By Jason McLure
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner defended the decision by industrialized nations to release emergency oil reserves into global energy markets, saying on Friday that it was not a political move.
“It’s really as simple as this: there’s a war in Libya, costs between one and two million barrels a day in lost output, I think 140 million barrels off the market so far,” he said in response to a question at Dartmouth College, where he spoke on a panel.
“Reserves exist to help mitigate those kinds of disruptions and we helped to organize a coordinated global international response to help ease some of that pressure,” he added.
The Paris-based International Energy Agency announced on Thursday that it was tapping member countries’ emergency reserves — some 60 million barrels over 30 days — for only the third time since it was founded in 1974, to fill the gap in supplies left by the disruption to Libya’s output.
The 28-nation IEA, which was set up after the Arab oil embargo as a counterweight to OPEC, said the move was a bid to boost the global economic recovery by holding down oil prices.
The United States will provide half of the total volume to be released.
The decision caught energy and financial markets by surprise and generated criticism from oil companies, members of the OPEC oil-producing cartel and Republican opponents of the Obama administration.
Since oil prices already had fallen from early-May peaks near $115 a barrel, critics said the action appeared aimed at propping up President Barack Obama’s popularity rating as much as helping consumers.
But Geithner, who met with local business leaders earlier on Friday in nearby Manchester before speaking at Dartmouth, said putting additional oil supplies on market was “sensible policy” that should give a lift to a slowly expanding economy.
“It will provide some modest help and relief” to the U.S. economy, Geithner told reporters afterward. “It was a prudent use of existing reserves.”
High oil prices have put “significant” pressure on global growth, he said.
Geithner has limited his foreign travel this year, concentrating on trying to build support in Washington for a hike in the debt ceiling before August 2 when Treasury said the country will be at risk of default. But he has made several day trips to different regions, like Friday’s to New Hampshire, urging business groups to tell Republican lawmakers that concluding a budget and debt deal is urgent.
In his remarks at Dartmouth, Geithner said many factors restraining U.S. economic expansion were temporary, including supply-chain disruptions from Japan’s massive earthquake in March. He also said an adjustment in housing markets was about two-thirds over.
He said costlier energy and less vigorous worldwide growth would keep U.S. economic growth to around a 2 percent annual rate in the first half this year, but he insisted that underlying trends were improving.
Regarding budget talks in Washington, Geithner said he was confident Congress can still reach a deal, even after a top Republican lawmaker walked out of the talks this week. But he said tax increases cannot be taken out of the equation.
“You need to have modest changes in revenue,” Geithner said. “There is no way to do a deal without it.”
He said that business leaders whom he met with on Friday had some encouraging words about the environment they face.
“Things are gradually getting better,” Geithner said, adding that the U.S. economy is still growing “a little slower” than had been expected.
U.S. economic growth in the first quarter was an annualized 1.9 percent, the Commerce Department said on Friday.
That was revised up from a previous 1.8 percent reading. But it is still too low to be an engine for job creation, with the high U.S. unemployment rate of 9.1 percent posing a reelection challenge for Obama.
The budget deal “needs to get done in a way that doesn’t put too much pressure on the economy near term,” said Geithner, calling for “the right kind of balance” and a deal that does not skew too much to elements that could hinder growth.
Business people badly want to see Washington reach a broad agreement on the budget, and soon, Geithner added. “A lot of people think that would be good for the economy, and I agree.”
(Additional reporting by Ros Krasny in Manchester, Rachelle Younglai and David Lawder in Washington; writing by Glenn Somerville; editing by Leslie Adler

All over the Middle East, Europe, even the US, communist and Islamic groups are uniting against their common enemy – us.

From the Jordan Times

Former prime minister Ahmad Obeidat on Saturday announced the launch of a pro-reform political coalition that includes opposition parties and unionists to call for the “rule of law” in Jordan.

Constitutional amendments, government accountability, combating corruption, new economic policies, redefining the role of security agencies, judicial reforms, press freedoms and revisiting the education system are the main cornerstones of the newly established National Front for Reform (NFR), according to a statement released by the coalition…

The coalition includes the Islamic Action Front (IAF), the Jordanian Communist Party, the Jordanian Democratic Popular Unity Party (Wihda), the country’s two Baathist groups, the Jordanian People’s Democratic Party (Hashed), the Nation Party, the Social Left Movement and the Jordanian Women’s Union.

Other members include a handful of professional associations and trade unions, in addition to independent figures, Obeidat said…

The NFR is, predictably, strongly anti Israel.

The NFR statement concluded by reiterating the right of return for all Palestinian refugees and their grandchildren living in Jordan to their homes in historical Palestine.

“The existing and the coming Zionist threat is the main challenge targeting Jordan, as it has targeted Palestine,” said the statement.

By Tim Tzouliadis

Mr. Tzouliadis is the author of The Forsaken, an account of the American emigration to Stalin’s Russia of the early 1930s – an exodus that fell into the interstices of Cold War history. This essay derives from a journey made across Russia earlier this year.

At the height of the Great Depression, several thousand American emigrants left New York on the decks of passenger liners, waving goodbye to the Statue of Liberty bound for Leningrad. They arrived in the “Workers Paradise” confident that they were leaving the miseries of unemployment and poverty behind them.  Inevitably their optimism would prove to be short-lived.

Most were stripped of their American passports soon after their arrival. Considered ideologically suspect by Stalin’s paranoid and totalitarian state, the foreigners were swept away in the Terror – and the American jazz clubs, the baseball teams, and English-language schools where they once gathered, quickly vanished with them.

During the early years, in public, the Americans had learned to follow the Russian example, and never mention the words “GPU” or “NKVD” aloud. Instead they cracked jokes about the Soviet secret police as “the Four-Letter Boys” or  “Phi Beta Kappa” or “the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Bolshevism” or any other whip-smart euphemism designed to confuse the listeners and informers who surrounded them. The bar at the Metropol Hotel had once been the weekly venue for an American party, where young couples danced around a circular fountain kept stocked with fish.

Seven decades later in present day Moscow, the Metropol’s marble fountain still shines in the centre of its dining room. While the rest of the iconic locations of the American emigration remain clearly identifiable. In the green acres of Gorky Park, the American baseball teams once competed against each other in the summer evenings of the early 1930s. The American Ambassador’s residence, Spaso House, still flies the Stars and Stripes out front and young diplomats can be seen sipping cocktails on the terrace.  The original American Embassy – a neo-classical building built on the site of a church destroyed during the atheist campaign – continues to face the Kremlin, although now it has become the headquarters of a Russian investment bank.

