“The soul of a nation is under the knife….” — Bob Dylan In the recent presidential “debate,” both candidates expressed their eager, unstinting, even feverish support for the so-called “War on Terror” being waged by Washington and its proxies around the world. Indeed, throughout the entire campaign, Barack Obama and John McCain have repeatedly pledged their fealty to the Terror War, and all that it entails: an even larger war machine (with even more public boodle for war profiteers); a continued military presence in Iraq (under one guise or another); a substantial expansion of the hate-fomenting war in Afghanistan (with

The vote by the House of Representatives to defeat the Wall Street bailout plan is the first act of political courage that the Congress of the United States has mounted in the last seven years. The fact that it was due largely to right-wing Republicans afraid of going down with the sinking ship of the witless leader they have followed blindly throughout his reign is a delicious irony — but the whys and wherefores of the vote are not important. What matters is that one of America’s moribund institutions has flickered to life long enough to derail a disastrous action

As you can see, the new-look Empire Burlesque has now gone live. It’s a significant upgrade to the latest open-source Joomla platform, and moving a site as extensive this one to new digs has been an enormous technical undertaking, shouldered entirely by our webmaster and co-founder, Rich Kastelein. As Rich noted earlier, the reason for the upgrade is simple: to improve your experience in using the site. The new set-up should run smoother and cleaner — although if you hit any glitches left over in the aftemath of the change, let us know and we’ll iron it out. You might

I. The crisis of Wall Street’s financial meltdown has demonstrated, once again, that although the Bush Faction thugs are criminals, killers, torturers, and thieves, without even the slightest competence in governing, they remain brilliant political tacticians. They may be willfully ignorant and brutally stupid in almost every other area, but when it comes to advancing their own narrow interests — at the expense of the political opposition — their low cunning cannot be denied. Just look how they have made the Democratic leadership the face of the Administration’s bailout plan — which is perhaps the most virulently unpopular government action

Britain is a small and withered appendage of the American imperium, but it still serves as a mineshaft canary and microcosm of the fetid atmosphere of the Potomac Empire, as John Pilger demonstrates in an excellent article at Antiwar.com. Pilger explores some of the “intellectual” underpinnings of the current order, and identifies one of the root causes of the degradation of democracy and society on both sides of the Atlantic: rampant, rapacious, relentless militarism. Perpend: Silence covers the truth that Britain’s political parties have converged and now follow the single-ideology model of the United States. This is different from the

I know we keep channeling Arthur Silber here, but he has been all over the deeper implications of “Bailoutgate” than anyone else. His latest piece rightly skewers the emerging “compromise” between Bush and the Congressional Democrats on “oversight” of the government gift program for the Gordon Gekko gang. As any sentient being might have suspeted, the “tough oversight” being offered by such champions of the common folk as Chris Dodd and Barney Frank is — wait for it — a weak and watery sham. Silber quotes the Wall Street Journal (his italics): One broad area of agreement involves congressional oversight.

by Richard Kastelein We are currently testing have tested this quicker, more secure architecture for Empire Burlesque. And we decided to make the switch today – September 29, 2008. It’s been almost three years now – and – according to statcounter… we have had 2,184,677 unique visits from when we opened the doors in September 2005 after Floyd moved from the old digs at his cookie cutter blog at blogger.com. Wow! And thank you. In 2006, we launched Atlantic Free Press where I now work with over 350 writers in an Open Source Journalism environ… as well as Pacific Free

I’ve seen the future, baby: it is murder. — Leonard Cohen

I. Modern Times
While our national leaders quibble and carp over just how much public money they should ladle out to Wall Street’s den of thieves, and how many people should be in charge of divvying up this vast pork pie (one guy at Treasury? a panel of Establishment worthies? a couple of goobers in Congress?), the real business of the American empire — war and rumors of war — goes on without let