Cash Is Becoming Endangered Specie

If you have paper money and coins lying about the house, you might be wise to unload them next time you shop — that is, if you are able to. Ever more retailers are refusing to accept specie. They want to be rid of the nuisance of sorting paper and coin into the cash drawer and out of it again to make change. They want an end to trips to the bank to deposit cash while at the same time having to take back paper and rolls of coins to make that change.

On the road to a cashless society, the U.S. is well behind. We have consistently lagged other countries in modernizing payment systems — chips in credit cards, a European innovation, being a prominent example. Other countries are moving ahead with deliberate speed. Sweden is the front runner in going cash free. Many of their stores no longer accept it. Neither do the country’s buses. Banks no longer dispense cash and accordingly have junked their ATM machines. Denmark and Norway are following close behind.

The credit card was an American invention but Europe has pushed the technology further than the U.S. As effective monopolies Master Card and Visa dragged their feet rather than incur the costs of technological conversion. Increasing incompatibility with the rest of the world and a high incidence of fraud from easily compromised credit card magnetic strips forced adoption of the more secure chips embedded in cards.

over there

Well over a decade ago mobile hand-held devices for accepting credit card payments became the norm in Europe. Ready to pay in a restaurant? At table, your waiter inserts your credit card into his or her device, (technically known as a terminal), perhaps has you type in your pin number, and the small machine not only handles the electronic transaction wirelessly, but prints the bill, the ticket for you to sign, and your receipt. That’s now old technology, but not here. In this country the practice all these years later is still for the waiter to go back and forth to the desk with card and paper while you wait.

Europe and Europay — their Master Card and Visa — have taken the technology further. If you’ve got the app for it, you can simply tap a card against such a device to transfer card information and complete a
transaction. Or tap your phone against it, if you have upgraded further. These moves toward maximal convenience make clear that paper and coins are headed toward obsolescence.

Innovators in the U.S. have concentrated on peer-to-peer money transfers, developing Square Cash, Venmo, Google Wallet, Apple Pay and Messenger with which people can use their phones to make payments in stores or to friends but payment by phone is nowhere near as widespread as in Europe.

Or in China, which could reach the cashless finish line ahead of Sweden. Given its population size, it is the largest cashless market in the world, but with a difference. The Chinese largely bypassed credit cards and are instead
zealots for QR codes. Their mass adoption means that the Chinese can pay for virtually anything by using WeChat — the biggest player — on their phone to scan a merchant’s or a friend’s QR code. From the “wallet” of money the customer has deposited at WeChat, the scan causes payment to the account data embedded in the QR pattern — a merchant’s, a friend’s — that your phone is scanning. Or a friend can reimburse you for lunch by scanning your personal QR code on your phone to send money to your WeChat account. Apps for generating one’s own code are available online.

India has made clear its intention to go cashless, and offers a broad selection of digital payment methods. In the first half of 2018 there were 11.8 billion digital transactions in the country. One motive of eliminating cash is to drive out corruption. In 2016 Prime Minister Narenda Modi took the drastic step of demonetizing the country’s 500 and 1,000 rupee notes favored by corrupt politicians and criminal elements much as packets of the U.S. $100 note are the world’s favorite. But Modi’s move was too soon. Declaring that those currency denominations would no longer be honored by the banks caused a cash shortage crisis enough to knock points off the country’s gross domestic product for the year.

Kenya is notable for going straight to digital payments, leapfrogging banks and credit cards with its M-Pesa system (pesa is Swahili for money). Users deposit money via a vast network of storefront agents into an account stored on their cell phones. Using text messages secured with a pin, they can then transfer money to people and merchants. By its 10th anniversary in 2017, Kenya’s invention had spread to 10 countries and is in use by 30 million people.

drawbacks

The concern for going cashless in the U.S. is that 7% of households have no bank affiliation — “unbanked” is the term. A further 19% are classified as “underbanked,” meaning they rely on services outside the banking system such as payday lenders and pawnshops. Elimination of cash would more severely marginalize an underclass consisting of immigrants, the elderly, and the poor. Walmart, for one, recognizes the problem. It converts cash to prepaid cards that customers can use where cash is not accepted.

Lawmakers have taken steps to protect those lackig payment facilities. Merchants in Philadelphia and Washington DC have been banned from going cashless. It was tried in Chicago but was voted down. Massachusetts foresaw the problem long ago. The state has had a law against refusing cash that dates from 1978.