At the height of the Terror, the American emigrants besieged this building, begging for passports to leave Soviet Russia. Viewed with suspicion by the American diplomatic staff – described in one communique as “the flotsam and jetsam” of the Depression – they were turned away, only to be arrested on the sidewalk outside by lurking NKVD agents.

In the killing fields at Butovo, a suburb 27 kilometres south-east of Moscow, several of the American baseball players – whose lives I chronicle in The Forsaken – were executed during the Terror, and lie buried in mass graves. They were among the thousands killed in this one particular country backwater, whose present-day stillness belies the horror of a Revolution that has spun out of control. Wearing leather aprons and protective gloves, the NKVD guards had set about their nightly work methodically, killing young and old alike. Exhausted, they returned each morning to steady their nerves with their specifically-allotted quota of vodka, and douse their clothes in eau-de-cologne to remove the stench of death that clung to those who administered it.

The prisoners not executed in the Terror, were sentenced to work in the “corrective labour camps.”  In the far northeastern corner of Russia, the city of Magadan became one of the epicentres for these transportations. Here, according to Alexander Solzhenitysn, was the very “pole of cold and cruelty of the Gulag.” At the infamous bay of Nagaeva, the American emigrants were among a myriad of nationalities, unloaded from the hulls of the decrepit steamers, the so-called “death ships of the Sea of Okhotsk.” Later during World War II, the same Gulag fleet was sailed across the Pacific for refitting in the shipyards of West Coast America, only to return to Vladivostok to pick up more prisoners.  Nowadays the harbor at Nagaeva is quiet, save for a few fishing boats and the stray dogs that lurk where once hundreds of thousands of prisoners were assembled.

In search of the physical evidence of the Gulag camps, we travelled several hundred kilometres inland from Magadan, along the so-called “road of bones” built by the prisoners. The deterioration of the road forced us to walk the final three hours, until eventually we arrived at the camp of Butugychag. The barbed wire fence has withstood some of the coldest winter temperatures on earth, remaining standing in many places at about ten feet high. The main factory buildings are falling apart in a state of ruin, and yet many of the walls remain solid. Thousands of prisoners died in this brutal place, and a tangible presence of horror permeates the archaeological evidence of their suffering – it lies present in the abandoned camp buildings, in the isolator prison with its barred, narrow windows, in the guards’ quarters. Most of the wooden watchtowers have collapsed. One lies on its side in a tangle pool of barbed wire that seems to have wrapped itself around everything here. We walked past an empty plinth covered in undergrowth, where once there would have rested the inevitable statue of Lenin or Stalin.

At the far end of the camp, a primitive funicular runs up into the uranium mine. Built on a track of stone and wooden sleepers, this rusted piece of Gulag engineering has long fallen to pieces. I am fit and fairly healthy, and yet to climb this mountain exhausted me. I wonder how the prisoners would have coped in the long winters – forced first to build and then to work this mine, starved into a skeletal condition, physically abused, and wearing inadequate clothing in sub-Arctic conditions. On the side of this mountain, the ferocious cold alone must have killed many. Within the mine itself, the conditions were no less intolerable. All the Gulag camps had a utilitarian motive for their existence. But an essential part of their utility was always the eradication of the so-called “enemies” of the regime.

On a flat windswept plateau two kilometres outside the camp, the prisoners of Butugychag were buried in a makeshift cemetery. There are rows and rows of graves here, some of them marked by the remnants of rusted tin cans attached to wooden stakes that are crumbling away. Human remains once littered this site, but they have since been reburied by the Russian Orthodox church. A wooden cross was erected as a memorial, but its epitaph has been vandalized. The words of the plaque lie broken in pieces on the ground: “In nameless graves we ended our lives/Who can forget us if you are a human being?”

In camps such as these across the Soviet Union, the Americans lost their lives, alongside Stalin’s other victims. It was the final endpoint of their epic Depression migration. Only a lucky few ever returned home to bear witness to the fate of the others. Beside their accounts lies the documentary evidence of the archives, and the occasional artifact smuggled out by a desperate prisoner on which a shared plea had been written in English: “SAVE ME PLEASE AND ALL THE OTHERS.” This wooden tag was hidden in a shipment of Soviet exports, discovered in West Germany, and sent to Washington DC, where it remained classified in a State Department archive for decades, waiting patiently to be re-discovered. By then the Americans’ collective fate had become representative of a far broader Russian tragedy. They were just one forgotten tile on a vast mosaic of suffering.

 

 

WRITTEN BY JOE WOLVERTON, II

In 1987, as a freshman in college, I walked into the university library and took down a tome entitled the House of Rothschild. The book told a story of a humble Jewish family from Frankfurt that began as money lenders to the German aristocracy and expanded its wealth exponentially and geographically until its interests extended into the ruling houses of Austria, France, Italy, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. The Austrian branch was endowed with titles and lands by the Hapsburg emperor and the British branch was similarly ennobled by Queen Victoria.

To my wonderment, the Rothschild family controlled billions of dollars and literally had not only their fingers in every pie, but owned the bakeries, as well.

The influence wielded by the fecund Rothschild family was unrivaled. Through their grip on the purse strings of the governments of the world, they were able to manipulate peace and war to their own aggrandizement. As historian Niall Ferguson wrote in his book, The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild:

As we have seen, however, wars tended to hit the price of existing bonds by increasing the risk that a debtor state would fail to meet its interest payments in the event of defeat and losses of territory. By the middle of the 19th century, the Rothschilds had evolved from traders into fund managers, carefully tending to their own vast portfolio of government bonds. Now having made their money, they stood to lose more than they gained from conflict. The Rothschilds had decided the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars by putting their financial weight behind Britain. Now they would sit on the sidelines.

Remarkably, a recent article published in the Washington Times reveals that the power and influence of the Rothschilds has not diminished over the past 200 years. In the piece, it is asserted that the various programs promoted and established by George Soros are ultimately funded by the global wealth of this notorious family of financiers, the Rothschilds.

In a story entitled “Geneva Gnome’s Global Dread,” Arnaud de Borchgrave, the editor at large of the Washington Times and United Press International, identified the various golden Rothschild threads woven into the globalist tapestry held up as an ensign by George Soros.

The Gnomes of Zurich were derogatory caricatures of secretive, greedy, stiff Swiss-German bankers, pince-nez aquiver, who ruled over the land of secret numbered accounts for tax dodgers the world over. With the world’s best financial intelligence service, they knew their stuff and seldom spoke, even in retirement.

