It's time for a National ID card

The card above was issued to me when I was five years old in my native Argentina over 60 years ago. It was FREE issued by the national government. Before you think we shouldn’t mimic a third world country I want to point some things out. Argentina was the first country to convict someone in a court of law of a crime based on fingerprint evidence. It was the first country to require all it’s citizens to be fingerprinted. Now a common practice throughout the world. It was the first country to perform a successful blood transfusion. Heart bypass surgery and the artificial heart were developed there. The Bus for ferrying people around was invented there. The first working flyable helicopter.  That ball point pen you all use on an everyday basis was invented there in 1943.  It’s not as backward as some would have you believe. For the most part elections there are fairly honest because you need ID. 

Every citizen in the country is required to have his ID card on him at all times and you must present it when you vote. Imagine if this was a requirement in these last elections in the USA? It would make cheating far more difficult. If you had to put your thumbprint when you voted instead of a signature and combined it with a serial number it would be much more difficult to forge ballots since any excess ballots would require a unique fingerprint to match your vote. Imagine also that a copy would have to be sent to a voting integrity Bureau that would have them on file in case a vote had to be recounted. You could make such a requirement also with a mail in ballot. One copy to the local election board and a card with your thumbprint  and unique serial number to the integrity bureau. This would make it exceedingly difficult to forge ballots and produce a unique fingerprint for each ballot. 

Unless we fix the current electoral system there will always be questions about the electoral process and it’s integrity. Of course this is just my idea. The trick is to get the system to make it almost fool proof and get rid of areas that can get tampered with such as computer programs that can switch votes. Unless the population at large has faith in the integrity of the system they cannot have any trust in the government. If a group of people hell bent on winning at any cost get into government and ignore and have contempt for the rules and the laws and we let them. The we deserve what we get.

Americans have to get over their reservations about a national standard identity card and providing their fingerprints. You have to tender your fingerprints to work for the federal and many local governments. You have to turn in fingerprints to get a passport, security clearances etc. A national identity card would go along way to limit identity theft, cheating on elections and limit fraud. The only people who oppose such a move have ulterior motives and they are usually not good ones. It’s time to push for a national standardized ID card. 

There's Nowhere to Run To Anymore Part1

I posted this on Facebook a few days ago. It's inspiring me to start my blog again.

As an immigrant to this country who has experience and memories of the progressive disease of government. I am rather worried. I left my native Argentina when I was ten years old, but even then I understood that something was wrong. My father was an ethnic Slovenian immigrant to Argentina. He was born on the italian side of the border of then Yugoslavia. While he was a Trappist in seminary in Banja Luka His older brother (my uncle) was arrested by the fascists and he was forced to leave the priesthood. He then joined the communist resisters secretly and later they would become the partisans who would at the end of the war capture Mussolini. At around this time he was drafted by the Italians into the army. He served in Ethiopia and was later sent to the Russian front which he survived, his division had surrendered to the Soviets and managed to escape. As he spoke Russian and  could pass off for one he managed to get back to Italian lines. He would recount how he stood on a hill from a distance and saw the Russians execute all of the surviving members of  his division. 

From there he ended up in North Africa assigned to the Afrika Corps and acted as liaison to the Germans since he spoke German (my father was a linguist and spoke 17 languages). One day they caught one of his partisan colleagues photographing some documents and under persuasion he gave up my father who alerted managed to escape. He managed to get to Taman Rahaset in Algeria where there were some free French forces.  The US at the time was organizing what became the Slavonic divisions and my father joined them. For the next three years he served in the US army. His languages got him into Eisenhower's headquarters and my father served as an interpreter when the Russian Marshals showed up. He also acted as Liaison through his contacts with the Yugoslav partisans.

Within this period my grandfather was interned by the Nazis and executed in 1943. My grandmother and two of my aunts where shortly thereafter sent to German concentration camps.

After his stint with the US Army he became head of the Red Cross in Trieste.  It was through these contacts that my father located my grandmother and aunts in eastern Europe where she was liberated from the camp with my aunts by the Soviets. At the same time he and others organized a plebiscite to make the Trieste area independent of Italy and Yugoslavia. With the cold war starting the allies cancelled the plebiscite and made a deal to split the area with Italy and Yugoslavia as they wanted Tito as an ally. Tito then proceeded to issue a death warrant on my father. Feeling betrayed by the US, he dicided to escape to Argentina in 1948. There he managed to meet Juan Peron the then president of the country. Peron for all intents and purposes was a socialist as was his Justicialista movement was based on his control of the workers unions and was labor based. Peron had also served as military attaché to fascist Italy and was influenced by corporatism.  