But that goes in the opposite direction. To prepare for what is the seeming inevitable move away from cash, the country will need to modify its laws, starting with disallowing banks from turning away applicants they consider undesirable. Workers must have accounts somewhere if employers are to pay only by direct deposit. Fees charged for use of debit cards drawing against those deposits must be mandated at closer to zero.

If cash becomes hopelessly old-fashioned, at least we’d see the disappearance of tip jars in stores. Merchants will be forced to pay proper wages to their staff instead of expecting us to chip in. But how do we tip the plumber who comes on a Saturday to fix the overflowing toilet if there are no more $20 bills? It’s obvious. We’ll probably just tap his phone with our phone.

Declaring an Emergency Gives the President Unchecked Power

By not taking part in the negotiations for funding the government, by calling them a waste of time, President Trump is clearly signaling that he will declare an emergency and order that the wall be built anyway. The broader concern is that Trump, frustrated by the many limits placed on the presidency, has discovered
the exceptional powers given to the president by the emergency laws, which this article lays bare, and will resort repeatedly to this detour around the Constitution to get his way.

Angered by his inability simply to demand $5.7 billion to build a wall along the southern border, he weeks ago began considering declaring the migrants seeking asylum a “national emergency” that needed to be walled off, but had backed down under pressure from his lawyers and advisers and even Republican Congress members. But no longer, despite none of his intelligence chiefs mentioning the asylum seekers as even a problem.

envy of power

Trump has expressed admiration and shown envy of authoritarian heads of other governments able to run their countries free of constraints. He perhaps finds himself demeaned alongside those who have greater power than he — Russia’s Putin, China’s Xi, Egypt’s Sisi, Saudi Arabia’s Salman, even the Philippines’ Duterte, whom he congratulated for doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem” which has led to the extrajudicial killings of an estimated 12,000 to date.

Even if not over the wall, Trump’s yearning for this sort of power should make us expect that he will find some reason to declare a national emergency at some point, and then find reasons not to end it.

evergreen emergencies

The Constitution makes no provision for giving the president special powers. That lies with Congress which can suspend habeas corpus “when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it”. President Lincoln relied on that clause in 1861, but without obtaining Congressional approval. Because reliance on the slow-moving Congress was thought inadequate to meet a crisis, Congress itself early in the last century legislated various statutes expressly meant to stay dormant and awakened only when a president decided there was a national emergency to deal with.

Once activated, they have stayed active, passed from one president to the next. Several hundred were on the books when Congress sought to rein in the process with the National Emergencies Act in 1976. It required that a president announce to Congress which powers he intended to use. The statute calls for the state of emergency to expire after a year unless renewed by the president and every six months Congress is to consider its termination. In fact, none of this happens. Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice reports that emergency declarations have piled up as in the past such that there are 30 states of emergency still alive, “renewed for years on end”, that none of us are aware of. And in the 40 years since the law was passed “Congress has not met even once, let alone every six months, to vote on whether to end them”.

If President Trump were to declare an emergency, those still active emergencies provide him with an accumulation of 123 statutes to choose from, per the Center. He is even free to employ any of them irrespective of whether they pertain to the emergency he has declared. They span every facet of government, from agriculture to exports to the economy to civil liberties, such as when George W. Bush made it a crime by executive order after 9/11 for U.S. citizens to support suspected foreign terrorist organizations. This was more formerly enshrined in the Patriot Act which allowed federal agents to secretly search a residence under an “administrative subpoena” written by the FBI on its own, and exercised without the suspect’s knowing of the search, unless made aware by missing personal papers, tax records, bank statements, and one’s hard drive. Under the act, renewed ever since, it is illegal to disclose to anyone else that this has happened. As written, the law precludes even informing a lawyer in order to contest the subpoena.

temptations

Of particular concern with this president, given his campaign against the media as “the enemy of the people”, is his disregard of the First Amendment’s guarantee of press freedom. He has so far held off, and indeed it was Barack Obama who showed a willingness to prosecute reporters and those who leaked to the press, even a hero who had earlier risked his life taking down a much sought after terrorist in a Pakistan firefight. But now we are hearing Trump’s nominee for attorney general, William Barr, in answer to Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s question of whether he would jail journalists, say after a long pause:

I can conceive of situations where, you know, as a last resort and where a news organization has run through a red flag or something like that, knows that they’re putting out stuff that will hurt the country — there could be a situation where someone could be held in contempt.”