Their Geneva counterparts in French-speaking Switzerland were more sophisticated, relaxed in the company of global wheeler-dealers, and weren’t afraid to speak their minds, albeit off the record. Such was George C. Karlweis, the brain behind Banque Privee, owned by the late Baron Edmond de Rothschild. His biggest claim to fame: George Soros and the launch of his Quantum Fund in 1969.

An original $100,000 stake in Mr. Soros’ fund was worth $150 million by 1994. Between 1970 and 2000, the return was 3,365 percent. (For 10 consecutive years, it did 42.6 percent per year.) In 1992, Mr. Soros bet billions against the British pound — and broke the Bank of England (“Black Wednesday”).

Although himself a neocon of the first order and one to neither foment nor foster any Rothschild-centered conspiracy theory, de Borchgrave’s analysis of the relationship between Soros and the Rothschilds is worthwhile and illustrative of the well-established growth of the mushroom of globalists conspirators in the accommodating lengthy shadow of the Rothschilds.

The value of this tale to friends of liberty is found in the innumerable points of common purpose visible when one lays the story printed in the Washington Times over the story of the history of the founding of a one-world government through the efforts of socialist/communist/globalist operatives inside and outside the halls of government.

Furthermore, this same cadre of conspirators were ultimately responsible for the recent worldwide economic collapse as they were the creators of the central banking structure that enables such booms and busts through the manipulation of the world’s currencies.

As one writer explained the cooperation between these monied interests:

That is not to say that every single person involved with the corruptions of central banking must intentionally be fomenting Marxism; no more than to say every Marxist is excited about finance.  But there is mounting evidence of close associations over not only decades but centuries, associations not only of people but of their intentions.

Whether intentional or not, the de Borchgrave article painted the scene of world-wide financial distress in the following very broad strokes:

The financial crises that have been blowing up for years are speeding up, Mr. Karlweis says, because of expenditure exceeding income, “borrowing hand-over-fist, even for no good reason, on ever shakier fundamentals.”

In a display of openness not likely appreciated by his Rothschild patrons, Karlweis attached the name of Hitler to the current currency collapse:

After turning their countries into Weimar Republics by printing more and more money “they will all need a currency commissioner like Hjalmar Schacht,” a German banker who headed Reichsbank and became an early Hitler supporter, “to save them from hyperinflation. Let’s just hope they don’t turn their regimes into Third Reichs in the meantime.”

Next, Karlweis mixes his metaphors and uses the demand for bread and circuses that bankrupted the Roman Empire as an analogy for the potential of similar reactions in the empires that cover the earth today.

“No one wants to predict the reactions of voters who constantly clamor for more bread and games to forget the looming disappointments that could give rise to black swans,” adds the former giant gnome of Geneva.

Black swans are an aspect of the theory of the same name that was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Basically, the theory “refers only to unexpected events of large magnitude and consequence and their dominant role in history. Such events, considered extreme outliers, collectively play vastly larger roles than regular occurrences.”

Naturally, no observer can resist placing the lion’s share of blame for the world’s financial distress at the feet of the government of the United States. Sadly, the placement is well and rightly placed there.

“Governments, public corporations, financial institutions, consumers — everyone is over their head in debt,” Mr. Karlweis says. And “a huge part of the blame for the debacle of the past three years lies squarely with the U.S. By more or less shoving free trade down everyone’s throat, America paved the way for globalization. This is what has destroyed jobs and driven down wages in the developed countries, hobbling economic growth and gouging tax revenues”‘

Given the stretch and strength of the Rothschild web and the bottomless treasure chest at their disposal, George Soros and others determined to obliterate the Constitution are likely to continue their efforts for decades to come until the job is finished

By KENNETH P. VOGEL | 4/28/11 7:41 PM EDT Updated: 4/29/11 2:30 PM EDT

For Democrats hoping George Soros will write an eight-figure check to boost their 2012 efforts, conservatives seeking to use Soros as a bogeyman to rally their base and market analysts trying to predict his next play, a top Soros aide has some advice:

Read Karl Popper.

The 20th century Austrian philosopher’s theory that ultimate truth is unattainable undergirds Soros’s ideology, “to the extent that he has one,” said Michael Vachon, Soros’s political advisor and spokesman. “Soros’s investment style and his philanthropy reflect that. It is very responsive to reality.” And Soros’s assessment of political reality could have a lot to do with shaping the political landscape in 2012 and beyond.

Political operatives from across the ideological spectrum have become increasingly fixated on the question of whether the Hungarian-born billionaire investor will once again reprise the role he played in the 2004 election, when he contributed more than $20 million to Democratic causes, or whether he will continue to focus his domestic philanthropy elsewhere.

In a brief interview Thursday, Soros did not clarify his intention, begging off a question about whether he intended to make large contributions to outside advertising groups.

“Since I don’t know what I’m going to do, I can’t tell you,” he told POLITICO.

Last October, Soros suggested he may be permanently shifting his giving away from electoral groups like those he supported in 2004, characterizing his involvement that year as “an exception.”

But Democratic political professionals have been buzzing about the implicit blessing bestowed this month by the Democracy Alliance, a Soros-linked Socialist donor network, on a coalition that hopes to spend tens of millions of dollars boosting President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats in 2012 — though Vachon suggested it’s unlikely Soros will come close to matching his 2004 investment.

Conservatives, meanwhile, seized on two conferences put on this month by Soros-funded groups — an international economics forum in Bretton Woods, N.H., and a media reform conference in Boston — as yet more evidence that he’s trying to “remake the financial order and the media,” with one group blasting out a fundraising email declaring that “we cannot allow these kinds of reprehensible events to go unchallenged.”

During a Thursday afternoon speech at an unusual setting — the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington — Soros bemoaned political polarization as “endangering our open society,” hinted at his growing interest in media reform and challenged his portrayal as a knee-jerk liberal.

“As I see it, the two sides in the current disputes have each got hold of one half of the truth which they proclaim to be the whole truth,” Soros said at the Cato forum celebrating Friedrich August Hayek, an Austrian free-market economist and philosopher who is a hero among libertarians.

Hayek and Popper were friends and colleagues at the London School of Economics (Fabian Socialists) — where Soros studied under Popper in the late 1940s — though the two Austrians diverged on scientific methodology and, to some extent, on the role of government.

