The wildly successful campaign theme that won Bill Clinton the White House for two terms was “It’s the economy, stupid!” So how come this worked against Democrats this time around?
Things seemed on the surface to be in favor of Democratic command over the economic picture. We are after all in a period of economic health that is the envy of the world. The stock market is in nose bleed territory over and over, corporate profits are astronomical. But therein lies the rub. This is not the economy of the people who file into the ballot box deciding who to vote for. A huge number of rank and file, everyday voters were probably thinking about how to deal with the massive interest they just got stuck with on the pay-day loan they were forced to take out to pay the electric bill, or the rent, or get some groceries or gas. And all of those things actually had gotten a hell of a lot more expensive during the Biden years.
The game of winning in an election includes the issue of finding the problems people are having on a universal level and blaming that on your opponent. And then making that stick with repetition and hopefully some actual reality. Trump’s campaign achieved this.
The fact that we had a significant inflation could not be disputed. How it came about is actually well known as well, but not so with the rank and file voters. All they knew was buying eggs, gas, electricity and paying their rent kept getting more expensive and eating up any pay increases they may or may not have gotten. For too many families this is still a two- or three-job economy. Many people hold two or even three jobs just to get the ends close to meeting.
All Trump and his mouthpieces had to say was, “Biden caused the inflation! He’s to blame.” And of course, the blame instantly got shifted to Harris as soon as the euphoria of her candidacy wore off.
The fact is that the White House is not in charge of the economy. There is not some switch to flip to instantly lower prices. Some moves can be made from time to time to relieve pricing pressure in some sectors. For example, when oil and gas prices were spiking in the past, past presidents have ordered using the strategic petroleum reserve to increase supply and thus lower prices. Restoring the ability of Medicare to negotiate prices with drug companies was a big win, but now is in danger again.
Over the past few years, once the supply chain issues were resolved post COVID, prices kept rising. This was not a normal inflationary period. It has been a rampant period of “Greedflation” where corporate profits soared to unheard-of levels. Oil companies were posting multi-billion dollar profits each quarter. Food companies, pharma companies, you name it. Same story.
A recent story in the Washington Post covers the story of four huge potato growing companies collectively called the Potato Cartel currently under multiple lawsuits and investigations for price fixing.
The alleged tater plot by the four producers, which control over 95 percent of the market for frozen potato products, led prices for those products to increase by 47 percent between July 2022 and 2024, the lawsuits say.
A company called RealPage has been selling software to help property managers keep rents high nation wide. Sure they have been under investigation for a couple of years by the DOJ. But we are all acutely aware of how fast and effective that organization has been under Merrick Garland. Yes, that was sarcasm.
In the pharma sector, Americans are known around the world as the suckers who pay ten times what people pay in other countries for the same medicines.
Greedflation.
This point could be dragged on with an endless stream of examples, but you get the point.
This pattern has been going on for years and it was not addressed adequately, or at all, by the current administration and this set them up for a classic propaganda manipulation known as “the scapegoat.”
Here is a primer on the concept of the scapegoat from Mary Wald’s book, Sowing Hate and Chaos.
You’ve heard the term. There may have even been one in your school, the kid who got in trouble for things the other kids did. When an underling is punished or convicted of a crime conceived by his superiors, rightly or wrongly, he or she claims to have been made the scapegoat. But the real scapegoat is not quite what you think.
The term goes back to the Book of Leviticus in the Bible, and possibly before. It takes two goats to cleanse a village of its sins. One is sacrificed. The other is released into the wilderness, after the village chief has given it the sins and impurities of the community to take with it. Today it’s no longer a goat, it’s a person or group. But the scapegoat still wears the sins of others on his or her head—for no other reason than having been chosen to wear them.
A poem by 14th century poet Guillame de Machaut speaks of communities facing the spread of a mysterious disease (presumably the Black Death). The villagers concluded that the Jews must have poisoned the rivers that provide the drinking water. So they massacred them. Afterward, they sang and danced in the streets. Of course, the disease continued killing people after the massacres, in even greater numbers. But for a moment, the villagers had felt better.
The development of the scapegoat in modern propaganda follows the same arc as the other techniques we’ve seen. In the early decades of the 20th century, as the wave of Freud was still washing over Western and Russian culture, the scapegoat mechanism was one of the group behaviors being cataloged and theorized about. And like the other studies on group behavior, by the 1930s it had become a tool for mass manipulation.
This classic propaganda tool was very effective for Trump. One of the probable reasons it was so effective is that it made an inveterate liar like Trump appear to be telling the truth. Sure inflation has been a real problem to average people. They cope with it every day. Thus Trump whom everyone understood to be a lair was telling them something that coincided with their reality and their wallets. And when he said it was the fault of the Biden/Harris administration—well that sounded plausible too.
Who cared that these same huge corporations—richly overcharging their customers—were paying for Trump’s campaign so he would lower their taxes again and keep increasing their profits. The arrogance of the scheme is stunning. And the money will just keep flowing up to the biggest wallets in the world because of this scapegoat ploy.
And just like the villagers who killed their local Jews to ward off a plague and suffered even more, so will our economy go. Voters tossed out the administration that had at least begun to chip away at the blatant illegalities of price fixing and the price gouging practices of these companies. Who wants to bet that the DOJ under Pam Bondi will continue to go after these corporations? No, she’ll be too busy protecting their profit streams.
Yes, we’ve been had. You may not be able to take back the votes that were scammed over to Trump. But you can vote with your wallets every day. Find out who has been ripping you off and don’t buy from them. Buy from their competitor. For example, don’t buy things like Dixie products or Georgia Pacific paper products. Those companies are owned by Koch Industries, the folks that funded the people who brought you Project 2025.
The more you know, the less you can be conned. The use of the scapegoat by Trump’s people is viewed as “dirty politics.” But it is more than that. It is a part of a suite of diabolically effective propaganda tools and techniques exposed in Mary Wald’s book, Sowing Hate and Chaos.
There is one thing the users of these techniques fear: that we know about them. When people become aware of what is in this book, these propaganda systems become ineffective. They’ve been around for decades and have brought down many countries. And they are now well on their way to taking down ours.
Time to fight back.
