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 33
by Jim Clonts, 2009

11/28/2009

My friends have been telling me lately that I don't seem myself, that I'm not the happy guy they are used to, that I've lost my mojo. After a tortuous period of self-analysis, I have to agree. I have not been myself lately. My friends have asked if I am having trouble at home, with the wife, kids or finances. No, I say. Those things are fine. So why am I depressed? The answer occurred to me the other day as I was driving to work. It's so simple and I'm surprised I didn’t recognize it earlier.

For the first time in my two-plus decades of adult life, I feel like the America I know is not going to survive. The things I have always held as givens in this society are being systematically destroyed. We are experiencing a massive paradigm shift which leaves me feeling like a stranger in a land where I do not speak the language.

I don't mean the country will go bankrupt in twenty or thirty years or some arbitrary time period in the future. I mean it is in the process of going bankrupt right now, today, and has been for the last twenty years. It's been a slow degradation until lately and I think many of us have only noticed thanks to the insane policies of the Obama Administration which have accelerated our journey to oblivion to warp speed. I look at our society, our infrastructure, the cars we drive, the planes we fly, the products we purchase, the way we dress, the vacations we take, the food we eat, the ball games we attend, the neon lights of retail, the media, our homes, the jobs we hold and I see a house of cards about to topple thanks to a Federal Government out of control.

The irony is that there is nothing wrong with most of America. Our industries, our businesses, large and small, and a majority of our population work, produce, make money, buy, sell, pay taxes and survive in a thriving capitalists system. Starbucks successfully sells coffee. Wal-mart successfully sells everything. Boeing successfully builds the world's best aircraft. Our power plants are marvels of technology and enterprise, pumping out hundreds of thousands of mega-watts to keep the lights on and motors turning. Regardless of whether you like Windows or not, one can’t deny that Microsoft has successfully transformed the way every business operates, increasing productivity ten-fold in some cases.

If left to its own devices, American industry would succeed. Sure some companies would fail, but that's the mechanism which keeps the economy strong as a whole. The inefficient are weeded out because the innovative comes up with a better way. Capital is invested. Jobs are created. Profits are realized. Capital is created and reinvested. Wages rise, as does standard of living. That's the America I knew.

Today all of our industries and businesses big and small face a coming disaster thanks to the Federal Government. I'm not just talking about the effects of tax policy, anymore. The damage this Government is doing goes far beyond tax policy, so far beyond that tax policy won't fix the problem. I'm talking a wholesale collapse of our monetary system. I'm talking about waking up one morning with the dollar worth about a dime, our families' life savings wiped out and martial law being implemented. (Incidentally, those National Guard troops patrolling your city streets after curfew might be the only thing that let's you sleep soundly at night.) I'm talking about a time in our future when you find yourself counting your bullets rather than your dollars.

Am I being paranoid? Our economy, our industries and retail commerce, at first glance seems way too large to be destroyed by a faceless Government a thousand miles away, however, there is one thing the Government controls that the best and the brightest CEOs cannot insulate their companies from: the value of the dollar.

So upon what am I basing my fears? Let's go back a few decades and unravel this mess:

In the 1970s, Jimmy Carter raised taxes and unemployment rose while tax revenues fell. In the 80s, Reagan cut taxes and unemployment fell while tax revenues rose. Bush One then raised taxes and we fell into a mild recession.

Clinton raised taxes and in a seeming contradiction, the economy grew and unemployment stayed low, up until the last year of his Administration. My best guess on why the recession was forestalled was the massive productivity increase realized across the board in Industry. I believe this was due to the fact that the early 90s saw the first wide-spread use of truly modern computer and communications technologies in all areas of business, from the offices to factory automation. By the last year of the Clinton Administration, though, the Dot Com technology bubble burst, the Stock Market fell, and unemployment was on the rise.

In response to the Clinton recession of 2000, Bush Two cut taxes. This kept unemployment at very low levels while actually increasing tax revenues, the best of both worlds, right? After twenty years of Bush-Clinton-Bush, Americans believe 4.5-5.0% unemployment is normal. With businesses expanding during those years and Boomers beginning to retire, there was a constant demand for employees and young professionals marketed themselves, climbing the corporate ladder by moving from company to company at will.

These years of low unemployment and high tax revenues masked a growing evil. Government was still spending well beyond what it was taking in. President G.W. Bush felt vindicated when tax revenues increased significantly over the Clinton years, but raising revenues by a hundred billion does little good when spending increases keep the deficits in the 300-400 billion dollar range.

