afraid to call for any policy that might mean a loss of jobs. And politicians routinely seek to create more jobs — even jobs that entail production of toxic waste, devastation of rivers and forests, and production and consumption of fossil fuels; creating jobs that are making our problems worse.

Buckminster Fuller saw a path forward. “We must give each human who is or becomes unemployed a life fellowship in research and development or in just simple thinking.” (Operating Manual, p. 107.)

Such fellowships will provide economic security for everyone. The right to live and the means to live will be guaranteed. Everyone will be able “to think truthfully and to act accordingly, without fear of losing the franchise to live.” (p. 108.) Individuals will act as trimtabs.

“Through the universal research and development fellowships, we’re going to start emancipating humanity from being muscle and reflex machines. We’re going to give everybody a chance to develop their most powerful mental and intuitive faculties.” (p. 108.) To solve our problems will require scientists, engineers, architects, urban planners, artists, and more, people with credentials and the self-educated. Economic security will allow people to acquire and apply needed skills.

Fuller’s intuition is now a specific public policy proposal. “Basic income” or “Citizen Dividends” is an income unconditionally paid to every adult citizen, without means testing or work requirement. The amount is to be enough for food and shelter, at least, thereby ensuring the means to live for anyone who is or becomes unemployed.

Basic income, like Fuller’s fellowships, is universal, and will thus create a baseline of justice and equality. That sense of justice and equality will encourage people to cooperate spontaneously. Basic income will be provided by government, and will thus motivate people to participate actively as citizens. That active participation will strengthen our democracy, transform our government, and help us overcome the special interests that are profiting with the status quo. Rapid progress will follow.

The challenges now are to publicize these ideas effectively. And to get advocates elected. And to get the policy enacted.

The main group working on this in the United States is the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network, USBIG. (www.USBIG.net) Many other countries have similar organizations. There is also an international group, the Basic Income Earth Network, BIEN. (www.basicincome.org) Participants in USBIG and BIEN are economists, sociologists, and other academics, political activists and other concerned individuals, and elected officials.

I am on the coordinating committee of USBIG, and have presented at each of its six annual conferences. I also presented at the BIEN congress in Geneva in September, 2002. My interest in these ideas began in 1971, when I was in high school and first read Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth and Utopia or Oblivion. I started writing about economic security in the 1980s. In 1998, as part of my Ph.D. work in human development, I wrote and self-published a book, Healing Americans, that presented Citizen Dividends as a way to arouse and empower ordinary Americans, and to unite us in solving our social, cultural, environmental, and political problems. My book We the People came out with a small publisher in 2001. In 2004, I initiated a successful effort to get the Green Party of the United States to add basic income to its platform.

Economists have calculated that we in the United States can afford a basic income of $800 a month or more, without raising taxes. The funds will come from cutting government programs that become superfluous, welfare and corporate welfare. Basic income will reduce poverty far more effectively than current welfare programs. Plus, our government will be free of the burden of trying to create jobs by subsidizing private employers. It will be possible to eliminate corporate welfare tax breaks, subsidies, loan guarantees, and such.

My focus and area of expertise is on political organizing for these ideas. My 2002 presentation to the BIEN congress was “Mobilizing Support for Basic Income.” A version is posted at the USBIG web site. http://usbig.net/papers.html. (The site is not set up for direct links. That paper is #42, and several of my other papers are also posted there. I have additional articles posted at www.CitizenPolicies.org. That site is for a nonprofit organization I started, though it is now dormant.)

Over the past six years, political discourse has been narrowly focused on terrorism, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, civil liberties, and related issues. The focus is shifting somewhat, to include global warming in particular, though most people continue to view our problems as if they are unconnected, as if it is necessary to focus on only one issue at a time. In response to my efforts to promote Citizen Dividends, numerous people have told me “I love this idea, but I’m too busy working on … .”

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge can be the trimtab that turns political discourse in this direction. The timing is perfect. The prestige and publicity that comes with the prize will help make basic income a topic in the 2008 elections.

Greens will surely be calling for basic income, and I have already discussed these ideas with several Green Party candidates for president and Congress. Libertarians might also. One of the most prominent libertarians is Charles Murray, at the American Enterprise Institute. His 2007 book, In Our Hands, calls for a basic income of $10,000 a year for every citizen age 21 or over. That is the key, he asserts, to cutting government and reducing its intrusiveness. Greens, Libertarians, and independent candidates can raise these issues, and challenge Democrats and Republicans to respond.

Democrats and Republicans might also support basic income. Leaders of both parties endorsed guaranteed income proposals in the 1960s. Lyndon Johnson appointed a national commission of prominent businessmen, academics, and union presidents, and they unanimously recommended a government program of income supplements without any work requirements. Richard Nixon presented a specific plan, written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and it passed the House of Representatives by two-to-one. (Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan was narrowly defeated in the Senate. Moynihan described the plan and its defeat in The Politics of a Guaranteed Income.) George McGovern campaigned for a more generous alternative in 1972.

Martin Luther King Jr. declared guaranteed income to be the key to progress on housing, education, and racial injustice. Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith were among the many hundreds of economists who endorsed guaranteed income. Earlier efforts to provide economic security were championed by Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

That is good company for Buckminster Fuller to be in. Reminding people of his political insights will enhance his reputation, and generate interest in other aspects of his life and work.

I am preparing to launch an educational campaign for Citizen Dividends, aimed particularly at political activists and candidates. I will be encouraging people to view and describe basic income as the key to progress on climate change, health care, education, and many other issues, including peace. In that way, though implicitly, I will be teaching people to apply dynamic comprehensive anticipatory system thinking.

I am recruiting team members from USBIG and various political groups and campaigns. And I am completing the manuscript for a new book (which, because I have not been able to find a publisher or literary agent, I plan to self-publish in a few months). Winning the Buckminster Fuller Challenge would provide funds for this work, and enable fundraising for continuing efforts.

Promoting basic income in the United States, to any extent, will be a trimtab for other countries. A regular participant at USBIG and co-chair of BIEN is Senator Eduardo Matarazzo Suplicy of Brazil. He has told me that our efforts in the United States make it easier for him to promote basic income in his country and around the world. Thanks to him, Brazil has a law declaring that everyone has a right to a minimum income. That law, however, lacks deadlines; Sen. Suplicy is now working to strengthen it.

This idea is scalable. It is possible to enact a basic income in one state, possibly a city or county. Local and state political candidates can therefore campaign for it. It is scalable upwards, also. There can be versions of basic income in many countries, eventually in all countries. That may be the most direct path to world peace.