“As a last resort” is not particularly reassuring, considering he will be working under a president who has never spoken out against regimes around the world, ruled by despots such as Erdogan in Turkey, that have thrown hundreds of journalists in prison, and who would not renounce Saudi Arabia or its Crown Prince Salman for the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. And we have a Supreme Court that has been steadfast in support of the First Amendment but now has five justices tilted well to the right who might favor presidential power over press freedom.

In this century the press is greatly expanded by the Internet and social media. A 1942 amendment to the Communications Act of 1934 allows the president to shut down or take control of “any facility or station for wire communication” if he concludes “that there exists a state or threat of war involving the United States”. At the time “wire” referred to telephone and telegraph, but the Court might rule — considering the president has declared an emergency — that the law should be broadly treated to sweep in all forms of communication, that presumably being the law’s original intent. Thus could a president decree — this president should North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un again threaten the U.S. with an “unimaginable strike at an unimaginable time” — that certain subjects such as anti-war posts or policy critiques (or of Donald Trump), be banned from social media and the Internet as being unpatriotic and seditious, and with the sort of Patriot Act civil liberties penalties thrown in.

A second major concern is military, that Trump might call an emergency and order troops into the street. The Insurrection Act of 1807 provides for sending troops into a state at the request of its governor or into a rebellious state at the president’s discretion to put down “insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy”. Such was the case in 1957 when Arkansas’ governor Orvil Faubus refused to comply with the Supreme Court’s outlawing school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. President Eisenhower sent in troops to accompany students to school. In 1878 Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act (Latin for “power of the county”) which restricts the use of federal troops in domestic law enforcement. This principle — that using the military against Americans is undesirable — dates as far back as Ninth Century England, but it is not in our Constitution, and the law has exceptions, e.g., neither state national guards nor the Coast Guard is restricted from deployment into the streets.

It’s reasonable to think that President Trump had never heard of posse comitatus nor the principle of not using the military against its own citizens. He once threatened he would “send in the Feds!” to end the “carnage” of Chicago’s gang wars and subsequently showed no reluctance to ordering some 6,000 troops to the Mexican border just before the midterm elections when a caravan of migrants from the Central American triangle was on its way to the U.S. to seek asylum. Trump spoke of this as an “invasion” and a “national emergency” without formerly declaring one, an emergency that evaporated immediately after the elections. The troops were not used for law enforcement, but neither was there much public objection to Trump’s deploying the U.S. military within the country, especially for doing so when there was no emergency. That was a weakening of the legal safeguards long in place, and it told the president that he could deploy troops in country with impunity.

democracy until cancelled

Those who reach the highest levels of our government then learn of a practice entirely unknown to the public, as do we from Ms. Goitein’s article: Presidential Emergency Action Documents. First devised at the outset of the Cold War as powers for the president to invoke should a nuclear exchange cripple government, these are draft executive orders, proclamations, and messages to Congress that lie dormant and are secret to the extent that none of them have ever even been leaked to the public. All that is known is from references to them that have emerged between the cracks, as in Freedom of Information requests of FBI memorandums. But gleanings from such sources reveal that PEADs call for disturbing measures to be taken on a proclamation of emergency. Those peeks have shown mention of suspension of the Constitution, martial law, curfews, suspension of habeas corpus, voiding of Americans’ passports, and an FBI “Security Index” of more than 10,000 persons considered to be subversive and subject therefore to detention. The security index dates from the 1950s to 1970s, but as recently as 2008 came a report that it is still maintained. From midway through the Obama years, the Justice Department has been given funds to update PEADs with no knowledge of which are thought to need revision or have this priority.

From the Insurrection and Posse Comitatus acts, the 30 emergency declarations still alive with their 123 statutes conferring special powers on the president, and the untold number of unrevealed Presidential Emergency Action Documents comes the alarming realization that there exists below the surface a parallel government, an authoritarian regime that could burst into being, dispensing with democracy and its laws, all ready to take over if a president proclaims an emergency to a pliant Congress. One could say that there is indeed a “deep state”, and it belongs to Donald Trump.