“The political controversy on the role of the state in the economy is raging in full force today, but the standards of political discourse have greatly deteriorated,” said Soros, whose Open Society Foundations are named for the “open society” philosophy developed by Popper. “Although I am often painted as the representative of the far left and I am certainly not free of political bias, I readily recognize that the other side is half right in claiming that the government is wasteful and inefficient and ought to function better,” Soros said Thursday, at one point referring to “the so-called left, in so far as it exists.” He is in the far, far left.

Some Democrats, though, charge that, if the left is in a weakened state, it’s partly because Soros and his fellow Democracy Alliance donors ceased funding outside advertising campaigns after their 2004 efforts failed to stop George W. Bush from being reelected as president. Erica Payne, who was involved in the creation of Democracy Alliance, said wealthy liberals have simply not had the long-term commitment of conservatives such as the industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch, who — perhaps ironically — have in the past few months become symbols for the left in much the same way Soros is for the right.

“There is not a single liberal donor in the country who has displayed the same combination of resources, multifaceted investment strategy, ideological focus, and stick-to-itiveness we have seen by Koch — and that includes George Soros and all the other so-called ‘liberal billionaires,’” said Payne, who now heads a donor-advisory group called the Agenda Project.

“Most liberal funders see funding as a hobby, not as an investment. As such, they fund at the hobby level rather than the investment level.”

In 2004, motivated by a deep and abiding opposition to the Iraq War and other Bush administration policies, Soros, along with insurance magnate Peter Lewis and other major liberal donors, combined to contribute a total of nearly $200 million to two liberal groups, America Coming Together and the Media Fund , that paid for get-out-the-vote efforts and aired ads boosting Democrat John Kerry’s unsuccessful campaign against Bush.

But after Kerry’s defeat, Soros — of all the big donors — “was probably the most disappointed in the 2004 effort, wondering how progressives could spend all that money and not achieve success,” said one Democratic consultant involved in a fledgling coalition of outside advertising groups hoping to raise tens of millions of dollars to counter a network of big-money Republican-allied groups conceived before the 2010 midterm elections by Bush-era GOP strategists Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie.

Not long after the 2004 election, Soros became one of the original members of Democracy Alliance, which had the goal of shifting major liberal donor cash from nonprofits that focused on campaign advertising to those centered around policy, issue advocacy and voter mobilization, with the goal of building more permanent intellectual infrastructure that transcends any given election cycle.

The Alliance model was patterned in part on the giving of wealthy conservatives to a well-established network of think tanks like the Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, The Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution, which have long been the beneficiaries of huge checks from major conservative donors like the Koch brothers.

It is within that context that Soros’s foundations since the 2004 election have given $7.3 million to the Center for American Progress, which seeks to shape Washington’s messaging and policy battles, $1.4 million to the media reform group Free Press, which sponsored this month’s conference, and $1.1 million to Media Matters, which is prosecuting a war on conservative-leaning Fox News Channel.

After his speech at Cato, Soros dismissed as “a sideshow” former Fox News host Glenn Beck, who hosted a three-part series attacking Soros as a puppet master. But he asserted Beck’s departure from Fox this month “hasn’t changed anything at Fox really,” explaining his grants to Media Matters were an effort to hold the network accountable, but stressing that media slant on both sides is a problem that adds to the polarization of the national discourse.

“Neutralizing” Fox can’t be accomplished, he said, “because it has an audience. But I think holding its feet to the fire is appropriate. Not only for Fox (but) the other side also in so far as they use techniques which are deceptive.” Though Soros and other donors continued giving in smaller amounts to political advertising groups after 2004, the shift away from that type of giving was abetted by Obama himself. His 2008 presidential campaign discouraged big donors from giving to outside groups, partly as an effort to prove the candidate’s commitment to changing the political system, but also because his campaign raised a record-shattering $750 million and didn’t need the help — or the risk that outside groups would step on his message.

At a Democracy Alliance meeting in Washington a few days after the 2010 election (not long after the White House gave a clear green light to big-dollar ad campaigns by independent groups), Soros expressed frustration with Obama to a small group of donors on the sidelines of the meeting and made the case that, even in light of conservatives’ advantage in outside spending, liberals should continue to focus their cash on groups that pressure Democrats from the left on issues.

Even as Republican-allied independent groups — emboldened by a January 2010 Supreme Court decision allowing corporate and anonymous donations to be spent on campaign ads — last year helped launch a handful of new big-spending outside advertising groups, Soros and his cohort stayed on the sidelines.

Shortly before the election, Soros said though the prospects of a GOP Congress concerned him, “I’m not in a position to stop it. I don’t believe in standing in the way of an avalanche.”

But at a conference this month in Laguna Beach, Calif., Democracy Alliance seemed to point in a different direction by facilitating contributions from its wealthy members — who are required to contribute a total of at least $100,000-a-year to recommended groups — to groups like those that Soros funded in 2004.

The conference featured a panel at which representatives from four groups in the new Democratic coalition — including an as-yet unnamed group run by former White House aides Bill Burton and Sean Sweeney that hopes to raise $100 million to boost Obama’s reelection bid — explained their missions to donors.

Soros, a founding member of the alliance, didn’t attend the conference. But Vachon, who sits on the Democracy Alliance board, was there. The conference, which was closed to the public and media, was revealed this week by the investigative journalism nonprofit Center for Public Integrity (to which Soros’s foundations have contributed $3.7 million since 1999 and at which this reporter worked in 1999 and 2000).

And Democratic operatives who regard Soros as a bellwether of sorts for the intentions of other major donors, emerged from the conference hopeful that Democracy Alliance members and other major donors would open their wallets to the independent expenditure efforts. he conference was “the beginning of a series of conversations. And certainly we hope that something will come out of it, but it’s too early to put a dollar figure on it.”

Vachon said the groups probably shouldn’t expect another $20 million from Soros, but he also didn’t shut the door to Soros becoming seriously involved. “I would be surprised if he got involved at the same levels as in 2004,” he said, “but the election is a long way off, and it’s not his focus right now.”

Soros’s high-profile spending and inflammatory rhetoric starting in the 2004 campaign — when he compared the Bush administration’s rhetoric to that of the Nazis (a comparison he also in February applied to Fox News) and described defeating the Republican president as “the central focus” of his life and “a matter of life and death” — has made him a favorite target of the right, which has continued to portray him in fundraising appeals as an anti-American puppet master steering the Democratic Party and the nation toward socialism.

In fact, most of Soros’s philanthropy focuses on international efforts fostering human rights and civil society building, and fighting poverty corruption. And — like Koch brothers’ philanthropy — the recipients of Soros’s largesse do not all fit into neat liberal-conservative constructs.

