The corporate interests in whose behalf those men fervently serve have no respect for our planet's people's needs or aspirations.

Humankind is, in fact, an abusable means toward an expedient end for these entrenched World Rulers.

Escalating private profit is their constant, unwavering objective, in furtherance of which they apply all the biases and discriminatory ideological attitudes at their money-fevered command, even as they smugly imagine they have holy sanction and obvious superiority as operative motivation.

They rake in great wealth from poor places, which is everywhere that immensely inequitable conditions permit the powerful few to prosper at penurious souls' hurtful expense.

There are fabulous riches in their brimming coffers, and great bounty on their tables.

Meanwhile, our species' majority is horribly impoverished, often picking for food in garbage dumps to survive.

Malcolm X told us that freedom is a universal imperative to be achieved by any means necessary.

"No justice, no peace" is an inevitable, axiomatic response to pervasive denial of such freedom, which certainly includes the basic human right to be spared from unnecessary, devastating want.

With a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other, the white conqueror subjugated Africa, Asia and the Americas, assuring withering underdevelopment as he took gold, slaves and hope itself. In plush drawing rooms in London, Paris and New York, the colonialists -- and their latter- day imperialist variants -- joked, laughed, toasted their good fortune.

Meanwhile, in million of huts and hovels all across the globe, haggard multitudes suffered, futilely cared for the desperately ill, wept, stood sentinel over the dead, and wept some more.

Whole cultures were extirpated. Genocide transferred control of entire continental regions from indigenous populaces to interlopers' brutally harsh reign. Tens of millions were killed, over time in many lands, and the depredation...never stopped.

And yet, when an impulse for revenge arose through the wailing ghosts of tortured centuries and finally found its fruition in crashed airliners on 9/11, the World Rulers were aghast and utterly uncomprehending.

"What manner of barbarism could do such a thing?!"

What barbarism, indeed.

More than two years have passed, with nothing having been learned in the hypocritical interim.

A U.S. president, not even actually elected by a domestic plurality, defied overwhelming international opinion and launched an illegal, unprovoked war that targeted the wrong party, and objectively pitted the religion of Jesus against that of Mohammed.

To this day, he absurdly speaks of following a righteous mandate.

But everyone knows that if there were no oil beneath Iraq's bloodstained sand, not a single youngster from the American heartland would have been dispatched to kill, and be killed, in the distant cradle of civilization.

The World Rulers continue their infamous predation, having honed their dirty skill in myriad lands where natural resources that could and should have funded native advancement were disastrously shunted away, through outright theft. Left behind as perverse compensation were environmental pollution and hard labor darkly defined by peonage and sweatshop squalor.

Nothing will alter this ongoing travesty until the earth shakes in transcendent uprising and the currently mighty are laid low.

Dark skin and female shape must predominate in worldwide governance.

Natural majorities need to replace artificial impositions of the relative handful.

Other faiths, and no faith at all, ought to shatter Christi-centric religiosity, which invariably serves as holy justification for terrible social crimes abysmally committed in God's name.

Cooperative ventures and public-profit commerce are mandatory if the wicked avarice bred by monopoly capitalism is to ever release its raptor's grip on our collective lives.

Above all else, the unalloyed bunkum that is hoary conservatism has to be supplanted by edifying, enlightening progressivism.

Benighted bigotry, pretending to be a valid philosophy that does nothing but rationalize the exploitation and oppression of the world's people, has to go.

What I personally advocate here will certainly transpire, for this isn't my isolated idea.

Objective reality, historical and dialectical fact, and the unendurable plight of universal masses dictate its sure outcome.

Despite their system's superpower status, the World Rulers have feet of clay.

The rocket-propelled grenade and the peasant's AK-47 show that "paper tiger" and "pitiful, helpless giant" aptly describe its true standing.

Iraq, where empire was to have been consolidated, is instead demonstrating the inexorability of empire's end.

The "failure" of World Trade Organization talks in Cancun, Mexico, where poor nations mounted an insurgency against dominant economic states, is a telling straw in the wind.

The wretched of the earth will no longer tolerate being host to imperialist parasitism, and they're finding unified ways to alter the one-way beneficial relationship that's kept them chronically downtrodden.

In the First World's citadel, meanwhile, endemic contradictions affecting monopoly's viability continue to mount.

Corporate welfare and military spending soar, and the rich are lavished with huge tax breaks. But millions go without health insurance, schools face deep cuts or closures, the infrastructure crumbles, and hard-to-find jobs commonly provide poor pay with scant benefits. Broad unrest is developing. American workers realize they're becoming only marginally less exploitable than others oceans away, as the World Rulers grow increasingly ruthless in their desperation for desired profit.

This millennium began with capitalist gloating, which turned to pervasive fear in the aftermath of a blue-sky horror in September, 2001.

As the years progress, individual terrorism's cruel nihilism will thankfully lose favor as a radical tactic.

Ordinary people, on an unprecedented global scale marked by inspiring unity, will themselves reverse reality and put the screws to the very forces which have squeezed their lifeblood for centuries. Angry masses in the streets will replace the isolated suicide bomber. (Bolivia's recent worker/peasant/student uprising is a portent of things to come elsewhere...everywhere.)

It is in our self-interest, as common folk dwelling within the belly of the beast, to align ourselves with this emerging, titanic demand for authentic justice.

For the actual teachings of Christ tell us to support the "meek" against the principalities and powers, and the latter are seeing to it through their greed-inspired savagery that we, too, are definitely falling into the category of eventual world "inheritor".

Tomorrow is ours, and this bitter day is fading fast.

We're the incipient rulers who'll build a better, fairer world in a shining future.

Never before has history been on the threshold of such profound, fundamental change.

Happy New Year. Savor the great gift the world's people are giving to themselves!

Dennis Rahkonen, from Superior, WI, has been writing progressive verse and commentary for various outlets since the'60s. He can be reached at dennisr@cp.duluth.mn.us

Other Recent Articles by Dennis Rahkonen

* Is Our Constitution Doomed?
* GOP Moloch
* Bush’s Betrayal of Our Troops

* The Virtue and Logic of Progressive Politics

* Fulfilling Frantz Fanon’s Prophecy

* Out Now!

* Black, Brown and White, Unite to Stop America’s Decline!

* Honor American Dissidents

* Adding Color To A Too-White Peace Movement

* The Battle For...Pie