’s equipment. Each time, the voice talked over me and continued with her script. Eventually, somehow, I managed to convince her it was the equipment and not some figment of an old man’s making.

When her script was near its end, she said she would connect me with the business office but assured me she would not hang up. Before I could stop her, she rerouted my call to a mindless, scripted, mechanical voice. And she was gone. Not knowing, apparently, that the business office would not open in our time zone for another half hour. A dead end. I hung up.

I waited until the appropriate time before calling back and going through the long routine “talking” to the computer. After a wait of some 10 minutes, a voice from Utah said he could help. Since it was Utah, I knew immediately there would be another language barrier.

He, too, had his script. He, too, talked over my voice, insisting I listen to all the virtues of this “communications” company and how deeply concerned with my happiness all the folks there were.

I’d been on the phone more than half an hour with two “service” locations, much of that time placed on “hold” listening to interminable recorded messages of how sorry the computer was that I had to wait so long and how important my call was. I also had been contending with a language barrier. At that moment, the Utah guy still had not let me tell him why I was calling or what my problem was.

And here – right at this moment – he made his fatal mistake.

His next words were “Overall, how satisfied are you with our service?” I swear! That’s an exact quote! With all the cards stacked against a temperate, rational evaluation of service provided by this national company, this was the moment the marketing department had chosen to have me rate my experience! He gave me no scale – 1 to 10. No parameters – good, bad or terrible. Just tell him how I felt.

I did. I doubt he wrote it all down. And I further doubt my appraisal will move the marketing department to send along a “thank you” note if they listen to my recorded call.

Though I could tell the Utah voice was sensing my anger and wanting to tell me what I could do with it, “we” arrived at a time for one of the technicians to come to the house several days hence. Of course, the timing for the service call was what HE said it would be.

I’m sure your experiences in this 800 business have been about the same as mine. Maybe after one of these “service” sessions you, too, have wondered if there couldn’t be a better way.

It seems terribly wrong this national company – and many others – would spend millions and millions of dollars advertising their marvelous services and voice their corporate concern for the customer’s welfare, then follow it up with such universally bad personal contact. No matter how many dollars are spent by the marketing department, it is the “service” call – the only point of one-on-one “live” contact between the company and the customer – where the consumer gets the accurate personal data on which to form an opinion. A lasting opinion.

What that tells me is there is either a chimp-level intelligence in corporate marketing or our opinions don’t mean a damned thing. You choose.

Well, that’s my rant. I hope it was good for you, too. If I’m going to drown in a sea of technological indifference, I’m going down shouting a protest to the corporate hierarchy.

You might say “that’s my Qwest.” Or rather, my “Link to the Century.”

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One of the great benefits of an opinion blog is that the blogger – in this case me – can state a pure opinion even if there are no ready facts to back it up. Oh, it helps to have an occasional fact or two just to add legitimacy. And I’ve got a few for this one. But the next statement is pure opinion. Conjecture, if you will. Mine.

This nation is going to one day have a single payer health program. It will likely be government-operated from a special pool. It may involve dozens of private insurance companies in some role. It may be a combination of several sources, maybe some I haven’t thought of. But it’s going to happen. Take that to the bank.

When it does, there will be one big reason – just one – for its creation. Spineless, cowardly, job-protecting politicians of both parties. They will have failed to develop satisfactory alternatives, even as their constituents get older and sicker. A lack of political will – guts – will make it so

Some oppose single payer; some support it. I’m one of the latter. I support it for a couple of reasons. The first is the paragraph above. Costs of health care will keep rising dramatically with no effective action by this nation’s gridlocked political system. Americans by the tens of millions will be priced out of medical coverage while politicians cover their butts. This will create more costs and our present “system” will crash and burn under the weight of political failure.

If you believe as I do, that basic health care is a right of citizenship in this country and not a privilege, single payer is the only way to fulfill that promise at a cost that can be sustained. If care for everyone – and I mean everyone – is paid from a single pool of funding from individuals, states, private insurers, employees-employers and all other sources – then the playing field will be leveled economically. Care for you and care for me – and costs – will be the same. There will be no “wallet biopsies” performed on prospective patients to see if we can pay for care.

