During the Great Depression the New Deal unarguably brought economic relief to millions of Americans and their families who otherwise might have starved. It is also true that just as the so-called "reforms" of the Progressive Era under another President Roosevelt (Teddy), were legislated from a fundamental underpinning of social control, the essential intention of the New Deal's framers was to ward off a revolution in the United States that, left unchecked, could easily have spiraled out of control, driving an increasingly desperate populace into the arms of Soviet-style Marxism.

Since the United States Civil War, reform in America has always been wedded to the principal assumptions of the capitalist economic system, namely, that corporate capitalism, the maintenance of order, and the passage of laws that enforce the predominance of the business class and contain the unruly have-nots, is preferable to any possible alternatives. To succinctly describe this, historian Gabriel Kolko in The Triumph Of Conservatism uses the term political capitalism to define a political system engineered to meet the needs and serve the interests of business. Of the Progressive movement he states that: "Progressivism was initially a movement for the political rationalization of business and industrial conditions, a movement that operated on the assumption that the general welfare of the community could be best served by satisfying the concrete needs of business. But the regulation itself was invariably controlled by leaders of the regulated industry, and directed toward ends they deemed acceptable or desirable." (3)

The Bretton Woods system was yet another milestone of political capitalism in which, in the name of world peace and "stability", the United States would dominate the world economically. As with domestic political capitalism, it was motivated by the necessity of restraining the influence of the Communist bloc and managing impoverished nations that were likely to align with it as a result of their fundamental survival needs. The engineers of that system were not ideological conservatives but liberal members of the Democratic Party.

Whereas the Bretton Woods system was constructed largely by New Deal liberals, the resultant policies of the IMF and World Bank have transmuted into the current neoliberal paradigm, bolstered by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) of which Harry Dexter White was a member, embracing an internationalist, globalist perspective which shares more than less in common with the neoconservative ideology of blatant geostrategic hegemony as typified by the Project For The New American Century (PNAC). Differences in rhetoric between the two organizations imply a divergence in policy, yet historical functioning reveals otherwise. The endgame of both is geopolitical dominance politically, economically, and militarily by the United States. Whereas the neoconservative agenda envisions an ever-expanding military to accomplish blatant conquest and subjugation of nations, the neoliberal vision would be realized by the dissolution of nation-states altogether under the economic administration of transnational corporations.

Thus, we should not be surprised by the close ties developed in recent years between the Bush family and the Clintons. The Bush crime family has multigenerational experience in waging super-imperialist economic warfare on the world and on American citizens, and it appears that the Clintons have become two of their most prodigious pupils-their "entrance examinations" being the creation of NAFTA and throwing masses of welfare-dependent individuals into "welfare to work" jobs on which no one in America could survive.

In the current political milieu, no candidate who is not committed to a policy of super-imperialism has the slightest chance of ascendancy to the Presidency of the United States. Echoing her CFR colleagues, Hillary Clinton states, "First, and most obviously, we must by word and deed renew internationalism for a new century." And Barack Obama chimes in with, "Whether it's global terrorism or pandemic disease, dramatic climate change or the proliferation of weapons of mass annihilation, the threats we face at the dawn of the 21st century can no longer be contained by borders and boundaries."

I am not suggesting that the United States become an isolationist country in the sense that we have nothing to do with all of the other nations with whom we reside on planet earth. What I am declaring is that I support no leader who is unwilling to radically alter the super-imperialist trajectory on which the United States has traveled since World War II. Having said that, I am well aware that no one who would do so could ever be nominated, let alone elected President of the United States.

Inextricably tied to the super-imperialism project is the $4 trillion dollars stolen from the U.S. Treasury in the past decade, the unanswered questions regarding September 11, 2001, the USA Patriot Act, Peak Oil, the privatization of water and other resources, the cesspool of corruption surrounding government contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the domination of U.S. money supply and fiscal policy by the Federal Reserve and other centralized financial systems.

Each of these issues is beyond the scope of any president or party to thoroughly remediate. Only one thing is absolutely certain regarding super-imperialism-its collapse. Whether collapse occurs suddenly or gradually, before, during, and after, there will be many opportunities for those of us residing in the belly of the beast to create new economic and social structures. The pivotal question is: Will we be prepared to do so?

Did I watch the Democratic candidates' debate, April 26? No, I was sitting in a local movie theater watching the film "Shooter" which, in my opinion, rips the mask off the current political landscape and ventures into territory where no candidate anointed by the corporatocracy is willing to travel. "Shooter" is the real deal; presidential debates, yet another distracting soap opera. A line from that film now comes to mind, depicting the essence of super-imperialism:  "There is no Sunni or Shia, no Democrat or Republican-only the have's and have-not's."                     

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