In 1964, a book entitled 'The Invisible Government' shocked Americans with its revelations of agencies playing fast and loose; a secret government lodged inside the one they knew that even the president didn't fully control. Almost half a century later, everything about that 'invisible government' has grown vastly larger, more disturbing and far more visible. Now, Tom Engelhardt takes in something new: what is no longer a national security state, but a global security one, fighting secret wars that have turned the US president into an assassin-in-chief. 'Shadow Government' offers a powerful survey of a democracy of the wealthy that older generations wouldn't recognise.

"A tour de force."--Jeremy Scahill

"Tom Engelhardt is the I. F. Stone of the post-9/11 age."--Andrew J. Bacevich

In 2008, when the US National Intelligence Council issued its latest report meant for the administration of newly elected President Barack Obama, it predicted that the planet's "sole superpower" would suffer a modest decline and a soft landing fifteen years hence. In his new book "The United States of Fear," Tom Engelhardt makes clear that Americans should don their crash helmets and buckle their seat belts, because the United States is on the path to a major decline at a startling speed. Engelhardt offers a savage anatomy of how successive administrations in Washington took the "Soviet path"--pouring American treasure into the military, war, and national security--and so helped drive their country off the nearest cliff.

This is the startling tale of how fear was profitably shot into the national bloodstream, how the country--gripped by terror fantasies--was locked down, and how a brain-dead Washington elite fiddled (and profited) while America quietly burned.

Think of it as the story of how the Cold War really ended, with the triumphalist "sole superpower" of 1991 heading slowly for the same exit through which the Soviet Union left the stage twenty years earlier.

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the TomDispatch website, a project of The Nation Institute, where he is a fellow. He is the author of the critically acclaimed "The American Way of War" and "The End of Victory Culture."

Tom Engelhardt, creator of the vital website TomDispatch.com, takes a scalpel to the American urge to dominate the globe. Tracing developments from 9/11 to late last night, this is an unforgettable anatomy of a disaster that is yet to end.

Since 2001, Tom Engelhardt has written regular reports for his popular site TomDispatch that have provided badly-needed insight into U.S. militarism and its effects, both at home and abroad. When others were celebrating the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, he warned of the enormous dangers of both occupations.

In "The American Way of War, " Engelhardt documents Washington's ongoing commitment to military bases to preserve--and extend--its empire; reveals damning information about the American reliance on airpower, at great cost to civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan; and shows that the US empire has deep historical roots that precede the Bush administration--and continue today into the presidency of Barack Obama.

"Tom Engelhardt provides a clear-eyed examination of U.S. foreign policy in the Bush and Obama years, and details unsparingly how Obama has inherited -- and in many cases exacerbated -- the ills of the Bush era.... an important book for anyone hoping to understand how the U.S. arrived at its current predicament during the Bush years, and how it remains in this predicament despite Obama's best efforts -- or perhaps because of them."
--Daniel Luban, Inter-Press Service

"Tom Engelhardt is among our most trenchant critics of American perpetual war. Like I. F. Stone in the 1960s, he has an uncanny ability to ferret out and see clearly the ugly truths hidden in government reports and statistics. No cynic, he always measures the sordid reality against a bright vision of an America that lives up to its highest ideals."
--Juan R. Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan

As veteran author Tom Engelhardt argues, despite having a more massive, technologically advanced, and better funded military than any other power on the planet, in the last decade and a half of constant war across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa, the United States has won nothing. Its unending wars, in fact, have only contributed to a world growing more chaotic by the second. From its founding, the United States has been a nation made by wars. Through incisive analysis and characteristic wit, Engelhardt ponders whether in this century, its citizenry and government will be unmade by them.

Tomdisaptch.com has established itself as the go-to blog for contemporary US politics, and the favored web platform for radical commentators from Noam Chomsky to Howard Zinn. Its powerful, no-holds-barred features draw a huge response from the public and resonate throughout the global media, acting as a touchpaper for debates which subsequently become headline news. This comprehensive volume offers readers a chance to catch up on some of the finest political analysis of our age, including trenchant accounts of the two Bush administrations' catastrophic imperial adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq; Guantanamo, extraordinary rendition and its apologists; and Hurricane Katrina, global warming, black gold and the rise of Hugo Chavez.Introduced, arranged and with additional commentary throughout by the blog's founder Tom Engelhardt, The World According to Tomdispatch is the essential primer for anyone seeking illumination and guidance along the highways and byways of our post-9/11 world.

From the dawn of the atomic age, art and popular culture have played an essential role interpreting nuclear issues to the public and investigating the implications of nuclear weapons to the future of human civilization. Political and social forces often seemed paralyzed in thinking beyond the advent of nuclear weapons and articulating a creative response to the dilemma posed by this apocalyptic technology. Art and popular culture are uniquely suited to grapple with the implications of the bomb and the disruptions in the continuity of traditional narratives about the human future endemic to the atomic age. Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future explores the diversity of visions evoked in American and Japanese society by the mushroom cloud hanging over the future of humanity during the last half of the twentieth century. It presents historical scholarship on art and popular culture alongside the work of artists responding to the bomb, as well as artists discussing their own work. From the effect of nuclear testing on sci-fi movies during the mid-fifties in both the U.S. and Japan, to the socially engaged visual discussion about power embodied in Japanese manga, Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future takes readers into unexpected territory

From the dawn of the atomic age, art and popular culture have played an essential role interpreting nuclear issues to the public and investigating the implications of nuclear weapons to the future of human civilization. Political and social forces often seemed paralyzed in thinking beyond the advent of nuclear weapons and articulating a creative response to the dilemma posed by this apocalyptic technology. Art and popular culture are uniquely suited to grapple with the implications of the bomb and the disruptions in the continuity of traditional narratives about the human future endemic to the atomic age. Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future explores the diversity of visions evoked in American and Japanese society by the mushroom cloud hanging over the future of humanity during the last half of the twentieth century. It presents historical scholarship on art and popular culture alongside the work of artists responding to the bomb, as well as artists discussing their own work. From the effect of nuclear testing on sci-fi movies during the mid-fifties in both the U.S. and Japan, to the socially engaged visual discussion about power embodied in Japanese manga, Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future takes readers into unexpected territory

In a substantial new afterword to his classic account of the collapse of American triumphalism in the wake of World War II, Tom Engelhardt carries that story into the twenty-first century. He explores how, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the younger George Bush headed for the Wild West (Osama bin Laden, ""Wanted, Dead or Alive""); how his administration brought ""victory culture"" roaring back as part of its Global War on Terror and its rush to invade Saddam Hussein's Iraq; and how, from its ""Mission Accomplished"" moment on, its various stories of triumph crashed and burned in that land.