Soros’s Open Society Foundations, for instance, have contributed $431,000 since 1996 to the Cato Institute to fund its drug reform, civil liberties and anti-corruption programs. And the Kochs have contributed tens of millions to the arts and cancer research.

Still, the left’s increasing targeting of the Koch brothers seems to have only further fueled the right’s targeting of the Kochs, and vice versa.

“Soros wants to radically transform this country, while the Kochs represent capitalism and have a libertarian bent,” said Andrew Breitbart, the conservative Internet entrepreneur, who last year spoke at the winter installment of the twice-a-year Koch-sponsored donor conferences that are similar in some ways to the Democracy Alliance meetings.

Vachon, though, rejected the Koch comparison, asserting “many on the right seek to compare Soros to the Koch brothers because it suits their partisan or ideological purposes, but in truth this is not an apt comparison. Soros is completely transparent about his funding, both in philanthropy and politics. And he funds activities and advocates for policies that would hurt his bottom line.

Both sides need to chill out, said David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, which was co-founded by Charles Koch in 1977.

“There is a tendency to put people in either a red or a blue box and to polarize the debate, and to accuse one side of being socialist and the other side of being anarchist or facist, which are actually opposites, so that’s a confused argument to begin with,” he said. “It would be better to talk about ideas and argue about policies … If people don’t like what the Kochs believe or what they support, they should argue with those ideas and the same thing is true with Soros.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/53902_Page4.html#ixzz1KwbORERc

 

We prisoners had an unwritten rule, steal another man’s clothes and you’d get a hiding, steal a man’s bread and you’d die: The chilling testimony from the Gulags’ forgotten victims
The word Gulag is a actually an acronym, derived from the Russian for Main Camp Administration. Over the years, however, it has come to signify the whole Soviet slave labour camp system, a regime that reached its deadly peak under Josef Stalin’s despotic rule and saw millions of men and women transported to camps in Siberia and other outposts of the Red empire.

There, they had to endure sub-Arctic temperatures, undertake heavy labour at gunpoint and try to avoid starving to death. Between 1929 and 1953, the year of Stalin’s death, 18 million people passed through this Gulag system — many of them never to return.

Now a new book, Gulag Voices, edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum, tells the stories of some of the survivors; harrowing reminders, told in their own heart-rending

ALEXANDER DOLGUN was an American, born in the Bronx in 1926. But in 1933 his father moved the family to the Soviet Union to take a job at the Moscow Automotive Works. When the family tried to return home, Soviet bureaucrats stopped them. Alexander’s parents never left the Soviet Union again. He grew up and started work as a clerk at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. In 1948 he was arrested on suspicion of being a spy, with the violent interrogation he underwent in Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison marking the beginning of a gruelling eight years in the Gulag.

IT WAS 3am and Sidorov, my interrogator, was angrier than ever. He had been showing me the same photographs over and over again, face after face of strangers. But he didn’t believe what I was saying.

‘I’m giving you another chance. Point out the ones you know! Why do you deny you know them?’

After almost a month of surviving on less than an hour’s sleep a day and already experiencing hallucinations, my fear was that I was going out of my mind. ‘It’s no use,’ I said, ‘we’ve done this over and over. I don’t recognise anyone. Not one!’

His fist came in hard and caught me on the side of the face with enough force to spin me out of my chair and onto the floor. I was dizzy with the shock. ‘Liar, liar, liar!’ he barked furiously.

Suddenly, I felt as if my right shin had been cracked open. I sat up and grabbed it, almost screaming, just as the toe of his hard high boot landed on the other shin.

The pain was terrible; I felt sick and my stomach began to heave. Determined to avoid another blow, I clambered back to the chair, slowly composing myself.

‘I’ll try,’ I muttered.

The next night was even worse. This time Sidorov didn’t even wait for a denial, wading into me with both fists, yelling that if I did not tell him everything he would kill me with his bare hands.

I hit the wall hard after a punch, and went down on my knees. I must protect my shins, I thought, I must protect my shins. He picked me up and dragged me to the chair, screaming obscenities and slapping my cheeks hard. I held my eyes closed against the shattering pain of the lights in the room.

‘Are you going to identify this man?’ he asked, thrusting another photograph under my nose and with a sudden quiet in his voice.

I couldn’t trust my voice, so mouthed the words: ‘I can’t.’

The shock when his boot hit my shin on top of the first bruise made me gasp. The next kick made me yell out loud.

‘Please! I’ll tell you any name. Boris, Andrei, I don’t know. Anything. Only don’t kick me again.’

The fist lashed out again and my consciousness swam away.

KAZIMIERZ ZAROD was a young Polish civil servant and army reservist who, with many others, fled east from Poland’s capital Warsaw when the Nazis attacked on September 1, 1939. But when the Soviets invaded Poland on September 17, he was arrested. After interrogation, he was sent to a Siberian forestry camp, which he knew only as Labour Corrective Camp No 21.

AT 3AM each morning, an alarm was beaten out on a triangle. Dressing was unnecessary as we slept in our clothes.

Tumbling off the hard wooden shelf on which I slept, I joined the queue for the one water bucket, where I filled a small soup container and splashed my face with a few handfuls. Soap, a tiny scrap of which we were issued with once a month, we kept for the evenings when we returned filthy from work.

By 3.30am, we were supposed to be in the square to be counted. On snowy mornings, this could be a long, cold, agonising business. Assuming the right number of bodies were present, the foreman of each working party was then dispatched to collect the bread for the day.

How much bread you got depended on how much timber you had cut the day before, a tally that really could be the difference between life and death. Those who met 100 per cent of the punishing targets — a physical impossibility for most men — earned 900g of bread (about 2lb), while those returning only 50 per cent of their targets got 300g.

Made from rye which had not been thoroughly cleaned, this black bread was the source of Gulag life and carefully hoarded throughout the day. A little with the breakfast soup; a few bites during the short dinner break at midday; more with the soup in the evening to stave off the inevitable pangs of hunger after 12 hours of cutting and stacking logs.

If a prisoner stole clothes or tobacco and was discovered, he could expect a good beating from his fellow inmates. But the unwritten law of this camp was that anyone caught stealing another man’s bread earned a death sentence. An ‘accident’ was not difficult to arrange in the forest.