Most people who oppose the single payer concept point to Canada as having so many problems because of it. Yes, Canada has some problems. So what? An American system need not be a carbon copy of what the neighbors have. Canada contracts with private companies for health care; England employs all the providers and insurers. Again, so what? We needn’t blindly copy either. Or both.

Single payer simply defines who pays. Not how the system operates. And it can be successful. Medicare is an example. Seniors get basic coverage and, if they want more coverage for more things, they can buy it. The concept works. VA care is another case-in-point. It works, too. Single payer.

Under single payer, doctors, hospitals and all other providers would bill a single entity. Currently, there are 1,500 private insurers. Consider only this one step if you want to reduce paperwork, time and cost of doing business in just this one area.

Doctors could do fee-for-service, join an HMO or be salaried with a hospital or clinic. That’s how most operate currently. They could negotiate fees with a single payer. If government were involved, it’s role would be administrative and not as an employer. And not as a decision-maker for care despite right wing ravings to the contrary.

Over the last five years, health insurance premiums have gone up 5.5 times faster than inflation, 2.3 times faster than business income and four times faster than worker earnings. Medicare has done a better job than that. Between 1996 and 2006, health care costs per person rose 4.6% annually for Medicare compared to 7.3% under private insurance.

My experience is when folks find out what a single payer system is – and more importantly what it is not – resistance to the concept sort of fades away. But the idea has been demagoged so much by politicians, fear mongering talk show goofballs and private insurance companies that most of us don’t know what to believe.

And therein lies the problem of why we will continue to cling to today’s system until it nearly breaks us as a nation. Gutless politicians and the hundreds of millions of dollars fed to them by insurance companies. It’s the insurers who are fighting hardest. They make billions in profits as things stand. Under single payer, if rates were set under the pool concept, those billions would be greatly diminished. They’d have to be happy with lots of millions.

Finally, here’s the cherry on top. In the U.S. House, H.R. 1200 has been introduced. “What would it do,” you ask? “Just one thing,” sez I. It would syphon off one percent of what we spend on health care annually to retrain displaced insurance company workers!

That tells you two things. First, single payer is coming sure as you’re born. Don’t know when. But it’s coming. And, second, the insurance companies will have their hand in our federal cookie jar to the last crumb. The very last crumb.

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Well, here we are. A group of guys in New York has told us, as a nation, we’ve overdrawn our credit card and we’re not as good a risk to pay back what we owe as we were a year or two ago. So, all Hell has broken loose and there are institutional and political fingers pointing everywhere.

If you believe all the charges flying through the air, it would seem nobody’s to blame for the continuing hemorrhaging of retirement savings, the loss of about a third of our home’s value, the 20-30% local real unemployment statistic and the doubling of families needing food assistance and sleeping in tents or cars.

Here, in our little wooded corner of the Northwest, I chose not to believe all the accusations being relayed by an impotent media looking for the easy way of reporting a full and difficult story. I chose to believe nearly all of the charges and countercharges are both real – and pure B.S. – for my own reasons.

Some of the talking heads are blaming the Tea Party. Whatever and whoever that is. No. The ideologues recently added to Congress with their lack of knowledge about governance didn’t do it. They just held the match to the already gasoline-soaked fuse. The makings of this mess were piling up long before those folks got to Washington.

Standard and Poors did it? Not really. One of the best quotes I’ve seen in the last few days came from columnist Bill Saporito writing in Time magazine. “Having Standard and Poors downgrade the creditworthiness of the U.S. and warn about further downgrades, is a little like having the Catholic Church lecture scout leaders on proper behavior toward boys.”

His point, of course, is that S&P has been blessing companies engaged in the criminal business of packaging and selling high-risk – and sometimes all risk – mortgages for years and years. Though there is ample proof S&P and other ratings agencies knew of the “houses-of-cards” scam, they continued the AAA ratings for those involved. No clean hands there.

