The Rigging of the 2016 Election: Was American Intelligence Just Flummoxed by the Audacity of Trump and Russian Hacking, and Paralyzed by Jurisdictional Compartmentalizing (Self-Interest ), And/ Or Has American Democracy Operated Successfully But Against Itself

PREFACE:
Pericles21 believes that in the 2016 election process, America was attacked and conquered by a known, long term and actively detrimental declared enemy state, Russia, in a modernized, non-shooting, non-bombing war largely without America knowing of the war going on or how to respond (e.g., FBI Director Comey's seeming indecision about what to do about Apparent Russian interference and relationship with the Trump campaign the spring and summer 2016).

Pericles21 also believes that since losing that 2016 war, the American public remains confused, overwhelmed by the sophistication that requires a new vocabulary in attendance to the digital world of networks, cryptology, cyber-intelligence, second and third degree crowd-behavior influencing (cyber-social networking nudging), 'cutouts' and good old fake proxies. What a fine world we Americans have naively lived and loved in for at least 40 years. But, 'Hey' if there is one good thing we Americans do well is to continue a good thing and 'naivete' feels so good (and 'Roseanne' is on tonight so don't bother us), so we will try our best to continue to exist in a fine state of denial assisted with a little OxyContin and Beer. We will do our best to maintain behind the wall of ignorance of the sophisticated, non-traditional ways our own culture was attacked, penetrated, taken over and then weaponized against us. What a 'thing'!

BLOG PRIMARY (A little late maturing in a daily amazed and increasingly scared blogger's mind):
The above 'Preface' is a point of view reflected in John Schindler's thorough and sobering article in the 'Observer' ('Here’s How the FBI Investigation Into Russia and Trump Campaign Actually Started', May 28, 2018)
America was outclassed and outfought on a battlefield that had no soil, no water no air. America's educational priorities, or rather, 'de-emphases' away from real science, science rationality, mathematics and cyber education all combined to help defeat us. (America's commodified, comercial-prioritized culture also played a key role in 'plumping', desensitizing our national awareness to being attacked as Russian agents posing as business players walked freely in plain sight along America's streets.)

Also, that 2016 war we just lost, was an asymmetric war - America was attacked but did not (could not?) respond.
Instead of shooting bullets, America's enemy saw and used vulnerable leverage-points in America's own culture - our hugely popular (and influencing) social websites and our mostly right-wing, loud and inciting, emotionally histrionic 'news' venues that claim 'entertainment' status when confronted with factual challenges to their 'news'. In this regard, Russia's weapons of choice were signally, Facebook and Fox News (especially in the latter, the loud, emotionally strident views of Sean Hannity who has been outed as having a discarded mistress, a hook into Tump's dark shade Fixer 'Lawyer' and perhaps even a nipple at. he belly of the ever nurturing )of greedy piglets) Grand Sow, the collective group of Russian oligarchs munching and slurping on the rich far East provinces of the former USSR, all under the watchful eye of the Great Boar himself, Grand Uncle Vladimir.

In that 2016 war America just lost, our huge military budget ($700 Billion asked this year) and advanced war machines were useless. Our 'advanced', decadently expensive, evolved but still essentially traditional weapons we are so proud of sat idle and irrelevant.

COMMENTARY:
Pericles21 believes that American intelligence agencies and politicians, and a large portion of America's general population, who are still scratching their heads about the surprising 2016 election of Donald Trump (aka 'RICO Dedito'), were and remain naive about the re-shaping of warfare and the increasingly clear alliance between Russia (along with other other national interests) and Donald Trump. Americans are also in denial of how Russia used non-traditional warfare to take control of and 'guide' that election through sophisticated cyber-invasion techniques ('hacking') and equally sophisticated manipulation of American voting predispositions. And we are recently become aware of the compromising of America's right wing (Trump supporters)'entertainment' icons, e.g., Sean Hannity.