ELENA GLINKA, a 29-year-old engineering student, was arrested on false charges of treason, and spent six years in the Gulag. She was sent to one of the camps on the dreaded Kolyma Peninsula, where winter temperatures hover between -19C to -38C. Having disembarked at a small fishing village, she witnessed one of the mass rapes, nicknamed the ‘Kolyma tram’ because of the brutal manner in which they were carried out. As the youngest of the prisoners, Elena was ‘chosen’ for the exclusive use of the local miners’ Party boss — and thus spared the worst of an ordeal that still left her so traumatised she could write about it only in the third person.

‘WOMEN in Burgurchan!’ The news spread like wildfire and within an hour men began flocking to the town hall — first the locals, then men from farther afield, some on foot,

Cigarettes, bread, even lumps of cured salmon were tossed to the corralled women prisoners who, after two days at sea, swallowed the food without chewing.

Then bottles began to clink and the men, as if on command, retreated to one side to drink vodka with the guards. There were songs and toasts, but there was also a clear purpose to this debauch as, one by one, the women’s guards passed out, dead-drunk.

whooping and hollering, the men rushed the women and began to haul them into the building, twisting their arms, dragging them through the grass, brutally beating any who resisted. They knew their business; it was co-ordinated and confident. Benches were removed, planks nailed over the windows, kegs of water hauled in.

That done, whatever rags or blankets they had at hand — padded vests, bedrolls, mats — were spread out and the women thrown to the floor. A line of about 12 men formed by each woman and the Kolyma tram began.

When it was over, the dead women were dragged away by their feet; the survivors were doused with water from the buckets and revived. Then the lines formed up again.

LEV RAZGON was a Russian journalist whose marriage to the daughter of one of the founders of the Soviet secret police had helped him work his way to the heart of the Bolshevik elite in the 1930s. But in 1937, when Stalin’s Great Purge began, Razgon saw his extended family arrested one by one. They came for him and his wife Oksana in 1938. Oksana died in a transit prison. Razgon spent 18 years in the Gulag, where he became grimly fascinated by his jailers, the men and women who, one way or another, decided who lived and who died.

OUR transport had been walking for a week and as we finally neared our destination, Camp No 1 in Ustvymlag, my first camp boss was outside waiting for us. A tall man in a well-made overcoat with a blue NKVD [the Stalin-era forerunner of the KGB] cap and boots polished to an unbelievable shine, Senior Lieutenant Ivan Zaliva, surveyed us with a severe and condescending gaze — his hand placed firmly on the wooden butt of his Mauser pistol. Over the forthcoming months, I would learn that he was a man of astounding ignorance and rare stupidity, who stuck devotedly to his official instructions, regardless of the cost in human lives.

To curry favour with his superiors, he always bought the cheapest food, the poorest clothing and, after three days, always switched new arrivals — many of them weakened by months in prison and weeks in transit — to a diet that related to their output.

There were 517 of us in the Moscow transport when we arrived in August 1938. By spring, after some 20 to 30 had been transferred to other camps, only 27 remained. All the rest had died that first winter.

In November 1938, 270 nomadic Chinese had arrived, having inadvertently strayed over the invisible Russian border. Zaliva set them to hauling timber by hand — a job that none of us could endure for more than a week.

The Chinese, however, worked steadily and calmly day after day, and when they had finished their punishing days, returned to the barracks, which they kept scrupulously clean and where they spent their evenings repairing their ripped clothing.

By February 1939, just three months after their arrival, 269 of these Chinese had died. Only one remained alive, working in the kitchen.

HAVA VOLOVICH was a newspaper sub-editor who was arrested in 1937, aged 21, for being publicly critical of the damage done to Ukrainian peasants by the new collective system, which grouped together dozens of farms to make one giant super-farm. She remained in the Gulag for 16 years, where she became one of the tens of thousands of young prisoners to become pregnant and have a baby. Prison nurseries did exist, but malnutrition, restrictive breast-feeding schedules and astonishing cruelty often resulted in the child suffering an early death.

A number of men offered their ‘services’ — and I did not choose the best by any means. But the result of my choice was an angelic little girl with golden curls. I called her Eleanor.

There were three mothers in our barracks and we were given a tiny little room of our own. By night, we brushed from our babies the bedbugs that fell from the ceiling like sand. By day, we left them with any old woman who had been let off work, knowing these women would calmly help themselves to the food we left for the children.

Every night for a year, I stood at my child’s cot, picking off the bedbugs and praying, begging God to prolong my torment by 100 years if it meant I wouldn’t be parted from my daughter.

But God did not answer my prayer. Eleanor had barely started walking and had just uttered her first, heart-warming word — ‘Mama’ — when we were dressed in rags, despite the winter’s chill, bundled into a freight car and transferred to the ‘mother’s camp’.

Here, I was expected to work in the forest, felling trees as normal during the day — while my pudgy little angel with the golden curls, back at the camp’s infant shelter, soon turned into a pale ghost with blue shadows under her eyes and sores all over her lips.

I caught a chill on the bladder, terrible lumbago and shaved my hair off to avoid getting lice. My appearance could not have been more miserable and wretched. But in return for bribes of firewood, the guards let me see my daughter outside normal hours. But the things I saw!

I saw nurses shoving and kicking children out of bed before washing them in ice-cold water. I saw a nurse grab the nearest baby, tie back its arms and then cram spoonful after spoonful of hot porridge down its throat.

My little Eleanor began to fade faster. ‘Mama, want home,’ she cried one evening, her little body covered with mysterious bruises.

On the last day of her life, when I picked her up to breast-feed her, she stared wide-eyed into the distance, clawing and biting at my breast, begging to be put down.

In the evening, when I came back with my little bundle of firewood, her cot was empty. I found her lying naked in the morgue among the corpses of the adult prisoners. She had spent one year and four months in this world and died on March 3, 1944.

- Gulag Voices, edited by Anne Applebaum, is published by Yale University

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1371768/Testimony-Gulags-forgotten-victims-Steal-mans-bread-die-.html#ixzz1IP6wjINa

In attempting to explain how lobbyists get U.S. foreign aid for Egypt, journalist Pratap Chatterjee of the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress writes that Tony Podesta, “the brother of a former White House chief of staff,” joined with Toby Moffett, a former Democratic Congressman, and Bob Livingston, a former Republican Congressman, to create a lobbying organization, the PLM Group, to represent Egypt in Washington.