Taxes in America: A Mess That Has Only Grown Worse

The tax cuts enacted a year ago by the Republican-controlled Congress and signed by President Trump have inspired a growing realization that America’s tax system is a shambles. That verdict goes beyond the uproar over the new tax law handing corporations a 40% rate reduction and the uncalled-for tax cut benefiting the rich. The dog’s breakfast resulting from what politicians and special interests have dumped into the tax code across decades with no sense of a master plan has led to a growing consensus that we are doing it all wrong.

In the United States, unlike several European countries, assets are not taxed, no matter how much they may have gained in value, until sold. Most of the wealth the richest Americans have acquired is not taxed, even as it has grown in value from year to year. On the other hand, Congress sees fit in the laws it passes to withhold taxes from the first dollar earned by every salaried worker and every dollar thereafter.

Leaving assets free from from taxation leads to easily the most deviant and insupportable tax practice: the estate and gift tax, which, save for the rare exception, taxes no one by allowing accumulated value to pass on to others tax free. Not only that, but the inheritor’s cost basis becomes the value of the asset on the day it has transferred. A giftee could sell stock the day received and pay no tax whatever, no matter by how much the asset had gained in value in the years leading up to the transfer. Or sell the property later — land, securities, whatever — and pay tax only on the difference between the selling price and the phony “cost basis” valuation of the transfer date.

how the rich got richer

In the early 1990s, 18 extremely
wealthy families pooled $500 million to lobby against the tax — the owners of the first and third largest privately held companies (Koch Industries and Mars candy); the family that owned 40% of Walmart; another family owning 40% of Campbell Soup, among them. Legislators benefiting from corporate money flowing into their campaigns were only too happy to oblige.
The table shows that as recently as 2001 only the first $675,000 of value in an estate was exempt from the inheritance tax, with a 55% tax rate on amounts above that threshold. In the end- 2017 tax bill, that not only rocketed to $11.18 million that an individual can transfer as gift or on death — and double that for a married couple — but the top tax rate even declined to 40%.. The number of people subject to estate and gift taxes has become so rarified that only about 2,000 (or 0.0006% of the population) in the U.S. are currently liable for the estate tax.

The question: How do the nation’s wealthy, and the Congress members who carry water for them, justify imposing no tax whatever when an estate is transferred? We should eliminate the rule that allows all taxable gains to be wiped out at death.

That would be “double taxation” say those who fight what they call the “death tax” and call for what remains of the tax to be repealed altogether. Selling the notion that taxes have already been paid on the income in an estate is a lie that has sold well. Heads nod in agreement, with no thought given to the likely appreciation in value of those assets — real estate, collections, securities, and so on. The tax law looks the other way for this privileged class while the rest of us — the middle-class with its modest income who have to sell things to meet household and educational needs for our kids — are required to pay taxes on whatever gains we realize.

Lobbying campaigns against the estate and gift tax paint a tale of woe every time the subject is raised about offspring having to sell the family farm they have inherited in order to pay the tax. But that’s a red herring. For those lacking the cash or unable to borrow, the government could be the lender with a lien, at interest, on illiquid assets payable when an asset — such as that totemic farm — is someday sold. But the tiny violin playing for this equally tiny minority as a basis for foregoing taxes altogether for a huge majority is obviously a sham that doesn’t have the country in mind.

There is also the indefensible deduction of the appreciated value of assets when given as family or charitable gifts. That painting you bought fifteen years ago for $2,000, now appraised at $50,000 because the artist has become recognized? You can give that to a charity and subtract the full $50,000 from income that would otherwise be taxed. The same with securities, or anything you give. You have done nothing to make the asset’s value appreciate. The outside world’s good opinion of it did that. Why the tax giveaway?

And when a gift is made, say to one’s children, their cost basis for when they someday sell it, is the value of the asset on the date of the transfer. So that stock held by mom and dad for 10 years that doubled in value, their whole capital gain moves on, tax free.

charity tilted to the rich

Charitable giving is given a similar free pass. By that we’re not referring to modest giving; that’s no longer deductible on its own because it is subsumed by the new tax law which doubled the standard deduction. So it is only the biggest givers that get tax deductions. Every tax waiver the government grants for a gift to charity means money the government has to get from the ordinary citizenry. In the next 20 years baby boomers are expected to give almost $7 trillion to philanthropy. Those gifts of millions to Yale or Stanford, reducing by that amount the donor’s income that will be taxed, means governments will be squeezed enough to ask the rest of us for more. Does this make sense? Shouldn’t philanthropy be limited?

foresight turned off

What was originally billed as tax reform and simplification, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act became the opposite, adding new levels of complications. Consider this: Millions of people set up their businesses as limited liability companies, S corporations and partnerships whereby the businesses don’t pay the taxes, their profits or losses pass through to owners’ personal tax returns. The attraction for using that business form was that those owners mostly paid personal taxes at rates well under the 35% formerly paid by the standalone “C” corporations.