Then, after September 11th we went to war in Afghanistan, then in Iraq in 2003. I believe those wars were the right thing to do, however, there was no acknowledgement at all from the Federal Government that, just perhaps, Government spending may need to be curtailed in other areas during this period. During the Iraq war, the media criticized President Bush for not calling for more sacrifice from the American people. Bush told people to keep on working and spending. The best thing the public could do was keep economic activity high so tax revenues would flow and the economy would expand. Bush was right about that, although it infuriated Democrats. What both the Democrats, Republicans and media missed, was this: the American people should not have cut back on their spending...Government should have! The media never showed any outrage that Government was not asked to make sacrifices.

In order to keep bi-partisan support for the war effort, Bush accepted nearly every liberal big-spending agenda item. No Child left Behind led to a 40% increase in the Department of Education spending. The Medicare Part D prescription drug plan was projected to increase Government outlays by $80-90 billion a year. The Government kept adding entitlement after entitlement, pork barrel projects after pork barrel projects, bridges to nowhere. Conservative and Liberal ideologies compromised by granting everything for everybody, a strong military for the Republicans and massive new entitlements for the Democrats.

During this same timeframe, the American people simply didn't care about Government deficits. Why should they? That was all theoretical, economic mumbo-jumbo, right? We were always told we can grow our way out of debt, right? Companies were expanding, profits were up, 95% of Americans were happily employed, bringing home steady paychecks. Bush wasn't raising taxes, so there was no threat there. Meanwhile, the Government kept borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars each year from the Chinese, the Koreans, the Japanese and others.

Then, with the help of the Government, the People finally played their part in the coming tragedy with the sub-prime mortgage fiaso. Government threatened to clamp down on banks that were not lending to lower income customers, then directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to lower the requirements for loans they would purchase from banks. Banks were then able to loan with minimal risks to themselves, violating principles of banking established two thousand years ago. That was when American citizens stepped up to do their impression of Congressmen and borrow money they could not repay to buy homes they could not afford with no money down and adjustable rate mortgages. Freddie and Fannie then bundled the mortgages and sold them to investment banks and insurance companies as securities. That is what caused the real damage. Spreading the bad paper across Wall Street guaranteed the whole economy would be hit when the bubble burst.

That was when the American people decided they needed hope and change. President Obama came into office with a radical left-wing agenda, basically quadrupling-down on all the mistakes Bush made, and going one further with coming tax increases. Socially, the election of 2008 did not take us from far right to far left. It took us from center-left to far-left. Conservative principles can't be blamed for any of this since they haven't been tried since Reagan.

Bush ran a deficit of $400 billion in 2008(the highest on record at that time). Obama is running a $1.6 trillion deficit in 2009. The national debt stands at $12 trillion and will hit $14 trillion by the end of next year. If you add in the spending mandates over the next ten years (Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, etc) the debt is actually projected to hit $106 trillion. If you taxed every Fortune 500 company at a 100% rate, it will take 145 years to pay this debt down. Folks, it can't be repaid. We've ran out of creative accounting methods and are hitting the brick wall of mathematics. The Chinese are going to stop buying our bonds. They are doing the math and realizing they are investing in a country that is beyond broke. They know their return on investment will not be there. They hold almost a trillion of our debt. Do you believe they will loan us another trillion? How about another $105 trillion? Anyone want to calculate the interest on $105 trillion?

The bottom line, and my source of depression, is this: the United States as we know it cannot survive. The crap is going to hit the fan---and sooner, rather than later. I fear we are going to have to literally rebuild this nation from rubble. I can foresee a time in our future when a few hours of electricity or a few gallons of gas may be a luxury, a time when we have to boil water before drinking, a time when if you want coffee you better grow the beans yourself, a time when I may stare with nostalgia at a plane taking off from Atlanta-Hartzfield.

As much as I like Sarah Palin, just electing her or even the ghost of Ronald Reagan, will not stop this. If the next president and congress really want to face the realities of our dilemma, they will have to take Draconian measures. In coming days I'll discuss just what the Government would have to do to avert this disaster. It won't make you feel better.

Over the next few weeks, I want to move away from criticism of Obama's healthcare plan, Cap and Trade and other liberal legislation and just discuss the world we will have to live in assuming all these things are made law. I want to discuss possible economic outcomes given the policies our Government is implementing and basic personal edconomic survival in the coming America. I'm hoping this 'doomsday' discussion will generate responses from you, Friends of Liberty. At the end of the day, our liberty might be all we have left. What are we prepared to do to protect it?

Happy belated Thanksgiving

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