But not only America's general population were caught unaware of or frozen in the headlights of the Russian attack. America's intelligence defenders seem equally naive not to have expected that America would one day be 'attacked' with the same indirect, non-exposive 'weapons we have been using to accomplish regime change in critical foreign areas for the past 100 years (the sinking of the battleship 'Maine', the many interferences in the mid-East, Indo China, Africa, South America, etc).

When the compromising relationship between Trump and Russia apparently became clear by early 2016, it appears the FBI and the NSA were restricted or delayed in non-interfering (read 'noon-cooperative') stasis by, in retrospect, our Congress's somewhat naive imposition onto the FBI and NSA of jurisdictional hegemony and a administratively old school (Prussian?) perspective that prioritizes non-interfence if not competitive relationships between these intelligence realms.

It is not surprising, therefore, that this intelligence infrastructure of easily administrated (by un-informed elected officers), clean boundaried and separate jurisdictions should fail America in the face of not only increased vulnerabilities of electronic digital communications and networks but the accelerating expertise in penetrating (cyber-hacking) inadequately protected systems.

Opinion. America's inattention to, and/or lack of committed (loyal), deeply trained, expertise to develop cyber defenses and protect America's potential, 'Multi-Front vulnerabilities in our culture as well as our digital systems, has led to a gross vulnerability of American social and cyber systems to penetration, take over and psychological manipulations. We saw that happen in the 2016 election.

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Work in progress but the above had to come out or be next week (July 10, 2018)irrelevant

that outcome, were and remain naive about world political realities and the non-traditional forms of warfare that have been written on for centuries (e.g., Lao Tsu's and Mao's 'Little Red Book')

A clear, if not concise article by John Schindler in the Observer [May 28, 2018,'Here’s How the FBI Investigation Into Russia and Trump Campaign Actually Started', May 28, 2018]
https://observer.com/2018/05/what-did-the-fbi-do-in-2016-about-russian-connections-to-donald-trump/

[Personal: Comey (FBI Director) and NSA couldn’t grasp how Trump, a candidate for President, could do such a thing?]

SUMMY: (NSA & FBI: ““ By mid-July 2016 We knew we had a Russian agent on our hands,”

The FBI-NSA investigation of Donald Trump was kicked off by …routine SIGINT reports..from America’s foreign friends before 2016.

2015: Britain’s NSA’s routine surveillance detected suspicious ‘interactions’ between Trump associates and Russian agents.
Britain passed this info to the U.S. as part of their routine exchange of information.”
Late 2015 and into 2016: NSA’s other intell friends ( Australia, Germany, Estonia, and Poland) all reported interactions between Trump and Moscow.
So, too, did the French and the Dutch—the latter being an especially savvy SIGINT partner of NSA’s.
2016: different foreign agencies targeting the same people began to see a pattern of connections that were given to U.S. FBI
2016: In response to FBI urgency, NSA rose to the occasion, and
by mid-July 2016, “We knew we had a Russian agent on our hands,”

America's Loss of Jobs, Working Against Self-Interest and Economic Decline of the Working Class

With much respect for the always wise and insightful views of Robert Reich, Pericles21 adds two cents to Professor Reich's article, 'How to Prevent Future Trumps', in his July 3, 2018, blog site.

In that article, Prof. Reich gives his analysis that the cause of the economic woes of the American worker class is the three or more decades of wage declines superimposed on the standard worker class (at least white workers) guilt of racism.

While racism and wage decline are undeniable in their presence, they are not universal to every white worker personal profile or loss of lifestyle. Rather, Pericles21 maintains that racism and wage decline are really resultant fallouts from a primary economic dynamic that has promoted them into the spotlight.

And that primary economic dynamic has been the decades-ongoing disappearance of 'meaningful' (lifestyle sustaining) jobs either from 'jobs flight', being outcompeted in the technical worker marketplace and other factors not at all stemming from the personal blemishes of the American worker. This is something that few analysts, writers and pundit observers of American socio-economics have commented on, much less apparently even looked at directly.
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Pericles21's perspective is the economic wage and prospect "stagnation" Reich refers to are really descriptors of the effects of job disappearance which has happened largely as the result of a fundamental American 'Lack' at the national policy level.