Democrats to blame? Republicans? Sure. Repeated tax cuts with no offsetting income, new social programs without new revenue to pay the bills, creating massive tax breaks for companies and individuals already making billions of dollars, sleeping with PACs and anyone else willing to pony up large campaign money. Turning a blind eye to the financial decay all of them knew was there. Lots of blame.

Presidents willing to sign legislation knowing full-well it was adding to the red ink. Presidents willing to “negotiate” losing battles rather than kick some butt on Capital Hill to do the right thing. Presidents who engaged in piling up of hundreds of millions of dollars to keep themselves employed. Blame there? You bet.

Big corporations poisoning the electoral process with billions of dollars and, with the blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court, all without any public accountability. Former members of Congress hiring themselves out to the highest bidder to weaken regulatory and other government oversight powers with their inside knowledge and contacts. Toss some blame their way. Lobbists, right and left wing fringe groups. Yeah, them, too.

An American system of public education that has turned out millions and millions of “graduates” with insufficient knowledge – or absolutely no knowledge – of how their nation’s governmental and political machinery works, how they’re structured, what they’re supposed to do – and not do. It’s been going on for years. Lots of blame.

But in the end, it’s you and me. While we’ve demanded smaller and less government, we’ve clamored for more services and benefits from it which, of course, means more costs and more involvement from a larger government. We’ve condemned Congress for inaction and arrogance while re-electing members over and over. We’ve stood by while individuals – not governments – individuals got us into two unwinnable wars, squandering not only billions in wealth but the lives and futures of thousands of our young people. We’ve kept up the payments on the house and the RV while we’ve allowed our government to run up trillions of dollars in debt.

We are suffering loss and financial hardship because we, too, participated in the system. Willingly participated. Much of the real fault in this national debt disgrace starts with you and me because we’ve long elected the wrong people from both parties, told them to take care of our business, then turned our backs and tolerated them when they didn’t. Both parties. All parties.

It didn’t start with the elections of 2010 or 2006 or even 1956. This economic decay has been festering and smelling for decades.

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The Pentagon has published pictures of the 30 Navy SEALs killed in the chopper shoot-down in Afghanistan along with short bio’s of most of them. Given the classified nature of the SEALs, I had hoped the Navy wouldn’t have allowed the publicity.

Our nation went into a major tizzy when the Bush people “outed” one CIA agent. To me, being a SEAL falls into the same shadowy world. In both programs, participants want anonymity as they go about dangerous and deadly missions most of us never hear about. To throw 30 of these silent warriors into the media pool – even in death – seems a counterproductive precedent.

But now that we know a little about these 30, aside from sympathy felt for their survivors, my most overwhelming emotion is anger. Just plain anger. The more their story is told and their pictures are flashed by – especially the pictures – the angrier I become.

The root of my angst is summed up in one question – one word. A question aimed directly at the president, the congress and the military. WHY?

Why did these men have to die in Afghanistan? What have we gained by the loss of 30 superbly trained, highly conditioned young people? What improvement in the world can be traced directly to their murders?

I’ve heard all the flag-waving excuses about “democracy and freedom for the Afghan people.” Pure B.S. If, somehow, we force those folks into some form of free elections and a strong central government, it will mean nothing to them. Not a thing! For more than 2,500 years they – and the nearly impossible terrain of their country – have defeated all other nations. All. Their history – all of it – is subjugation and internal strife. Most of them can’t define “democracy” without a dictionary – if they could read it – and, even then, it’s an abstract principle.

When we leave that country – and we will leave – our huge sacrifice of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars will be no more apparent than the ripples five seconds after you’ve thrown a softball-sized rock into the Columbia River. We will leave and the normalcy of thousands of years of Afghan life will resume.

No one can make a legitimate case to me why those 30 SEALs died. No one. We have gained nothing in their sacrifice. And we are without them and their talents and whatever contributions this nation may have had from their continued living.