He wrote, “The Livingston Group made the largest number of contacts with the U.S. government for the Egyptians to make sure that this money continued to flow, but they were not the only ones. Tony Podesta, the brother of a former White House chief of staff, and Toby Moffett, a former Democratic Congressman, joined forces with Livingston to create the PLM Group to represent Egypt in Washington, according to foreign-agent records at the Justice Department.”;

See Related Report: Congress Must Investigate Support for Muslim Brotherhood and Revolutionary Socialists

The reference to that “former White House chief of staff” was meant to suggest that Tony Podesta has real clout and influence, especially in Democratic Party circles. But who is that “former White House chief of staff?” And why wasn’t he named?

What Chatterjee did not want to openly acknowledge, for obvious reasons, is that this unnamed brother of lobbyist Tony Podesta is none other than John Podesta, his boss at the Center for American Progress (CAP). John Podesta, former Clinton chief of staff, is the President and CEO of CAP.

Politico reported that Tony and John Podesta started Podesta Associates in the late 1980s and that it was later renamed the Podesta Group. So John Podesta was in on this money-making scheme from the start. Soros subsequently asked John Podesta to run the Center for American Progress, whoseforeign policy expert, Brian Katulis, has been arguing on MSNBC that the U.S. ought to pull the plug on the Hosni Mubarak government in Egypt and deal with the Muslim Brotherhood.

In other words, the Podesta brothers are on both sides of this international crisis.

Chatterjee, who also contributes to the British Guardian, echoes the views of many on the left. He is upset that the lobbyists making over $1 million a year from Egypt succeeded in getting military training and tear gas shells supplied to the Egyptian military. That tear gas provided to what he calls Egypt’s “military-industrial complex” has been used against pro-democracy protesters in Egypt.

Chatterjee is right in the middle of this, having joined the Center for American Progress in September 2010 as a Visiting Fellow. His writing has won an award from “Project Censored,” but he engaged in some news manipulation of his own by omitting the name of John Podesta from his column on influence peddling. It’s a matter of not biting the hand that feeds you.

 

Before he opened fire on lobbying for the Egyptian government, Chatterjee was on his assigned mission, attacking Republicans for considering cuts in the federal budget. One article asserted that federal workers were not overpaid. Another article attacked Republicans for proposing a federal hiring freeze.

 

Now, however, he has taken a carefully guarded look at lobbying interests that involve his boss. But as the curious omission of the name of John Podesta suggests, however, don’t expect to see any follow-up investigations into the activities of the Podesta Group from Chatterjee. The author of Halliburton’s Army, published by Nation Books, Chatterjee cannot be counted on to write a follow-up on the “Soros Army.”;

As we have argued, Soros’s multibillion dollar international business and influence network makes Halliburton look like a Mom ‘n Pop operation.

Interestingly, it turns out that the Podesta Group has some journalists of its own on its payroll, including:

·         John Ward Anderson, a former foreign correspondent with The Washington Post and contributing editor of Politico.

·         David Marin, said to be an “award-winning journalist” with “extensive relationships with the national, regional and trade press.”

Speaking of curious omissions, John Podesta’s bio at the website of the Center for American Progress makes no mention of his role in forming Podesta Associates with his brother. Strangely, hisbio at the site of the Center for American Progress Action Fund does include this information.

Speaking of biographies, one for Chatterjee says that he has served as a board and staff member with many “activist groups,” including Project Underground. The latter was “a Berkeley, CA-based human rights and environmental group” devoted to “supporting the human rights of communities resisting mining and oil exploitation.” It folded in 2000 but had been attacking Republicans and even Al Gore as pawns of Big Oil. (Gore had extensive ties to Occidental Petroleum). In 2009, all of this was forgotten as Gore appeared with John Podesta and Senator Harry Reid at a CAP-sponsored “Clean Energy Summit.”

Politico has since reported that the lobbyists in the Podesta Group and the Livingston Group had lobbied on the issue of a Senate resolution calling for free elections in Egypt. The story didn’t mention that a former Politico editor, John Ward Anderson, now works for the Podesta Group.

Anderson’s wife, Molly Moore, who also was a reporter for the Post, left the paper for Sanderson Strategies Group, “a communications company” also active politically.

This curious network of special interests is standard for Washington, D.C. For that reason, we need an adversary media willing to look beneath the surface. And this is why George Soros’s buying of reporters (He is giving $1.8 million to buy journalists at National Public Radio) works against the public’s right to know.

Fortunately, Joseph Farah’s WorldNetDaily is working to blow the lid off. WND’s Aaron Klein hasbroken the news that the Soros-led International Crisis Group (ICG) issued a 2008 report urging Egyptian government acceptance of the pro-terrorist Muslim Brotherhood.

One key ICG member, Klein notes, is Robert Malley, a former adviser to Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign. Malley resigned after it was exposed he had communicated with Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood off-shoot. His father, Simon Malley, was an important figure in the Egyptian Communist Party.

 

 

He’s ordered the Justice Department to stop defending the Marriage Act and the constitutionality of a law.

The Justice Department announced Wednesday that, at Obama’s direction, it would not defend the Defense of Marriage Act in acourt case where it’s being challenged.

Spokesman Jay Carney said Obama has always opposed the Defense of Marriage Act as “unnecessary and unfair.” He disregards the Constution. But Carney said there’s no change to how Obama views gay marriage itself. It is an important first step in instating Sharia Law.

DIRTY, DIRTY ,  DIRTY

While the federal Environmental Protection Administration is about to impose regulations and taxes on carbon emissions by executive fiat – in the name of stopping global climate change – the United States has already dramatically cut its emissions and probably has already complied with the Kyoto/Copenhagen goals for reduced emissions. And this has been done without taxes, without regulations, and without government intervention.

In 2007, the U.S. emitted 6.12 billion metric tons of carbon. In 2008, emissions fell to 5.92. In 2009, while Obama was promising that the U.S. would cut its emissions to 5.0 by 2015, the American economy and public – on their own – cut the emissions to 5.5 billion. Most likely, by the time the 2010 measurements are in, we will have reached the Obama goal. While many attribute cut to the recession which, presumably, will end sometime, the fact is that emissions dropped before the recession hit and have continued to fall. A big part of the reason is the reduction in the use of coal to generate electricity. As we explain in our new book Revolt! (to be released on March 1), coal accounted for 52% of electric generation in 1996 but only for 45% today. In the past twelve months, coal’s share has dropped form 49% to 45%. Natural gas has almost doubled its share from 13% in 1996 to 23% in 2009 while renewables have risen from 2% to 4%.