I was born in 1952 and my godfather was Peron's private secretary. Peron's economic policies were a disaster for the economy and he was overthrown in a violent Coup in 1955. Several subsequent coups occurred in the following years. My father by this time had become a committed anti-communist. He found himself as president of the anti communist league (Liga Internacional de Resistencia Anti-Comunista) for the Western Hemisphere. During this time my father got a degree in International science at the University of Buenos Aires specializing in Astro Physics. In 1960 Arturo Frondizi a man with Marxist sympathies was elected president. His government was heavily infiltrated by communists. My father's league decided it was necessary to remove Frondizi and began organizing a coup. At some point they discovered my father's identity. At some point the henchmen for Frondizi sent armed men to my house and they held us under house arrest for five days. My father wasn't home so they could not do anything. One day my father's allies in the military sent troops and the armed men were forced to leave. Soon thereafter my father decided it was time to leave.  So we headed  to the US in 1962 Via Passenger ship. A trip that took almost a month. During our trip here Frondizi was overthrown in March of 1962.

My father as all immigrants took whatever jobs he could. He repaired refrigerators. Worked as a superintendent, drove car service as well as taxi. He got a job working for Fred Trump doing the Air conditioning for Trump village and Trump houses in Brooklyn. It was there when I was 16 or 17 that I met the younger Trump once at that time. He was older than me but had an obnoxious, abrasive rich kid attitude. It’s true, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

My father's linguistic abilities finally paid off and he went to work as an interpreter for the Criminal Courts of New York City, subsequently a few years later he bought a liquor store where I worked while going to college prior to going to graduate school at the CUNY Graduate Center where I became a PhD candidate ABD in Political science in comparative politics, political economy and International politics. At the end of this period my father developed Alzheimer's and I had to put my studies on hold. My father passed at 72 and my mother shortly got sick and passed away at 82. I never got the chance to go back to write my dissertation.

During my undergraduate years I became a doctrinaire Marxist to my father's chagrin. But conversations with my father and learning more of my family background slowly changed my mind by the time I was in graduate school. In the last thirty years I have been politically active. I managed a US senate campaign, several city council races, a state senate race, several congressional races, including a run against Nydia Velasquez.

I tried to be brief and left out a lot of details. I write this so people who are my internet friends  understand my perspective and where I am coming from.

As I prepare to go to bed tonight I am rather pessimistic over the fact that Biden will be the elected president of this country. The dark machine of the left is so close to achieving their goal of control that they can taste it. I do not expect things to go the way I would like it to. The machine has all the levers of power from the courts to mass media to the oligarchs financing it. I am having a Deja Vu moment and feel as I was back in Argentina. America has changed radically since I came here as a political exile (refugee). Dictatorships are deadly forms of government and the only people who look forward to them are people who've never lived under them or have seen one up close. Yet, this is what fifty years of relentless propaganda and indoctrination have done. 

I do not  trust the senate or the house to stifle the onslaught. Most politicians who I have met are career hypocrites without any core principles and act in their own self interest rather than that of their constituents. 

We all live in our respective echo chambers and that is a dangerous thing. We are moving to an atmosphere of fear and major institutions become complacent lest they become it's victims. An atmosphere of ideological control is in the air. The progressives do not need a secret police. They have captured all the cultural institutions and have injected political correctness and the "cancel culture" into the corporate realm, desperately trying to appease the mob lest they become it's victims. If Biden wins they will be encouraged and it will be implemented with a vengeance. Many will become the victims of the "cancel culture" and fear like a virus will spread. The government will stay passively watching this as it will be to their advantage as it slowly infects any opposition. 

Whichever turn the economy turns will be either geared towards the destruction of certain industries or some type of direct control by the state. Biden and his cronies will initiate policies that will favor their paymasters or allied groups in their coalition . High minimum wages will be passed and it will force manufacturing companies to again abandon the US and place factories elsewhere. They may be enticed by the Biden administration to go to China. Either way, we will loose jobs. For small businesses survival will be difficult and consumer prices will go up radically. The loss of revenue will  entice the government to raise taxes. A tactic that never work and leads to stunted economies. 

They will try to neuter the constitution by canceling the bill of rights through legislation. They will try to eliminate the electoral college and pack the court. They will bypass the constitution since they don't believe in it anyway. 

They will reverse all policies which Trump initiated in foreign affairs. They will via treaties and other ways water down US sovereignty by suborning the US via international treaties.

We need to stop calling socialism a failed system. It does not convince progressives and they don’t care. They are committed to the attainment of power. Karl Marx called socialism “the dictatorship of the proletariat” he didn’t call it “proletariat democracy”.  Socialism is the most successful system of tyranny ever invented. It affords tremendous power to those in charge of the state. The backers of socialism aren’t interested in economic success unless it gives them power. They are not interested if most of the people support a regime as long as they live in fear. They do not live by democratic principles. 

As I am writing this all the sates that Trump needs are approaching razor thin margins and I am sure in some rooms somewhere there are people frantically filling out ballots to change outcomes.

Maybe I am too pessimistic and none of this will come to pass. If it is opposed before it becomes too late. At some point however , it will become too late. I am reminded of a quote from Simon Bolivar, "He who makes a revolution ploughs the sea".

Put on your seatbelts, we are about to embark on a very rough ride. Stay true and fight back or you will lose the country sooner than you think.