We should add a new duty to the job descriptions of the president and leaders of congress. Every time an American military member dies in Afghanistan – and Iraq – the president and each congressman should have to go to the front door of each mother, father or widow and answer these questions “Why?” “Why did my brother/husband/father/sister/daughter/wife have to die in that far off land?” “Why is America a better nation for the sacrifice of the one we loved?”

No grieving parent is going to be satisfied with any answer to those questions except the truth. There are no reasons, no excuses, no patriotic rhetoric, no trumped-up flag waving that will ring true. We have wasted the lives of those they love as someone expendable in the defense of nothing.

Political careers and political egos are being tended to by American families paying a terrible price.

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Poking holes in conspiracies has long been one of my more pleasant journalistic joys. From the Birch Society to the Kennedy assassination – and lots of points in between – there have been plenty to keep the more well-grounded busy. But maybe it’s time to put down the poking stick and consider what appears to be happening around us today.

While I can’t precisely define all of them, this nation is undergoing huge fundamental simultaneous changes in our society. The most in my long life. And I believe it’s no conspiracy theorist hallucination to say our status as a democracy or republic or whatever else it may be called, is being fundamentally changed into something else.

The other day, I heard a new word that might apply. “Corpocracy.” The definition I’d give to that description is a nation run for the convenience of – and under sponsorship by – corporations. The very large and the very rich. A definition underwritten, in part, by the recent tragic decision of the U.S. Supreme court to grant rights of individuals to multi-national corporations.

In just one election cycle, the results of that decision changed our system of free elections from outcomes representing the will of the electorate to those desired by corporate America. The ink of the justices signatures had hardly dried before hundreds of millions of dollars were turned loose. The voice of the electorate was drowned out by the noise of dollars hitting the collection buckets held by members of Congress and in the 50 statehouses.

While public education continues to teach the young the American virtues of “free elections,” “will of the people” and “majority rule,” none of those have the same meaning any more.

There is nothing “free” about national elections. More than 80% of incumbents are re-elected largely because their names are the most familiar ones on the ballot to too many electors often unaware of voting records or candidate philosophy. Incumbents are re-elected because corporations understand the value of congressional seniority and pour big bucks into who’s already there. It’s a lethal combination of apathy and mega-corp budgets that overwhelm by producing anonymous -and often false – ad campaigns to influence their desired outcome. “Free” they ain’t.

“Will of the people?” An informed “majority rule?” Doesn’t seem so. What we’re witnessing is “elections sponsored by…..”

Another change. Greatly increased worldwide economic interconnectedness. Some reliance on major nation’s economies has been around for many years but not to the absolute binding of each nation’s economy to all others. In the 70’s, if Greece or Ireland or Portugal had near-disastrous internal financial difficulties, would Wall Street nosedive? Might have been a ripple but no drastic reaction. Look at that same situation now – in 2011. Every bank and every investor in America is affected. Tokyo, Hong Kong, London and Paris, too.

And more. Terrorism. The world’s always had it. But now every city and town in every country in the world is vulnerable. And every citizen. From New York City to Moses Lake to Burns to Sandpoint. The most recent bloodshed was Norway. Hardly thought to be a prime target. But the terrorist came from inside the country. Like Timothy McVay and Oklahoma City. Six tons of fertilizer and any malcontent can murder and maim. In New York City, Moses Lake, Burns or Sandpoint.

How about drugs? Three or four decades ago, parents dealt with kids sneaking a beer or a cigarette. Now it’s cocaine, heroin and an international drug trade with tentacles into virtually any public school. A drug trade more well-armed than most law enforcement fighting it.

The Internet. One of mankind’s greatest inventions and one of mankind’s biggest problems. With power to educate and inform. It also has the power to mis-educate and misinform. With power to link brilliant minds to discover and build. And the power to link society’s most dangerous minds to distort and destroy. We have a technology that far exceeds our moral understanding of how to use it and the necessary safeguards.

