WHEN PENGUINS FLEW AND WATER BURNED This is the true memoir of one US Air Force navigator’s journey from the schoolhouses of Air Training Command to the nuclear alerts of the Cold War to combat in a 35-year-old anachronism called the B-52. It is a first-hand account of life during the last days of Strategic Air Command, the early days of Air Combat Command and the ensuing military drawdown of the 1990s. From peacetime training exercises across the globe to combat operations in Desert Storm, Jim Clonts takes the reader inside the cockpit where life and death are seconds apart. Often comical, sometimes heart-pounding, other times tragic, WHEN PENGUINS FLEW AND WATER BURNED takes you into the world of military aviation, a crucible where warriors learn the true nature of character, conscience and mortality.

Friends of Liberty VOL 17
by Jim Clonts, 2009

07/28/2009

Saving America by Destroying it

Lately I've noticed a disturbing new trend in Democratic legislation. Whether they are attacking the healthcare, automotive or energy industries, the new laws seem to be based on a single premise: destroy the profitability of the existing companies by creating an economic environment in which they cannot compete.

The stated aim of the Energy/Climate Change bill, also called Cap and Trade, is to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and replace them with "green" alternatives. The legislation, however, does not build "green" alternatives, rather it creates an environment where fossil fuel providers and power generators cannot make a profit. Obama himself said during the campaign his plan would "bankrupt the coal industry" and "cause electrical rates to necessarily skyrocket." His words, not mine.

If the Government proclaimed it was spending two-hundred billion dollars to build a giant solar array in the Arizona desert, or fifty new nuclear power plants, or an experimental geothermal plant, I could almost get behind that. That type of investment would at least yield something tangible. Instead, the legislation does not create new energy systems. It simply destroys the profitability of today's energy producers. The master plan relies on existing energy producers paying higher taxes in the form of carbon credits. This ensures no utility will expand their operations, since their return on investment is guaranteed to be negative. In fact, some oil company executives have already said they would shrink operations, shut down refineries and import more foreign fuels to meet demand. Cap and Trade achieves its goal by driving companies into bankruptcy. This is pure genius---if your goal is to own the energy industry. Once the energy producers' stock prices are driven below sea level due to the mass exodus of investors, it will be all that more easy for the Government to buy them out when they do go under---ala General Motors.

The same is true for the healthcare industry. By creating a non-competitive operating environment where you pit traditional insurance companies against the bottomless well of the US Treasury you guarantee the Government Option will be the only survivor. Then, when everyone is on some form of Medicare and hospitals, clinics and physicians are forced to accept government payment terms, their profitability will collapse and they will declare bankruptcy---all part of the plan for a government that wants to own the healthcare industry as well.

It seems the Master strategy is to drive these industries into the ground by sucking them dry of capital through taxation or regulation, then in the name of the "public good", bail them out and in the process gain an ownership stake and a place in the boardroom. President Obama repeatedly states he does not wish to run these industries. I believe him. His goal is not to run them, but dictate how they are to be run, through his many Czars, making the CEOs who do run them subservient to the will of the Government.

What is the end result of such a strategy? History has many examples of authoritarian governments dictating operating policy to private industries or outright seizing them: Nazi Germany (Messerschmitt, Daimler-Benz, Krupp), Imperial Japan (Mitsubishi) and Venezuela (CITGO) to name a few. Then you have the State-run industries of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, China, Cuba and North Korea. In the United States we have some major companies cozying up to the Federal Government in preparation of this new future: General Electric, Goldman-Sachs, General Motors and Chrysler, to name a few.

Ironically, traditional Western European socialist-leaning countries such as Germany and France are heading in the opposite direction at the moment, as is Red China. Regardless of who we end up looking like---going down this path guarantees we won't look like the United States. How's that hope and change working for you?

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