Victory Over Want proposes a road map to a better world for everyone

There is a curious - and menacing - stillness around the world. A calm before the storm?

There are terrifying signs that it could be.

Mass slaughter continues. Terrorism, suicide bombings, assassinations continue in the Middle East. Peace between Israel and Palestine seems further away than ever.

Estimates are that more than three million people have died in continuing conflict in the Congo. Elsewhere in Africa, conflict, drought and untreated disease, hardly given a thought in the "rich" world, bring a miserable death to many thousands - men, women and children - every day.

Misery is widespread but governments are paralysed. The Group of 7 or 8 does nothing except worry - as, indeed, they should - about the demonstrations in the streets outside. The same is true of the summits of the European Union, preoccupied with disagreements over a new "constitution" rather than deeper and more meaningfully urgent issues. ASEAN countries are now showing concern about military tyranny in Burma, as they should be; but do little about it or anything else.

Afghanistan and Iraq may be quietly sinking back into widespread, murderous conflict and anarchy.

Economic uncertainty bedevils the world. It always does, in some measure, but the crisis that threatens now could be deeper, more long-lasting and more devastating to political and strategic stability than anything we have known before.

Nuclear weaponry is proliferating. Hatreds spread.

For the most part, governments - if they don't directly inflame the environment of violence - simply hope that things will get better. The New York stockmarket has been showing some resilience. That gives hope - almost certainly false, buoyed with the expectation that Chairman of the Fed Greenspan will be forced to lower interest rates yet again to try to lift investors' spirits.

Japan might be getting worse more slowly than before but any genuine and lasting improvement seems still a good way around the corner. Germany is still in deep trouble, with high unemployment and the outlook bleak.

Is anyone doing anything to retrieve the situation?

Not really and certainly not enough, so far as governments are concerned.

The Italian government is contemplating a big public-investment infrastructure program. That is promising. The government of China is embarking on huge public programs of transport and infrastructure investment which should make their stability and growth less dependent on external trade, especially with the United States.

Those are encouraging developments but they are, alone, much too little and almost certainly much too late, to do the world economy or major national economies - except probably China - very much good.

On the academic side, William Greider has begun advocating public investment to rescue our economic fortunes; but he is still a lone voice in the wilderness.

A lone voice? Not entirely.

As early as the beginning of 2002 - 18 months ago - Victory Over Want was established to initiate a democratic process for international public investment to meet the short-term crisis of recession and the long-term crisis of chronic poverty.

If governments would not act - and they have since confirmed their incapacity to do anything useful - then action must be taken through the processes of direct democracy.

We, the people, must show governments the way.

The resources are there. The processes are there. All we need is the will to get together and work together on worldwide, Marshall Plan-like programs of carefully planned and implemented public investment and we can resolve the complex of crises confronting the world economy and the world society.

In this way, we will solve the economic crisis and, if we work together and build together, we can solve our political, strategic and, yes, our terrorist crises at the same time.

Multilateral public investment, managed well within a broad vision, is a practical and relatively simple way of working our way out of what is, at the moment, our near-despair. It will stimulate private investment. It will put the workless back into employment. It will revive the wholesale markets and the consumer markets. It will revive the stockmarkets too.

Everyone will benefit, the rich and poor alike. Every continent will benefit.

It will be globalisation of the best possible kind.

Every country, every society will have more certainty, more hope, better prospects for a more comfortable life, with more liberty and more opportunities for the pursuit of happiness.

All we need is a revolution in our mental attitudes - a return to the sensible policies of investing for the public good, for the good of everyone, not in one or two national markets, but right around the world.

We have the resources, human and physical. We have the finances - all we need is to mobilise and manage them in ways much more meaningfully and securely than we have in the past few decades.

Victory Over Want (VOW) pointed out the way ahead 18 months ago. It produced a "Road Map" if you like - a highly realistic highway, free of violence, fair to all, for the good of all.

Let's adopt that "Road Map" and set out on a highway that could make the 21st Century the greatest century of all for all those - human and other - who inhabit our presently troubled planet.