What’s All This Fear About NATO? Europe Needs to Hike up Its Pants.

It is absolutely absurd that a lawless, narcissistic, American president can bring the world to it knees. Europe is dithering over its terror that a NATO without America is defenseless when, in actuality, an America that leaves NATO is a joke.

Ukraine has more courage than the entire world outside its beleaguered borders, and what is its reward? A dithering, frightened Europe.

I speak from having been around the block a time or two. Statistically, only 1% of those born in 1935 are alive today, and I am among them. But we’re a disappearing voice, and our ‘lived experience’ is quickly dying with us. Who knows someone who actually heard Hitler’s rants in real time? Who among us understands that the Marshall Plan rebuilt a totally destroyed Europe and Asia, or who George Marshall even was?

We were giants, who overcame two world wars within twenty years, held the nuclear threat at bay for two generations until the wheels came off Russia’s support of a European Iron Curtain, and overcame our own warlike stupidity in attempting to nation-build. We were (and are yet) strong enough to survive a rogue presidency.

And we will.

Donald Trump is not America, nor is he the cause of America’s transgressions. He is the result. Let me explain.

Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister who pretty much single-handedly carried Britain on his shoulders through World War Two, had this to say about our country: “You can always depend upon America to do the right thing, once it has explored every alternative.”

We have been exploring alternatives, searching for that right thing, and the most toxic of those wrong decisions will end with this presidency.

The millionaires of our nation saw an opportunity to expand their wealth by a thousand times, and they took it, chop-shopping America’s assets like a stolen car. Chop shops, if you’re unfamiliar with the term, are criminal enterprises that dismember automobiles for profit, much like butchering pigs in a slaughterhouse.

Check out my book, Chop-Shop, the Deconstruction of America, to see exactly how that happened, beginning with the Reagan Administration. Ronald Raegan’s first act as president was to fire all air traffic controllers, and destroy their union. The profits were enormous, millionaires made a thousand times richer (which is what a billion amounts to), shared at a dinner-table seating both Democrats and Republicans.

Entire industries were packed off to China, where labor was (and is) cheap. Cheaply made clothing and consumables were fed back to a wounded American middle class that could no longer afford quality, once their production line union salaries had been offshored.

Who lost and who gained from that criminal activity?

Put simply, an American oligarchy was created, trading in its vibrant economic middle class for an economic 1% who took home all the marbles. With that economic control, they bought all three parts of American government; the legislative (House and Senate), judicial (Supreme Court) and executive (presidency).

The other winner of that American decline was China.

It’s not widely known in America, mostly because of the privatization of most media sources but, in the past seven years alone, China has built a middle class twice the size of America. Not twice the size of our lost middle class, but twice the size of the entire nation—seven hundred million, and growing.

It seems our bright and shiny new oligarchy traded off your and my economic future, in order to become a thousand times more wealthy than the millionaires of my youth.

Those wealthy folks, who were my clients in my business days, had a lovely home, probably with a swimming pool. Husband and wife each had a pricey automobile, perhaps a Lincoln and a Cadillac. Their kids went to private schools and decent universities, and they might possibly own a summer house by a lake. What they did not mostly have, was a private plane, 300 foot yacht, and homes on three continents.

Billionaires, as you might expect, rarely rely on a traditional ‘salary,’ as their income is derived from investment gains and wealth growth, which often increases by millions or billions annually, compared to an average worker’s annual income. While top 1% earners might make over $1 million annually, the top 10 wealthiest people (think Musk, Zuckerberg, or Bezos) grow the wealth in their personal gardens at a rate of $1.3 billion per day.

If your pocket calculator isn’t handy, that’s $1,300 million each and every day.

On their way to that shared dinner-table, where we had no seats, other offenses arrived on little cat feet.

Put simply, an American oligarchy was created, trading in its vibrant economic middle class for an economic 1% who took home all the marbles. With that economic control, they bought all three parts of American government; the legislative (House and Senate), judicial (Supreme Court) and executive (presidency).

As a nation, America has no graft and corruption. We have made such shortcomings legal. The Supreme Court made it so, by allowing corporations to contribute without limit to political action committees (PACs). Free speech was thereby maintained, and only the size of the megaphone affected.

Think about that, the next time you hope for gun control, or improved schools for your kids.

The union movement that supported middle class wages was destroyed. Ronald Reagan’s first act in office was to de-unionize and fire all air-traffic control workers.

President after president, of both parties, granted continual tax cuts, disproportionally advantageous to the super wealthy. The military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about grew to 42% of our national budget, supporting wars we never won and killing tens of thousands of our kids, because it was profitable. Not their kids, their kids moved to Canada, or had bone spurs.

Millionaires paid their taxes, and America had no debt in 1950.

Billionaires legally dodge every available tax, and debt has grown 75 years later to $3.7 trillion. In ten years, the interest on that debt may exceed our gross national income, although no one really knows.

Under the new oligarchy, American healthcare became the worst and most expensive among wealthy nations, social safety nets fell victim to tax cuts, environmental standards declined, homelessness became epidemic, and our drug policies killed hundreds of thousands a year, while pharmaceutical companies thrived.

Nationwide, our infrastructure became unstructured and college grads moved in with their parents, too debt encumbered to buy a starter home.

Although the national debt, indeed, grew from nothing, to $3.7 trillion, you know what? Donald Trump hadn’t anything to do with it.

He rode down an escalator and won a presidency, because half the nation had lost its ability to live decently, and see their kids do better than they had done. The abandoned segment of American society was scared to death, and on the brink of bankruptcy. After the 2008 financial crisis, roughly 3 million American families lost their homes to foreclosure.

Three million homes foreclosed, and the banks made whole again by your and my government.

Fear and middle-class loss, along with a transfer of national wealth to the top 1%, created the national anger for a ‘tear-down-the-house’ election, no matter what. Along came Trump with the perfect nationalist rhetoric to pick up the pieces of lost jobs and societal neglect.

“You’ve been fucked, and only I can save you.”

Trump is not the cause. He is the effect. More than that, he is the metaphoric alcoholic (yeah, I know he doesn’t drink) required to save America’s much-needed societal Twelve-Step Program.

Which is a long way around to explaining Donald Trump, his threat to NATO, neglect of Ukraine by Europe, threats to Greenland, and the ruination of global respect for America.

But it comes as close as I can, by simply laying out the groundwork.

And I was there, the whole time, grieving, writing, and watching.

Now it’s time for Europe to hitch up its pants and save NATO, with or without the United States.