A little over a year ago, while researching the Confederacy’s economy, I stumbled across an unnerving graph charting the value of America’s “stock of slaves” in the last decades before the Civil War that helps give form to the brutal crackdown on the Occupy protests — and suggests darker things to come as we try to free ourselves from their vision of civilization, and our place in it.

In the early 2000’s, the co-chairman of the Cato Institute’s Project on Social Security Privatization, José Piñera, played a key role advising and overseeing Slovakia’s mass pension privatization, which passed in 2003 under the free-market government of Mikulas Dzurinda. Today, Slovakia’s retirees are groaning under the austerity pain administered to them by the Cato Institute.

Last autumn, Andrew Breitbart picked a fight with me. Now Andrew Breitbart is dead. Gee, whod’ya think won that little war?

But if the hacks ever do get around to following the money, they would very quickly stumble across one of the biggest WTF factoids of this primary season: Ron Paul’s SuperPAC, “Endorse Liberty,” is headquartered in Mitt Romney’s backyard: Salt Lake City, Utah.

I came across this hilarious groveling quote from Heartland founder David Padden about his all-knowing Master and Dear Leader, Charles Koch:

“I would never attempt to second-guess whatever he’s doing in the interest of making this a free country…”

This article was first published at TheNation.com If there’s one thing that distinguishes Ron Paul from the rest of the GOP field, it’s his principled stand against American empire and his ardent defense of individual liberties. [1] Paul’s opposition to wars, bloated…

Yesterday, our old friends the Koch brothers were back in the news. The DeSmog Blog exposed how some of the most rancid trolls in the world of climate change-denialism are on the payroll of the Heartland Institute, one of the Koch…