Look at your own life 30 years ago. Think of what you have now that you didn’t have then. What worries you had then versus what concerns you today. Your own daily interconnectedness with your life in 1980 compared to today’s reduced emphasis on the individual and more on the corporate. The authority you felt then to have an affect on an election versus how you feel about that now. How you felt about the American political process – and politicians – and how you feel today.

While I still don’t subscribe to some vast international conspiracy, when answering those questions I am astounded at the change in my own life. When I see what has become of democracy as I’ve known it versus the lack of power of the electorate today, I’m afraid for the country I’ve always known. But a country I”m not comfortable in now.

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For more than a year, your old scribe, deep in the forest of Southwest Oregon, has been prophesying the former elected temp in the Alaska Governor’s office would not run for president.

Like a salmon swimming the wrong way in a political river, I watched other talking heads swear it was just a matter of time until this over-exposed caricature of a small town mayor threw herself into the swift national waters of presidential politics. It ain’t happened and ain’t gonna.

Now I’m noticing some other journalistic salmon swimming to the right and left of me in the same direction. It was bound to happen. Not because I’m so smart or prescient. But because the flame always lasts longer than any one moth. And I’ve known a lot of political moths.

Any self-respecting pheasant will tell you if you want to survive to fly again, you’ve gotta get through hunting season with a low profile. Pick your time to be airborne. While hunters are shooting at other birds.

Watching the other candidate birds fly off in another direction, Ms. Palin put herself up in the air two years ago and hasn’t come down since. Like a pheasant drunk on some wild berry, she’s flown all over the place at all altitudes, saying “Here I am. Over here. Now I’m over here. Keep watching me.” An appealing … if not too bright … target.

Aside from being the poster child for the oft-proven theory that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, from the outset of her journey, Palin has followed the public career path of Lindsay Lohan and is headed for the same end. “Too much too soon” would be a great epitaph if the Barrymore’s hadn’t already used it.

Again, I’m not taking credit for being out front on this. Not by a long shot. And, ultimately, I may be wrong. But there have been two very large clues.

First, our society’s continual clamor for celebrities. They can be empty-headed “starlets” bombed out of their gourds on the latest recreational chemistry, showing skin to the public only a dermatologist should see. They can be sports figures with squeaky clean lives or trash-talking egos fresh from their latest felony convictions. They can be humanitarians or mass murderers. But we bestow public celebrity, fast riches and our temporary attention. But always temporary. There’s a whole generation for whom the initials “O.J.” mean only orange juice.

No matter the familiar face or excuse for national prominence at any given time, as a nation, we soon tire of ‘em and they disappear from the covers of fan magazines and are no longer seen on the latest “entertainment” show. They’re consigned to the celebrity scrap heap along with all the others who were last years “must see” flotsam.

The second clear indicator of Palin’s disinterest in running for president came, at least to me, when she copyrighted her name. And her daughter’s. Copyrights are used for only one thing: name and image protection. The basic reason is to legally stop others from marketing your name or likeness if they haven’t paid a fee for the right to slap your image on some sort of product. In Palin’s case, at least at the moment, I suspect a very large fee.

Imagine you come up with a deep brown, fizzy soda-like liquid while experimenting at home. Your friends say it tastes like Coca-Cola. “Couldn’t tell ‘em apart,” they say. So, you start bottling the stuff and trying to sell it as “Coke.” Yeah. Right. For just as long as it takes for the first news to get to the Atlanta headquarters and the legal department to crank out the first “stop immediately or go directly to jail” email. Copyrighted. Just like what’s-her-name.

Serious people in politics do not – repeat DO NOT – try to keep others from using their names or likeness. They want their name everywhere and on everything. For free. Create a comic character or a line of t-shirts? Have at it! Kewpie dolls? Got for it! When you take legal steps to keep that from happening, it means one thing: it won’t happen unless you pay. That’s major self-interest, private enterprise talking, Baby. Not electoral politics.