Then came the corporate plan to cut the tax rate from 35% to 21% for corporations. What about everyone with “pass-through” businesses. It was belatedly realized that the tax rate for a subset of millions of businesses would be more than the new 21% tax rate for standalone corporations. It was as if no one in Congress had thought ahead. Something had to be done.

Hurriedly and awkwardly, Congress devised a tax break they thought commensurate with the windfall standalone corporations were getting. This became a clumsy 20% off-the-top deduction from income with tax computed on the balance. There’s more. The deduction phases out on income in excess of beyond one dollar level for a single filer, and another for joint filers. And it ends in 2025. And it’s not for everyone. An arbitrary list took shape deciding who should be eligible for the discount — flower stores yes, architects no, and so on — arbitrarily based on whether a business has employees. Congress, which had preached simplification as a prime criterion for tax “reform” instead added this and hideous level of jury-rigged complication to a tax code that by 2014 ran to about
2,600 pages but is so complicated that 73,594 pages are needed to explain it.

By the way, those pass-through businesses? Donald Trump reportedly has hundreds of them, each holding ownership of separate real estate undertakings. But they don’t have employees so they’re not eligible for the 20% deduction, right? At close to the last minute, Utah’s Senator Orrin Hatch, quite on his own, without the knowledge of others, “air-dropped” into the bill text that permitted pass-throughs with few or no employees to partake of the deduction, too. This had nothing to do with Trump, of course.

debt

The Economist said a few years back that, “The field for the title of world’s worst economic distortion is a crowded one”, and put the subsidization of debt at the top. Economists in general disfavor that governments allow the deduction of mortgage interest, reducing income that is taxed. It is effectively a subsidy to the housing industry, which — no question — would suffer from its elimination as would a margin of people who could no longer afford to buy houses.

The 2017 tax act did take steps, wiping out deduction of interest of home equity loans and capping deductibility at the interest on $1 million in debt, and the interest on $750,000 for newly bought houses — a new complication for homeowners to learn how to compute. But note that the unexplained doubling of the standard deduction to $24,000 a year for marrieds is something of a ruse, covering as it does much or all of what in prior years was homeowners’ biggest item in their itemized deduction list. Just as before.

The act also puts partial limits on the interest deduction for businesses, but only for those with three years of gross receipts averaging over $25 million, and it adds a thicket of complications for the rest. Again, so much for simplification.

But the other atrocity in the tax code is the handout to the real estate industry which thinks anyone who winds up with taxable income a fool. The government allows real estate companies to write down the value of a property over as little as 25 years. A property owner thus says that the value of a building declines year-by-year by 1/25th because after 25 years it will be a pile of worthless rubble. That 1/25th is a million dollars for a $25 million property to make the point that these are big bucks reducing profits and therefore taxes throughout the real estate industry even though there is no actual dollar cost and the depreciation is imaginary — just a green-eyeshade entry in a ledger. Why imaginary? Because buildings last far longer — think of apartment buildings in New York City over a hundred years old — and generally increase in value. It is a senseless tax policy, obviously perpetuated by politicians eager for rewards from the real estate industry.

other ideas

There is much more that is wrong, of course. The double taxation of dividends, for instance, or that the idle income of capital gains is taxed at a fixed low rate whereas the tax on labor rises with income, etc.

The inequities of a tax code shot through with illogic has attracted a growing body of true reformers who go beyond just fixing what we cite above and who rethink taxing fundamentally. The most radical ideas come in a book by E. Glen Weyl, chief economist at Microsoft, and Eric Posner of the University of Chicago. They don’t at all follow in the footsteps of that university’s Milton Friedman. Weyl and Posner would break the iron grip of the property rights so fundamental to conservatives but which they say prevent markets from being truly free.

