The Great Debate

Venezuela has kicked off a presidential election campaign whose charismatic central figures are a governor and a ghost. The victor, however, may well be the flesh and blood heir of a revolutionary regime left to grapple with real and deepening crises.

The opposition has seized upon the death of President Hugo Chávez last week as an opportunity to break the 14-year grip on power of the self-styled socialist revolutionary and send their candidate, state Governor Henrique Capriles, to the Miraflores palace in elections set for April 14. But the outpouring of grief following El Comandante’s death from cancer showed the polarizing figure will continue to grip the national psyche.

Venezuelans either lionized or loathed their populist president. He was a hero to millions for using the country’s oil wealth to finance welfare programs. Chávez won October’s vote with an 11-point lead against Capriles, whose 44 percent tally was nonetheless the best performance yet against Chávez in an election. To his detractors, he was an autocrat who trampled constitutional rights, nationalized up to 1,000 companies and scared off foreign investment.

Capriles will seek to convince the mostly poor Venezuelans who supported Chávez that his regime produced mixed results at best and that their lofty revolutionary dreams are largely unfulfilled. The centrist candidate, who looks to Brazil for a model of social inclusion, argues it’s time to address down-to-earth economic woes, corruption and crime that plague this OPEC nation with the world’s largest oil reserves.

I watched Chávez sow the seeds of his revolution 20 years ago. On Feb. 4, 1992, as the new Reuters bureau chief in Caracas, tracer fire in the nighttime sky lured me to the presidential residence, where I witnessed police fighting rebel troops loyal to a paratrooper named Hugo Chávez. The rebellion was quickly crushed and Chávez jailed. Asked whether he was shelving his bid for power, he replied, “for now.”

Few economists preach spending cuts as a cure for high unemployment. Yet that’s exactly what Congress decided when it imposed, starting March 1, across-the-board spending cuts (the “sequester”). Despite Friday’s mildly upbeat jobs numbers, the economy remains limp, with 15 million or so unemployed individuals who want to work. Federal spending cuts won’t make their plight any better.

Congress has known for quite some time that the federal budget will turn sour in 10 to 15 years, with expected outlays far outstripping expected revenue. For complicated, if not odd, reasons, Congress now feels compelled to do what it ordinarily shuns: cut federal programs and raise taxes. That might seem politically brave and responsible. But brushed up against facts, the case for Congress taking swift action wobbles, hitting wrong targets at the wrong time.

Of the many reasons politicians offer for cutting federal spending during economically straitened times, two cry out for attention. First, many liberals and conservatives say, Congress needs to stanch soaring federal spending. Second, conservatives say, federal programs are growing ever more intrusive, ever more threatening to private initiative.

Fiscal crisis? What fiscal crisis? The stock market is up, unemployment is down and the deficit is shrinking.

The fiscal crisis is in Washington, and it’s a crisis of Washington’s own devising. All those deadlines! January 1: the fiscal cliff. March 1: sequesters. March 27: a possible government shutdown. Sometime in August:  the debt ceiling, again.

The unending fiscal crisis could take up the entire year. President Barack Obama desperately wants to end it. For one thing, more spending cuts could bring on a recession. For another, an unending fiscal crisis would monopolize the agenda. No time for Congress to take up immigration reform or gun control or the minimum wage or preschool education.

There is an increasing probability that financial markets will respond negatively to the unfolding economic and political drama unfolding across Europe. So far, the European Central Bank has pumped out cash and calmed the nerves of investors, but it needs to do more. A cut in interest rates by the ECB is crucial to contribute to a revival of growth across the euro zone. On its own, however, that is not enough. Europe’s political authorities need to counter the increasingly widespread perception that they lack the will to confront the zone’s economic ailments and promote a clear path to growth – austerity policies alone will not work.

The situation has become far more serious now that the crisis has moved from the zone’s periphery to its major economies: Spain shows no signs of emerging from prolonged negative growth, Italy is now facing mounting difficulties and France is sliding into recession.

Overall, looking across the euro zone, the jobless data best illustrates the pain of this crisis. The latest statistics from Eurostat show unemployment across the 17-nation euro zone at 11.9percent; 19 million people are out of work. The rates in Greece and Spain are 27 percent and 26.2 percent, respectively, and in both countries the rate for youth unemployment exceeds 55 percent. In Portugal and in Ireland, where major efforts are being made to overcome acute difficulties, the jobless rates are, nevertheless, 17.6 percent and 14.7 percent, respectively. The rate in Cyprus has shot up from 9.9 percent to 14.7 percent over the last year. In Italy, the rate is over 11.5 percent, while in France it now stands at 10.6 percent.

Discussions about illicit drugs can often hinge on misunderstandings about terms. This confusion is glaring when words such as “decriminalization,” where drug possession is no longer criminalized, and “legalization,” legalizing the sale of drugs like heroin or cocaine, are used interchangeably.