Our political landscape and national economic conditions have changed greatly since John McCain jerked Palin from her well-deserved anonymity in Alaska three years ago. Her most recent emails, tweets and speeches show she’s still rolling in past campaign rhetoric, still has no idea how to get a handle on the problems we face today, is void of serious solutions, couldn’t provide leadership to get a thirsty horse to water and enjoys being a smartass on Fox.

There’s a big difference between quips and quotes. To everyone but her and the willfully blind who’d follow her off a cliff. And there soon won’t be enough of them to get her re-elected to the Wasilla city council. They’ll tire of her “sameness” and will be drawn to someone else. That’s the downside of celebrity.

President Palin? No, I don’t think so. Unless you’re talking about the Wasilla chapter of the NRA.

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Well, here we are. A group of guys in New York have told us, as a nation, we’ve overdrawn our credit card and we’re not as good a risk to pay back what we owe as we were a year or two ago. So, all Hell has broken loose and there are institutional and political fingers pointing everywhere.

If you believe all the charges flying through the air, it would seem nobody’s to blame for the continuing hemorrhaging of retirement savings, the loss of about a third of our home’s value, the 20-30% local real unemployment statistic and the doubling of families needing food assistance and sleeping in tents or cars.

Here, in our little wooded corner of the Northwest, I chose not to believe all the accusations being relayed by an impotent media looking for the easy way of reporting a full and difficult story. I chose to believe nearly all of the charges and countercharges are both real – and pure B.S. – for my own reasons.

Some of the talking heads are blaming the Tea Party. Whatever and whoever that is. No. The ideologues recently added to Congress with their lack of knowledge about governance didn’t do it. They just held the match to the already gasoline-soaked fuse. The makings of this mess had been piling up long before those folks got to Washington.

Standard and Poors did it? Not really. One of the best quotes I’ve seen in the last few days came from columnist Bill Saporito writing in Time Magazine. “Having Standard and Poors downgrade the creditworthiness of the U.S. and warn about further downgrades, is a little like having the Catholic Church lecture scout leaders on proper behavior toward boys.”

His point, of course, is that S&P has been blessing companies engaged in the criminal business of packaging and selling high-risk – and sometimes all risk – mortgages for years and years. Though there is ample proof S&P and other ratings agencies knew of the “houses-of-cards” scam, they continued the AAA ratings for those involved. No clean hands there.

Democrats to blame? Republicans? Sure. Repeated tax cuts with no offsetting income, new social programs without new revenue to pay the bills, creating massive tax breaks for companies and individuals already making billions of dollars, sleeping with PACs and anyone else willing to pony up large campaign money. Turning a blind eye to the financial decay all of them knew was there. Lots of blame.

Presidents willing to sign legislation knowing full-well it was adding to the red ink. Presidents willing to “negotiate” losing battles rather than kick some butt on Capital Hill to do the right thing. Presidents who engaged in piling up of hundreds of millions of dollars to keep themselves employed. Blame there? You bet.

Big corporations poisoning the electoral process with billions of dollars and, with the blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court, all without any public accountability. Former members of Congress hiring themselves out to the highest bidder to weaken regulatory and other government oversight powers with their inside knowledge and contacts. Toss some blame their way.

Lobbyists, right and left wing fringe groups. Yeah, them, too.

An American system of public education that has turned out millions and millions of “graduates” with insufficient knowledge – or absolutely no knowledge – of how their nation’s governmental and political machinery works, how they’re structured, what they’re supposed to do – and not do. It’s been going on for years. Lots of blame.

But in the end, it’s you and me. While we’ve demanded smaller and less government, we’ve clamored for more services and benefits which, of course, means more costs and more involvement from a larger government. We’ve condemned Congress for inaction and arrogance while re-electing faulty incumbents over and over. We’ve stood by while individuals – not governments – individuals got us into two unwinnable wars, squandering not only billions in wealth but the lives and futures of thousands of our young people. We’ve kept up the payments on the house and the RV while we’ve allowed our government to run up trillions of dollars in debt.

