“Not a dime’s worth of difference” separates America’s two major political parties, presidential candidate George Wallace famously declared. If the platforms of the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates are taken as representing the positions of the two parties’ respective leadership, then Wallace was spot-on. To be sure, grass-roots constituencies of both Republicans and Democrats often differ sharply on issues of genuine substance, like the Second Amendment, abortion, and the basic role that government, and especially the federal government, ought to play.

But the wishes and opinions of the grass-roots seldom sway the party bosses, who, more often than not, are committed to slender differences of policy that will not threaten the special interests who control the disposal of federal monies.

The “two-party system” has held sway since the era of President Andrew Jackson and his successor, consummate political insider and power broker, the “Little Magician,” Martin van Buren. In the early 20th century, the creation of the Federal Reserve with its monopoly on the money supply, the rise of the welfare state with its massive allocations of federal taxpayer dollars during the Great Depression, and the creation of a “military industrial system” (President Eisenhower’s term) that depended on a much more warlike foreign policy for sustenance and a far larger standing military than America had ever financed before, combined to transform business on Capitol Hill into a vast spoils system.

During this same period, the specter of utopian world socialism prompted a cadre of globalist elites to create a framework for global governance — the United Nations — with the goal of revolutionizing America’s political system from within and undermining her independence from without, and by so doing remold the United States of America into a government and society more compatible with world government along socialist lines.

It is thus in the interest of these two controlling factions — the moneyed elites and the utopian globalists — to continue the venal spoils system that has largely replaced the modest, limited federal government of the 19th century, as well as to ensure that America’s debilitating web of foreign military and diplomatic entanglements is not disrupted. On all matters that strike at the heart of the establishment’s agenda — UN, NAFTA, WTO, and NATO membership, federal welfare and subsidy programs from edcuation to housing to agriculture, and the structure of the Federal Reserve-centered financial system — presumptive candidates Obama and Mcain are singing almost the same tune.

In fairness to the two candidates, there are some differences. Obama has pledged to withdraw U.S. forces from the Iraqi quagmire, whereas McCain favors open-ended military involvement. On the Second Amendment, John McCain is obviously more supportive than Barack Obama of the right to keep and bear arms. McCain’s campaign platform probably invokes the free market more than Obama’s. Overall though, the distinctions between Obama and McCain, as is nearly always the case between the two anointed major-party presidential candidates, are mostly of degree and not of substance. Far more eye-catching are the similarities between the two platforms, as manifest both by what they propose and by what issues they choose to ignore. Here’s a sampling.

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