Source 1996 2009

Coal 52% 45%
Natural Gas 13% 23%
Nuclear 20% 20%
Renewable 2% 4%

Source: US Energy Information Administration

The free market, free enterprise system has responded to persuasion and incentives like it does in free societies without the heavy hand of taxation, government regulation, and coercion.

These data expose the basic truth: Cap and trade or carbon regulation is not necessary to lower U.S. emissions. The government bureaucratic/environmentalist alliance want these measures to increase public control over our economy, not to fight global warming. Just as the Obama stimulus package was designed to increase public spending, not to stimulate anything, so the environmental regulations are exploiting public concern over climate change to ratify a growth in government power and oversight.

And that’s the inconvenient truth! No Need For the Government Regulations

Fox is Getting to Soros – May the Old Communist go down

Last year, it was announced that billionaire George Soros gave his first ever contribution to Media Matters, an organization that puts a specific emphasis on criticizing the Fox News Channel. Now we may know the reason why Soros has made this donation public.

On Sunday’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on CNN, Soros took a few shots at the Fox News and Rupert Murdoch, the CEO of parent company NewsCorp, accusing the media mogul of using Fox News and his media empire to change the direction of government. He reacted to Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck’s assertion that there is a “shadow government” with puppets and puppet masters, and Soros is pulling the strings.

“Well, I would be amused if people saw the joke in it, because what he is doing, he is projecting what Fox — what Rupert Murdoch is doing, because he has a media empire that is telling the people some falsehoods and mis — and leading the government in the wrong direction,” Soros said. “But, you know, by accusing me of doing that, it’s kind of — it makes it rather hard to see that it’s really — he is working for the man who is doing it which is Fox News.”

Soros’ reaction to Beck’s claim that he was “helping to round Jews up” during the Holocaust was that Fox News is attempting to use Orwellian tactics, just like they used in Nazi Germany.

“Well, look, Fox News makes a habit — it has imported the methods of George Orwell, you know, newspeak, where you can tell the people falsehoods and deceive them,” Soros said. “And you wouldn’t believe that an open society and a democracy, these methods can succeed. But, actually, they did succeed.  They succeeded in — in Germany, where the Weimar Republic collapsed and you had a Nazi regime follow it.  So this is a very, very dangerous way of deceiving people.  And I would like people to be aware that they are being deceived. Now, I — because I saw it as a child, I immediately react that way. But the people in America, they are innocent. They haven’t had the experience. They’re having the experience now. And I hope they wake up and they realize that they are being deceived.”

Host Fareed Zakaria also asked Soros about his thoughts of the Tea Party.

“Look, I think the people in the Tea Party are very decent people, hard-working.  They have been hit by a force that they — that comes from somewhere which they can’t fully understand,” Soros said. “And they are being misled. And they are misled by people who are using it for their selfish purposes, namely to remove regulations and reduce taxation. So reduce taxation and regulation and they are being used and deceived.”

As for the claims of being a “puppet master” – Soros said it was up to CNN viewers to decide.

“Well, you just had the experience of speaking to the — to the puppet master and the extreme left-wing manipulator,” he added. “And you — you and the audience can make their own decisions.”

Yesterday we brought you video of socialists openly rallying in Madison, WI and trying to recruit new members. Today, we show you that the communists are joining the fray too.

Once again, the MacIver Institute was down at the Capitol capturing video of those flocking to the protests in Wisconsin. This time, videographer Bill Osmuski caught up with some admitted revolutionaries from Chicago who came up to try and spread their message, and told Osmuski they definitely think “people are open to the possibilities of building a revolutionary movement.”

What did the communists cite as evidence? If you said “Egypt” and the unrest “around the world,” you’re right:

The group’s website explains more about its leader:

Bob Avakian is the leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. And he is more than that: he’s an innovative and critical thinker who has taken Marxism to a new place; he’s a provocative commentator on everything from basketball to religion, doo-wop music to science and he’s a pit-bull fighter against oppression who’s kept both his solemn sense of purpose and his irrepressible sense of humor.

He’s the author of “Revolution: Why It’s Necessary, Why It’s Possible, What It’s All About.”

The group, which appears to be different from the Communist Party USA, has three guiding principles:

1) The whole system we now live under is based on exploitation—here and all over the world. It is completely worthless and no basic change for the better can come about until this system is overthrown.

2) Many different groups will protest and rebel against things this system does, and these protests and rebellions should be supported and strengthened. Yet it is only those with nothing to lose but their chains who can be the backbone of a struggle to actually overthrow this system and create a new system that will put an end to exploitation and help pave the way to a whole new world.

3) Such a revolutionary struggle is possible. There is a political Party that can lead such a struggle, a political Party that speaks and acts for those with nothing to lose but their chains: The Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.

Remember, they’re just your friendly neighborhood communists.

As a side note, some of you might have caught someone carrying an American flag in the background. No, your eyes weren’t fooling you — the person was flying the flag upside down:

Posted on February 16, 2011 at 11:33am by  Jonathon M. Seidl

OAXACA, Mexico (AP) — Police fired tear gas and clashed for several hours Tuesday with teachers protesting a visit by President Felipe Calderon to the colonial city of Oaxaca.

The protests are reminiscent of unrest that paralyzed the southern city for five months in 2006 and left at least a dozen people dead.

The Section 22 teachers union said 20 protesters were injured during the running clashes, which lasted several hours. Police at the scene said five officers were hurt. Reporter Gildardo Mota of Radio Rama said he was struck on the left leg by a bullet.

The violence broke out in Oaxaca’s main plaza as the teachers gathered to protest. The teachers threw rocks and hit police with sticks. Police fought tear gas. It was unclear who fired the live ammunition.

Oaxaca, the capital of the southern state by the same name, is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Mexico because of its picturesque colonial center, Zapotec ruins and surrounding Indian villages known for their arts and crafts.

The protesters also torched a government vehicle and beat the Oaxaca state Public Safety Secretary Marco Tulio Lopez when he tried to call for calm outside the government offices.

Section 22 was the same union that began the 2006 protests. That upheaval began as a teachers strike to demand higher pay but quickly ballooned into a wider movement against then-Oaxaca Gov. Ulises Ruiz, who was accused of rigging his election.

Protesters seized the main plaza for months until federal forces moved in to clear them out.

Section 22 leaders said Tuesday they were protesting a decree that Calderon signed Monday giving parents tax breaks on private school tuition. The union leaders argue the measure undermines Mexico’s already struggling public schools. They threatened more protests and roadblocks in response to the police crackdown.

Calderon completed his visit despite the protest, signing several agreements with the state government.