Monday the National Intelligence Council was pimping their organization's new report "Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds" (PDF format warning, click here). The report bills itself as "the fifth installment in the National Intelligence Council's series aimed at providing a framework for thinking about the future." If you're wondering, "who?," they helpfully explain:
The National Intelligence Council supports the Director of National Intelligence in his role as head of the Intelligence Community (IC) and is the IC’s center for long-term strategic analysis.
Since its establishment in 1979, the NIC has served as a bridge between the intelligence and policy communities, a source of deep substantive expertise on intelligence issues, and a facilitator of Intelligence Community collaboration and outreach.
The NIC’s National Intelligence Officers -- drawn from government, academia, and the private sector -- are the Intelligence Community’s senior experts on a range of regional and functional issues.
The "Global Trends" is a yearly report and supposedly just intel. But it's not.
First, owing to the likely growth of revenues dedicated to funding pensions, health-care, and other entitlements in the West to care for aging populations, younger generations will feel a growing sense of inter-generational inequality.
Along with endorsing fracking, the report attacks 'entitlements.' Not just above but elsewhere.
In an "Iraq snapshot" this week, the attack was noted and a member of the administration informed C.I. that she had misread the report. The only real attack, C.I. was told, came from the report including an essay that New Marxist Review had published. C.I. responded by asking where that 'magazine' published and whether or not she and the official had both been asleep for a number of years?
She didn't misread the report; however, a White House official did.
The New Marxist Review 'article'?
That was written by the intelligence community. Your first clue to that, if you read closely, is that the NMR editor (an unnamed woman in the report -- there is no such real magazine, by the way) ran an essay contest to note the 210 anniversary of Marx's birth.
Why would someone go with 210 as opposed to 200?
That's a good question. A better one is when was Marx born? 1818.
210 years after would be 2028.
Which is why the report uses that year, it's not a typo.
In 2028, the Editor of the New Marxist Review launched a competition for the best short essay on the meaning of Marx and Communism 210 years after Marx’s birth in 1818. To her surprise, the journal was flooded with thousands of submissions. She was having a hard time sifting through the piles and selecting a winner, but she found one that pulled together many of the recurring themes. The essay made the case that Marx isn’t dead but is instead thriving and doing better in the 21st century than anybody could have imagined just 15 or 20 years ago. The following are excerpts from that essay.
This 'essay' -- that trashes entitlements -- was written by the national intelligence community.
So desperate is their lust to kill off Social Security and Medicare that they created a fictional magazine which in the future publishes a (poorly written) essay in which a 'Marxist' celebrates the end of 'entitlements.'
Those in charge of the spy community don't just want to spy on you, they want to gut the safety net.
A functioning US press would be covering that, would be asking who wrote the 'essay' and where the intelligence community gets off attempting to dictate policy?
But, as we learn each year, we don't have a functioning press in the United States.