By OcJim

“It’s halftime in America” said Clint Eastwood in his rasping voice promoting GM in a Super Bowl halftime commercial.  Continuing the age-old American “apple-pie” exceptionalism trademark in commercials, it is a cheerleading rally, rousing up an America pulling together, heralding the bailed-out Chrysler and GM as number one again.

Clint, a conservative icon, has boasted that he has never voted for a Democrat for president, but nevertheless, though the ad was for Chrysler, it indirectly, though unintentionally, acclaims the bail-out loans the Obama administration championed, while the Republican standard-bearer, Mitt Romney rejected loans in favor of bankruptcy proceedings.

Nevertheless, America is losing sight of too many hard truths that are facing us in the coming years, truths that Obama’s half-measures and Republican obstructionism tend to hide in the ever-present political fog.  Greatness is not just wrapped up in loans for auto companies, which a good half-time commercial quite prominently claims in the name of the almost failed icons, Chrysler and GM.

The spectacle, the banter, the celebrities and jingoistic commercials can almost make us forget that we are fighting a greater battle than the crunching and grinding moves of the Super Bowl game. The millionaires playing the game are our gladiators, taking our minds off of the battle against the plutocrats who profit from this spectacle and all spectacles they use to divert our attention, whether wars, Republican debates, rancor against imagined enemies or Super Bowl XLVI.

America is failing because our investments are mostly in sterile pursuits that benefit only a few in our society. All legislation, all policy is base on making a few rich people richer.

We permit vulture capitalists like Mitt Romney to make hundreds of millions by picking off the flesh of healthy companies. We deregulate Wall Street so that a few can maraud healthy loan markets by mixing the healthy and the toxic together, making millions and calling it  AAA instruments.

We have been lowering taxes so billionaires can buy more yachts, savaging education rather than raising taxes on millionaires, even camouflaging those who raped our economy with unions. We blindly imprison the poor and underprivileged rather than provide opportunity or education.

We allow for-profit big pharma and health care giants record profits while they declare an open season on America’s health, ravaging our earnings and impoverishing our sick who can’t afford over-inflated drug prices. Congress allows big pharma to bribe companies rather than sell generics at lower prices. It shuts out our purchase of cheaper drugs overseas to do the bidding of big pharma.

We let our infrastructure rot and crumble under civilian traffic and use the money to give more tax breaks to the rich.

Ronald Reagan used to say, “It’s morning in America,” but Clint is right. It is halftime in America and unless we continue to rally our forces for America’s real team, the middle class, by raising a continual ever-vigilant clamor, Fox News lackeys will brainwash us and Republican shills will make the rules, while the waves of yachts our starved budget system has bought will drown us in their wakes.