Take land as representative. It is monopolistic. Its owners block out entry by anyone else. That stymies what might be done with idle land by others who might bring entrepreneurial energy — an apartment building, say, or a business complex. For all property, not just land, the duo promotes a wealth tax. All persons would ascribe a value to everything they own and would be taxed on their self-declared total wealth. The catch is that every item must be available for purchase at its declared value. Pricing an item too low to minimize taxes would attract buyers who will have the right to claim and take possession of the item for that price. So to keep property, an owner would need to ascribe a high value to it — and pay heavy taxes. That at least compensates society for impeding the more constructive use of an asset.

It’s an interesting idea that will never happen, but that’s true of any change for as long as the current campaign finance laws and the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling allows politicians to follow the money instead of fixing the country.

The Russians in Afghanistan: Trump’s Strange History Rewrite

In its reporting of the year’s first cabinet meeting, The New York Times made
The cabinet meets at the White House, January 2nd.
no mention of it. Neither did The Wall Street Journal in its short write-up of the January 2nd meeting. It did run a short mid-page editorial, though, titled “Trump’s Cracked Afghan History”. What caused this from the normally friendly to Trump Journal? These remarks by the president:

“The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They [the Soviets] were right to be there. The problem was, it was a tough fight, and literally they went bankrupt, they went into being called Russia again as opposed to the Soviet Union. You know, a lot of these places you’re reading about now are no longer a part of Russia because of Afghanistan.

The Journal editorial called “Mr. Trump’s utterly false narrative…reprehensible” for good reason. In 1979 three divisions of Russia’s 40th Army entered Beyond collusion? : January 12: The New York Times today reports that after President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey and then said it was because of “this Russia thing”, and because of so many Russia contacts by those associated with the campaign, the FBI began an investigation into whether Trump was actually working for the Russians. That story here.
    

Afghanistan to prop up a communist government because it was threatened by an insurgency. The invasion had nothing to do with terrorism and Russia certainly had no “right to be there”. The Russians were acting on the Brezhnev Doctrine which dictated that any country that had gone communist would not be allowed to revert.

For Russia it was a disaster. By the time they pulled out 10 years later, about 15,000 Soviet soldiers had been killed, and about 35,000 wounded. For Afghanistan it was far worse. About two million civilians were killed and about four million Afghans were driven into exile in Iran and Pakistan. The United States supplied the mujahidin fighters with Stinger missiles that shot Russian attack helicopters from the skies, fighters whose thanks was to then ally with al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

Four-star Army general Barry McCaffrey called their fight “basically responding to communism as an atheistic affront to Islam” and called Trump’s remarks, “a truly astonishing, ignorant statement by the president”. The Journal agreed: “We cannot recall a more absurd misstatement of history by an American President”.

But it seemed to be more than that. An op-ed piece in The Washington Post at the beginning of December by Russian historian Vladimir Kara-Murza reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin is engaged in a campaign to whitewash aspects of the Soviet past. Putin has said the collapse of the Soviet Union is the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century” and part his program of rehabilitation is a resolution before the government that justifies the Soviet’s war in Afghanistan, calling it “in full accordance with the norms of international law”, and reversing the Russian view until now that it was a tragic mistake. The formal vote on the

new resolution is planned for before the 30th anniversary of the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan on February 15th of 1989. It will now be the new “historical truth” replacing the December, 1989, “moral and political condemnation” of the invasion by the Congress of People’s Deputies, a resolution that will be declared null and void.

Looked at in this context, Trump’s remarks go beyond ignorance of history. He is siding with Putin and his regime’s revision of history. How would Trump know of Putin’s history makeover? How would he know that sanctification of the Afghanistan invasion is in the works? Is there unreported late night phone contact with Putin? Once again we hear extraordinary deference to the Russian leader whom he has so often praised, and once again the question arises of just what does Putin have on the American president for him to engage in such abject appeasement.

Former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence Frank Figliuzzi predicts that unit of the FBI will want to look into what is causing the president to side with Russia’s attempt to rewrite history, saying that it is just the sort of suspicious allusion that attracts the counterintelligence unit’s attention.

By signaling his agreement with the Putin doctrine and sanctioning the Soviet slaughter, how has Trump not stunned and outraged both the Afghanistan leadership and, for that matter, the Taliban, telling them that Russia was “right to be there”. How has he not effectively foreclosed the likelihood of a diplomatic initiative to end the 17-year war.