Remember how, in the wake of the attacks on 9/11, everyone was saying “Everything is different”?

Does anyone still believe that claptrap?

Here we are three years down the road and the same corporate pimps and right-wing zealots are busy trying to eradicate all vestiges of the welfare state and civil liberties. Here we are with the same imperialist military trying to force people in third world countries to buckle under to American domination. Here we are with a Democratic Party that has still forgotten its obligation to ordinary working-class Americans and that is trying desperately to show its fealty to the wealthy and the corporate elites that already own the Republican Party.

In fact, the remarkable thing is that, three years after that disaster, so little is different.

The election that is about to happen is virtually a replay of the one that took place four years ago, with one of the characters actually the same, and the other almost a carbon copy of his predecessor, right down to his inability to stand for anything progressive, and to his singular lack of any common touch that might let him connect on a personal level with the people he claims to represent.

The war the country is mired in over in Iraq is remarkably similar to one that occurred three decades ago in Indochina.

Fights over things that shouldn’t even be issues anymore—abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research and assault weapons—are still trumping the important issues like global warming, the global AIDS epidemic, the abandonment of America’s burgeoning poor, and the impoverishment of much of the underdeveloped world, none of which get even a glancing reference in the presidential campaign.

As for the so-called War on Terror—

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