We are suffering loss and financial hardship because we, too, participated in the system. Willingly participated. Much of the real fault in this national debt disgrace starts with you and me because we’ve long elected the wrong people from both parties, told them to take care of our business, then turned our backs and tolerated them when they didn’t. Both parties. All parties.

It didn’t start with the elections of 2010 or 2006 or even 1956. This economic decay has been festering for decades.

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For an opinion writer, it’s not recommended you go to the keyboard when you’re mad about something. In your anger, you might just opine a little too far out on the limb. And today I’m mad! Damned mad!

It would be safe to say the root of my anger is mostly the current asinine state of our national politics. But to pour out more angst and/or venom on that subject would be just piling more of the same atop what’s already been said and written. Still, as I sit here, the Dow Industrials are down 512 points which means another $5,000 loss just today in an I-R-A that’s already lost $11,000 in a week. And much of it – not all – but much of it can be attributed directly to said national politics.

Now I read a New York Times story this morning that sales of almost anything considered a luxury item are at their highest points in more than six years. Nordstrom has a waiting list for a Chanel sequined coat costing $9,010. Neiman-Marcus has sold out all it’s Christian Louboutin platform pumps at $775 a pair. Mercedes-Benz sold more cars in July then at anytime in the last five years.

And there’s more. High-end retailers are not marking down pricy items. They’re marking them up! The Times says “The luxury category has posted 10 consecutive months of sales increases over a year ago. In July, the increase was 11.6%; the biggest monthly gain in over a year.”

Can you begin to see why my middle-class ire is near the boiling point? By no means am I suggesting I’m alone here. The evidence that millions and millions of Americans hurting and are damned mad – or should be – is everywhere.

In our little Southwest Oregon community, with a true local unemployment figure our county commissioners put at more than 20%, I’ve developed my own system for measuring the regional economy. It can be found in the classified section of our local paper.

There are more pickup trucks advertised for sale by individuals than at any time since we’ve lived here. And many more vintage vehicles of all kinds not normally on the market in such numbers in these parts. More campers and RV’s. More expensive rifles, shotguns and dozens and dozens of pistols.

The “antiques” ads are even more telling. Really rare furniture, collectable dolls, china, silver and stamp collections; just about anything else of value is listed. If you’ve got spare cash, there are some very good buys. But you have to feel some of these rare items are someone’s keepsakes or family heirlooms and there is great pain in putting them on the market.

We’ve just witnessed in our Congress what columnist Joe Nocera calls “The Tea Party’s war on America.” With almost suicidal fervor, 80 or 90 crazies put on their political explosives vests and took both common sense and our democracy hostage. The resultant damage is everywhere and the already pummeled economy is now hurting millions more Americans because of their ignorant tactics.

Nocera writes there will be even more such ignorance displayed and more damage done when these people get back in town, encouraged from visits with their narrow, minority base at home. I hope he’s wrong. I pray he’s wrong.

Maybe, between now and the 2012 national election, current congressional “leadership” will continue to allow these few inmates to run the asylum. Maybe not. Because, if dozens of national polls of voters are accurate, I think those members with any reasoning capacity left will be hearing a much different message from the home folk. Something like “A pox on both your houses. Stop the hemorrhaging. Stop the fighting. Stop all the social engineering. Use your leadership majority to shut those people up. Do what has to be done to fix the economy. Jobs. Jobs. JOBS!”

I’ve seen registered and likely voter polling numbers of over 80% expressing just those kinds of feelings in samples all across the country. If things don’t change in the next 14 months, we just might see incumbent “slaughter” at the polls in November, 2012. Not just the T-P’ers. But incumbents of all stripes.

Yes, I’m mad. Democrat-Republican-Tea Party-Whig-Mugwump mad! Because the most recent economic problems millions and millions of us are facing daily were largely man-caused and could have been man-avoided. The continued depreciation of home values, the erosion of our retirement plans and other personal assets, bankruptcies and business failings can – in many, many cases – be traced to actions or lack of actions by a Congress cowed and neutered by 80-90 people ignorant in the ways of governance.

