Welcome to Empire Burlesque
Chris Floyd is an award-winning American journalist, and author of the book, Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Regime. For more than 11 years he wrote the featured political column, Global Eye, for The Moscow Times and the St. Petersburg Times in Russia. He also served as UK correspondent for Truthout.org, and was an editorial writer for three years for The Bergen Record. His work appears regularly CounterPunch, The Baltimore Chronicle and in translation in the Italian paper, Il Manifesto, and has also been published in such venues as The Nation, the Christian Science Monitor, Columbia Journalism Review, The Ecologist and many others. His articles are also featured regularly on such websites as Information Clearing House, Buzzflash, Bushwatch, LewRockwell.com, Antiwar.com, and many others. His work has been cited in The New York Times, USA Today, the Guardian, the Independent and other major newspapers.
Floyd co-founded the blog Empire Burlesque with webmaster Richard Kastelein, who created the site using open-source software. Floyd is also chief editor of Atlantic Free Press, which was founded and designed by Kastelein.
Floyd spent several years in the depths of the military-industrial complex, working for a security-restricted federal research laboratory on projects dealing with energy conservation, global warming, space travel, transportation, robotics, artificial intelligence and military logistics. On the side, he published fiction and poetry in small journals and taught Russian literature at the University of Tennessee. Later, he annotated Shakespeare, 19th century British poetry and American literature for a start-up company producing multi-media CD editions of literary works for colleges and schools.
In 1994, he made his way to Russia, where he joined the Moscow Times, an English-language daily and one of the first independent newspapers of the post-Soviet period. There he spent two years – the high casino of the tumultuous Yeltsin era – and began writing the "Global Eye" column, which he continued after returning to the United States in 1996. He was also the Times' movie reviewer from 1996 to 2000.
From 1998 to 2000, Floyd was the editor of Science & Spirit, an Oxford quarterly journal dealing with the contentious relationship between science and religion. His work there included interviews with such thinkers as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Frans de Waal, V.S. Ramachandran and others. He also worked with contributors from around the world – Islamic scientists, Jewish theologians, militant atheists, Nobel Prize-winning physicists, and authors such as Freeman Dyson, Paul Davies, Lisa Jardine, A.N. Wilson, John Polkinghorne and others. Since 2000, Floyd has worked as a freelance journalist and as a writer and researcher for Oxford University.
His story, "Into the Dark: The Pentagon Plan to Foment Terrorism," was chosen as one of Project Censored's "Top 25 Stories of 2002/2003." His pieces have been anthologized in various political collections in the United States.
In 2005, Floyd recorded a CD of his songs, Wheel of Heaven, with producer/musician Nick Kulukundis.
I was in London's Heathrow Airport this morning when the bombs went off in the city, many miles away. Unlike America's CNN-saturated airports, Heathrow has no ubiquitous media presence looming inescapably at every turn. The first inkling we had of the slow-rolling attack was the announcement that the underground service from the airport to the city had been suspended "due to a power failure." Then came snatches of overheard conversations of people on their cell phones: "bus blown apart," "bombs in the tube," "I told them to shut all our pubs and get the hell out of there." No way of finding out more. For once, I longed to see one of those toothsome talking heads blaring out the news to a captive audience.
On July 1, the former presidential physician of George H.W. Bush wrote a guest column for the Washington Post. Two days later, the attorney general appointed by George W. Bush made a surprise visit to Baghdad. These seemingly unrelated events are not only inextricably linked; together they form a portrait of a nation gone wretchedly astray, hurtling into a moral void from which there may be no return.