The counterculture movement seems to be losing a little momentum, doesn’t it? The peace-and-love, anti-establishment generation is running the country now, and here’s where things stand:

According to New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, a substantial part of the insurance industry spends its days happily conspiring to vacuum cash out of America’s bank accounts. And the medical practitioners right here in Central Iowa – where we’re known as the kind of wonderful, trustworthy folks who will crawl across broken glass to return a paper clip – stand accused of installing in your chest whatever pacemaker happened to be on sale that day.

Just when you think you’re getting too cynical, you realize that you’ve actually fallen way behind.

Americans are criticized for not paying enough attention to politics, but that doesn’t sound quite right this year. Lately, we seem to be spending too much time staring at the political sideshow like rubes at a carnival, hungry for the entertainment and happy to be teased.

We think we’re clever because we know how the tricks are being done up on stage. Actually, while we’re inside the tent, pointing and scoffing, people in nice suits are out in the parking lot stripping our cars.

If our trusted institutions are willing to insert “con the customer” in their mission statements just to spruce up the bottom line, there’s no tax cut in the supply-side world that can compensate for the beating we’re going to take.

And if the Hippocratic oath has been amended to mention blue-light specials, there’s probably no health-care plan that can override that.

We can hardly stand it when we think about the ways our taxes are wasted. But if we really understood how many ways our hard-earned money gets turned into Caribbean vacation homes for corporate kings, we might just sit down on the nearest curb and give up.

At the personal level, we could improve our financial prospects by employing a complex economic theory best summed up like this: Buy less stuff. Unfortunately, that’s no cure at the national level, because our economy is based on overspending.

But even if there’s no easy solution, it would be nice to think that at least we’re all on the same team. Getting our fellow Americans to stop picking our pockets on a regular basis, that sounds pretty good.

How do we do that? Maybe the next president could work with Congress to outlaw some of these practices that benefit the huge corporations — the ones that donate all the campaign money.

Just kidding.

It looks like we’ll have to keep depending on the two old standbys of the powerless: shameless ambition and ordinary outrage.

We rely on hard-driving characters such as Spitzer to make a fuss. He gets the attention, and maybe we get a small break. That’s a bargain.

And we rely on little people to get motivated once in a while when the thought hits them: “I don’t think I’m being treated fairly.”

It isn’t much, but it’s better than walking around with the wrong pacemaker.