Have you noticed that Americans don’t pay attention to their surroundings?

Whether walking, biking, driving or skiing, people are largely unaware of what’s going on around them.

It’s the same with politics, where Americans are blissfully unaware of the political calculus. It’s team Red vs team Blue, where the problems facing our country get overshadowed by tribal war BS. The stark reality is that both parties are dominated by billionaires, who, thanks to Citizens United vs FEC, can spend unlimited amounts to gain the policies they desire. Politics, as I’ve endlessly intoned, is who benefits from enacted policies and who bears the costs.

Meanwhile, Americans maintain a child-like belief that the US economy is like their household. The notion that we need to balance the budget, tighten our belts, and cut spending, flows from this misperception. As modern monetary theory (MMT) makes clear, a sovereign country, like the US, that issues its own currency is not like a household. and that the only constraint they have on spending is real resources. Where did the QE to bail out Wall Street come from? Or, the federal largess in the wake of Covid?

Unfortunately, in one of the most effective psy-ops in history, Americans have been indoctrinated to view government activity as crowding out commerce, that the private sector is more efficient than the state, or that taxes are theft and to regard government in general with hostility.

Mikhail Kalecki’s seminal article, The Political Obstacles to Achieving Full Employment, illuminates the political/economy of a capitalist state. Unsurprisingly, class takes a leading role in the behavior of capitalists. Even though they would make more money under full-employment, they would lose the power of the sack, and the whip-hand over labor. They would also have less social/status difference with labor. On top of that, the state playing a more active role in the economy would additionally reduce threats of–a loss of business confidence, a “capital strike” or an exodus of the wealthy “job creators.”

Yves Smith elaborates–“The resistance to taking advantage of the flexibility of a fiat currency is in large measure due to campaigns to discredit the idea of government intervention, when oddly no one made much noise about the $162 billion sent to the Project Ukraine burn pit.

However, MMT proponents, IMHO, do themselves a disservice by not mentioning the role of tax in draining demand/checking inflation often enough. That feeds into the “This sounds too much like a free lunch” reaction. Even the policies that broke the gold standard are not framed well. You often hear commentators casually say that in the 1960s, the Federal government “spent too much” between LBJ’s Great Society programs, the Man on the Moon, and the Vietnam War.

The more accurate formulation was that even members of LBJ’s economic team, such as Walter Heller, told LBJ he needed to raise taxes, that running deficits when the economy was at full employment was too stimulative and would produce inflation. LBJ refused because he believed the public would perceive that they were being hit with higher taxes to fund an unpopular war.”

The corporate media bears much responsibility for the lack of political and economic situational awareness. An interview with New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, on CNN, revealed the acute economic bias. The host seemed to be arguing that any moves toward substantial redistribution of wealth from the rich to everyone else should be off-limits. Bracingly, Mamdani emphasized that these aren’t two separate, coincidental phenomena. Highlighting recent cuts to Medicaid and SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits, which have coincided with tax breaks for the wealthy, he painted a picture of a massive transfer of wealth in the wrong direction.

Furthermore, there is famously no accountability for policy failure in Washington. One reason for this is that the officials responsible for those failures are the ones that get to explain away those failures with the help of eager corporate media stenographers. You might go so far as to state that the mission of the corporate media has been to prevent Americans from seeing and understanding the 21st century’s realities.

The American belief in “rugged-individualism”, likewise neuters a class-based comprehension of economics, and politics. “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

Another successful propaganda meme. Do I sense a pattern?

Elections, as the saying goes, would not be allowed if they made any real difference. The Democrats and Republicans share the same basic assumptions about economic policies that enrich their wealthy backers while impoverishing average Americans. Whether we should support extreme austerity that benefits wealthy elites, or slightly less extreme austerity that also benefits wealthy elites but slightly less so. But they can never, ever propose socialist policies, as the interview with Mamdani illustrates.

Our situational reality is that we live in a world of political and economic make believe. The corporate media, social media and Hollywood have spun a matrix of narratives designed to keep us ignorant, divided and squabbling. The enormity of all this is too grave, too terrifying for most of us to cope with.

I’m a skydiver, and situational awareness is paramount. I started as an Army paratrooper and during airborne operations, situational awareness was even more critical, with team leaders constantly updating their Sit-Reps, or situation-reports, to keep up with an unfolding reality.

Update: In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Americans are going to have to update their situational awareness, and start paying a lot more attention. I firmly believe that the political violence is a result of the abandonment of the social contract by the wealthy and corporations they own. From “there is no society,” to “greed is good,” our feral elite have embraced the law of the jungle, where might is right, and do what ever it takes to get ahead, other people be dammed.

In a nation awash with guns, the latest shooting is hardly surprising. Unfortunately, I fear it’s a portent of things to come.