Like a convict facing parole, I’ve started marking off days on the calendar. I’m going out to the kitchen now, where the August page is posted on the refrigerator. And with a large red marker, I’m going to cross off another one.

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My father died 21 years ago. In the last 17 years of his life, we never talked politics. It was a subject we’d previously discussed many times, especially after my years in the national media living in Washington D.C. But after the mid 1970’s, not once in his remaining 17 years.

Dad owned a small business in Bend, Oregon, was active in his church, the Elks and Masonic bodies. A solid citizen. Well-respected. Moderate Republican most of his life. Good, solid Oregon stock. He was serious about things political and, while not an ardent follower of the subject, felt everyone should at least be knowledgeable enough to cast an informed vote.

But after the downfall of Richard Nixon, Dad would never talk politics again. With anyone. He died never having heard the foul-mouth, anti-Semitic ravings on the Nixon tapes. He never saw the David Frost interview in which Nixon admitted breaking laws but claimed, if it was done by presidents, it wasn’t law breaking. As with most of the rest of us in the mid-70’s, his judgment of Nixon at that time was based simply on the evidence presented in the congressional hearings. Conclusive enough to force Nixon to resign.

A lot of us had already written Nixon off as the crook and repeated liar he’d vehemently denied being. But Dad’s anger and disappointment went deeper. All his life, he had believed – as many Americans his age had – in the honesty supposedly represented by the presidency, in the image of a nation’s pride symbolized by the White House and in our national inherent “goodness” as a principled leader in the world. Dad was a rock-solid Republican of the old school who believed the best of his country. For him, Nixon ended that.

I’ve thought of Dad and all this in recent months. While being more involved in things political than he was I, too, find it harder to discuss the subject seriously. With anyone. Like him, I’m angry, disappointed and more than a little ashamed of the meltdown of our political system. The lies. The trash talk. The self-serving zealots. The personal attacks. The unprincipled use of hundreds of millions of dollars being spent to redesign the very structure of our country. And with the U.S. Supreme Court’s official blessing.

As each new presidential “candidate” dives into the pool, I wait for the message of hope, of ideas, of visions and the new national course each would set. I wait. And wait. And wait. Because they aren’t coming.

Instead, we’re being treated to the same old bashing of the current administration, the same platitudes of “mom, apple pie and the flag,” the same code words to appeal to a narrow ideological base, the same lack of what any particular candidate would do. Words unaccompanied by sufficient specifics to attract my support.

It’s certainly acceptable practice to criticize whatever party or individual represents the opposition. Acceptable and expected. But a legitimate candidacy can’t be based simply on criticism. It can’t just flail away at what is without offering ideas of what the candidate would do to make it what he/she thinks it should be.

As a voter not entirely endorsing what the present administration offers, I haven’t heard a single proposal for anything new or better to make me want to offer my single ballot in support of a change. Constant, unbridled criticism is not the basis for a successful run for office.

As a nation, we’re nervous. All of us. Economically, politically, socially and in just about every other way, we’re in a time of extreme flux. Our lives seem under attack, portions of the institutional system have failed and technology has swept aside many conditions with which we were more comfortable. A lot of careers are being lost, home values depreciated, investments or other savings eroded. And all because of conditions seemingly beyond our personal control. We are a nation of individuals looking for the stability we used to know. Which makes us vulnerable to hucksters who promise change without defining that change and how it would be accomplished.

As I listen to one presidential “candidate” after another come forward with only empty rhetoric and scripted criticism, I often think of my Dad. The shame of Richard Nixon, the lies, the hubris and Nixon’s corrosive affect on the presidency forever altered what Dad saw as a major symbol of this country – of all he’d believed. After Watergate, he never looked at American political institutions with the complete trust his generation was taught to have. Naive? Maybe. But that’s how it used to be.

Older now, I listen to the Romneys, Pawlentys, Bachmanns, Palins, Pauls, Cains and others of their ilk. I hear no promise. I hear no vision. I hear no reassurance that any of them have answers to our national problems.

Do you?

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