This new Campaign to Empower the United Nations offers a possible way out of the powerlessness and inability to influence history facing the major social movements. The exhausted formula of marches and protests seems to produce little political effect due to corporate media deflation.

Despite millions of people demonstrating in the streets, the peace groups could not keep the war in Iraq from happening. The transformation has barely begun from fossil fuels to renewable sources, promoted by environmentalists since the first Earth Day in 1970. The IMF, World Bank, and WTO, regardless of the protests of the anti-globalizers, continue their neoliberal macroeconomic policies that have impoverished countrysides and led to the fall of several governments from grassroots outrage.

Yet these same movements are quite well organized. They boast memberships in the millions. Liberal foundations are richer than neoconservative ones. Perhaps civil society's prospects would improve if we started to pursue a workable global agenda, with a heads up media strategy to disseminate it.

The task for the groups already aware of the need for UN Reform is to reorient such major advocacy coalitions toward realizing the advantages of joining this enterprise. The key theme is: If not through planet-wide reorganization, how then are we to effectuate world peace, universal women's rights, and transborder environmental restoration?

The UN offers an already established global framework. Strengthening, funding, and democratizing it can actually impact the conduct of world affairs. Examples follow of ATTAINABLE RESULTS that could motivate MAJOR MOVEMENTS to back given UN reforms.

ALTERNATIVES TO WAR ­ PEACE, ANTI-NUCLEAR

The package protection of a UN mediation and conciliation service plus a non-violent civilian peace force, backed by rapidly deployable UN peacekeepers, could prevent most armed conflicts and guard civilian populations from ethnic cleansings and suffering collateral damage.

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE WITH SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT ­ SOCIAL JUSTICE, DEVELOPMENT, ANTI-GLOBALIZATION, ENVIRONMENT, JUBILEE 2000 DEBT RELIEF

Rather than fighting fruitless guerrilla wars, deliver social equity through currency exchange fees that fund micro-credit for village cooperative enterprises in the Third World to produce sustainable livelihoods.

Most people of good will can unite around the desirability of achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Religious groups especially can get behind a reamplified global campaign to forgive all developing countries' debts in order to directly provide financing for delivery of the MDGs to their populations.

HUMAN RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES ­ CIVIL, HUMAN, AND WOMEN'S RIGHTS

Leaders who know they personally risk travel restrictions for life or worse resulting from a prosecution through the International Criminal Court may forbear without global permission initiating crimes against humanity or the peace.

INTERNATIONAL LAW ­ GLOBAL GOVERNANCE, COMMUNITY BASED ORGANIZATIONS, CIVIL SOCIETY

Even the major powers agree on the need for expanding the Security Council. The unanswerable imponderable to date has been: how to do so? Establishing eighteen voting units drawn from regional groupings of all UN member states can produce qualified majorities. Security Council resolutions will thereby gain a new legitimacy and a universally accepted enforceability.

DEMOCRATIZING THE UNITED NATIONS ­ GLOBAL DEMOCRACY, UN NGOS, WORLD CITIZENS

With sufficient popular demand, governments might be willing to entrust consultative status at the UN to a Parliamentary Assembly drawn from sitting national congresspersons. As happened with the initially only advisory European Parliament, such seasoned politicians can gradually earn legislative power.

In the meantime, these global tribunes could begin advocating for the protection of civil rights in every country. They might lobby to finance the underfunded world marine regulatory system, already in place, through new fees for use of the oceans. They could call for the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to balance their voting practices to better represent developing countries.

Then too, imagine a companion Global Civil Society Forum meeting regularly at the UN that mediated and cohered the world's NGOs, constellating them into a giant ring around the United Nations. Such a gathering could enable civil society to develop successful campaigns across issue areas. Many governments, who may now feel overwhelmed by the mass and range of demands from community based organizations, might prefer to make out the song within the din, and review actionable programs with identified financial supports. Through experienced world citizen diplomats, the common people could more readily and effectively voice their concerns at the global level.

REDEEMING HISTORY

A robust and comprehensive line up of possible UN reforms such as these gives the major social movements a means to pass beyond protest. With this agenda, these advocacy groups can become proactive rather than reactive to the latest atrocities on the front page. The UN's record in regional administration is generally good, when not unduly influenced by powerful governments with parochial national interests. The world body has routinely worked for the benefit of whole societies and the alleviation of human suffering, often deriving from poor planetary management by others.

The UN's main problems continue to be a lack of authority, funding, and manpower to implement the consensus agreements that emerge from its conferences. Organized humanity needs to realize that a transformed United Nations remains the best available instrument for the world to finally manifest the UN's visionary 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.