There is also confusion about the effectiveness of the 1961, 1971 and 1988 international drug conventions, which regulate our global approach to drug control. Those who label the conventions as ineffective now talk about liberalizing drug laws and amending the regulations. But the system is working — especially when it comes to health.

The conventions have helped limit the threat of illicit drugs. Global opium production fell by roughly 80 percent over the last century, even as the earth’s population quadrupled.

On Friday morning in downtown Manhattan, Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law appeared in a federal courtroom to be charged with conspiring to kill Americans. In a sober, orderly proceeding that lasted a total of 17 minutes, Judge Lewis Kaplan explained to Suleiman Abu Ghaith his rights, appointed his defense lawyers, read the charges against him, recorded his plea of “not guilty,” ordered the prisoner’s continued detention and announced that he would set a trial date for the case in 30 days.

Prosecutors have already turned over the bulk of their unclassified evidence against the defendant. Abu Ghaith, who was transferred to New York from Jordan on March 3, is reportedly cooperating with federal authorities and providing important information about al Qaeda.

It was, in others words, an ordinary, orderly federal court arraignment in an international terrorism case. Almost 500 such defendants have been convicted in U.S. federal courts on U.S. soil since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

It is not a national election year, but the “red state versus blue state” wars continue. Texas Governor Rick Perry’s recent foray into California, to lure away businesses and jobs, signals more than a rivalry between these two mega-states. The Texas-California competition represents the political, economic and cultural differences driving American politics today – and for the foreseeable future.

Texas and California are robust political and economic competitors. We don’t know which will be the template for the future. As California emerges from its economic and fiscal doldrums and some of Texas’ vulnerabilities become evident, it is now far from certain that Texas will emerge the victor.

California is a global hub for trade, tourism, culture and the manufacture of ideas and intellectual property. From high tech and biotech to entertainment, travel and logistics, the state’s brand transcends national boundaries. The Golden State tops the nation in agriculture. It also sets the pace on green energy development, which could lead to a dramatic increase in the state’s energy production.

The New York Federal Reserve, always interested in brightening our days, released a slideshow last week on student loans. It had little good news, but it did offer a reminder that in 2013 fewer people are indebted to the American Dream. Instead, they’re in debt because of it.

College, we’ve long been told, is the great equalizer. (And, despite the doomsayers, there’s reason to think it still is.) But increasingly, people are graduating in vastly different economic situations. More than 40 percent of 25-year-olds now have student debt, and 35 percent of twentysomethings are more than 90 days delinquent on loans that are being repaid. All of this comes as the average income for a 25- to 34-year-old with a bachelor’s degree is the lowest it’s been in years, down about $10,000 since 2000.

All of this makes people worried. How are that many people going to pay back that much debt while also paying for all the other stuff good, consumerist Americans buy? And if they don’t pay it back, what will that do to the economy? And while they’re (not) paying it back, what happens if they curtail taking out loans for cars, houses, etc.?

“The End of the Chávez Era” That was the headline on Colombia’s major newspaper, El Tiempo, the day after Hugo Chávez’s death.

True, Chávez’s controversial and colorful 14-year rule has ended, and Venezuela has lost a president who evoked uncommonly intense passions among followers and detractors.   Venezuelans will not easily forget a leader who, for better or worse, was the consummate showman and left an indelible mark on a highly polarized society.

Yet Chavez also followed in a long line of caudillos, or strongmen, who have been a notable feature in Latin America’s political history. Indeed, Venezuela has had its fair share. As the acute observer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia’s Nobel Prize-winning writer, noted soon after Chávez’s 1998 election, the new president’s seductive rhetoric recalled so many of the region’s other leading political figures — but he could well end up as yet another Latin American despot.

This essay is adapted from Useful Enemies: John Demjanjuk and America’s Open-Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals, which was recently published by Delphinium Books.

A trove of recently declassified documents leads to several inescapable conclusions about the FBI’s role in protecting both proven and alleged Nazi war criminals in America. First, there can be no doubt that J. Edgar Hoover collected Nazis and Nazi collaborators like pennies from heaven. Unlike the military and its highly structured Operation Paperclip — with its specific targets, systematic falsification of visa applications, and creation of bogus biographies — Hoover had no organized program to find, vet, and recruit alleged Nazis and Nazi collaborators as confidential sources, informants, and unofficial spies in émigré communities around the country. America’s No. 1 crime buster was guided only by opportunism and moral indifference.

Each Nazi collaborator that his agents stumbled upon, or learned about from the CIA, was both a potential spy and a potential anticommunist leader. Once they were discovered, Hoover sought them out, used them, and protected them. He had no interest in reporting alleged Nazi war criminals to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the Justice Department, or the State Department for possible deportation or extradition. He appeared smug in his simplistic division of Americans into shadeless categories of bad guys and good guys, communists and anticommunists.