America has simply not developed a national look-to-the-future industrial-jobs development policy for the future. And that 'future' is now at least 35 years from first appearing in the late 1970s.
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And let's not forget that lifestyle sustaining jobs mean stability of a national culture! Which translates to a population capable of a secure, critical thinking base able to see through the demagogue's camouflage!

In his article, Dr. Reich focuses on the ever-present American social mystery of why the white worker and needy classes have so readily and consistently embraced policies and especially persons that operate against their self-interests without even these actors bothering to hide their true natures.

In 2009, at the early history of this blog, and at the start of the first Obama term, Pericles wrote about the phenomenon of the white disaffected, poor and just anxious bloc appearing to knowingly decide against self-interest in voting. Pericles21 noted how in 2009, the southern white bloc, characterized and pre-historied by the South Carolina white antagonists of Reconstruction, voted for political candidates who were, to most of 'us' who claim to possess a rational thinking ability, in 1870, in 2009 and again today in 2018 transparently hollow and false prophets who invariably fail to help their wishful and gullible supporters and usually leave them worse off than before to suffer from economic collapse, industry closings and overall job disappearance.

Once again, under Trump, the gullible but hopeful supporters of the demagogue (the white evangelicals, struggling, jobless and poor) are seeing they have wasted blood and flesh sacrifices to a false idol. 'We', the rational minded, think in wonderment that 'they' must have sensed somewhere in their hearts the Trump glitter was a veneer that would sooner or later rub off revealing base metal. But, the base drabness and disappointing ugliness were probably not expected to be so...ugly.

So once more we are seeing how shallow the demagogue's (Trump's) promises are. Job flight is recurring, and disappointed American workers (white) are again experiencing being the marketplace outliers going hungry as the con-man hero-that-wasn't-but-what-every-sign-predicted and his fellow thieves take their turn at raping America.

Dr. Reich succinctly summarizes his well-stated analysis of the racism and wage-decline factors:

Why did so many working class voters choose a selfish, thin-skinned, petulant, lying, narcissistic, boastful, megalomaniac for president?

It’s important to know, because we need to stop more Trumps in the future.

Reich further analyses:

The answer lies in the interplay between deep-seated racism and stagnant and declining wages. Both must be addressed.

Some white working class men and women were – and still are – receptive to Trump’s bigotry. But what made them receptive? Racism and xenophobia aren’t exactly new to American life. Fears of blacks and immigrants have been with us since the founding of the Republic.

What changed was the economy. Since the 1980s, the wages and economic prospects of the typical American worker have stagnated. Nearly 80 percent now live paycheck to paycheck, and those paychecks have grown less secure.

And after this is where Pericles21 tosses his pennies into the pot. (It's so easy to 'Monday-Morning', respectfully even a 'Reich', without whose insightful and convenient analyses this blog would not have been written.

America has sat idlely in the face of global technical-industry and lifestyle changes while watching wide-eyed and with jealousy (sometimes) as other nations stepped smartly ahead to cope with these changes. America lost the steel industry because we myopically refused to 'violate' quarterly profit traditions to retool that industry. Likewise we lost leadership in consumer electronics because we couldn't/wouldn't violate comic-book bootstrap fantasies of the poor garage-base American-kid intrepeneur (keep American ingenuity classically poor and less dependent on R&D funding), i.e., we forgot the reason for R&D in the face of a relatively few nickels and dimes saved to short-term P&L statements. From this policy shortsightedness, America has suffered long term loss of competiveness, failure to dream up new industries and above all failed to create new, lifestyle sustaining jobs in a substantial way.

And, to repeat, let's not forget that jobs that sustain a meaningful, comfortable lifestyle equates to a stable national culture respected internationally!