20 years ago, one of the (many) pleasures of a visit to Bermuda was the opportunity to listen on ordinary radios to the BBC World Service.
Even in the New York metro area, the only way we could listen at home was via shortwave radio. And that involved keeping track of what time it was according to Greenwich Mean Time, and consulting a chart to determine on which, if any, frequency the BBC could be heard locally at that time of day. I imagined English-speaking people all over the world listening via similar radios.
Now my local NPR affiliate carries the BBC during the night. And by day, I can listen to it on XM satellite radio at my desk and in my car. Most of my listening is during the night; when I can't sleep, I put on headphones and listen.
As I listened for an hour this morning, I was led to wonder how many -- if any -- BBC reporters stationed around the world have encountered the ideas of Henry George, and how the experience would alter their reporting of so many stories.
So many of the stories of poverty, of strife, of terrorism are ultimately, at bottom, about access to land, access to natural resources, and how a people treats the natural resource revenues, including the revenue from urban land value.
Where all have access to land on an equal basis, by paying rent to the community, there need be no poverty or unemployment. Where some claim as their own privilege the right to collect that rent for their own portfolios, there is poverty, and there are people -- often the vast majority -- robbed of their birthright. They may not know the exact nature of the problem, but they clearly know that they're being wronged, day in and day out. Some cope. Some become terrorists. Some figure suicide can't be any worse than what they're dealing with.
When natural resources revenues are used to fund government spending, to provide the infrastructure which makes a city a better place to live, and the excess refunded to the community in the form of individual Citizens' Dividends, life tends to be pretty good for most people. When natural resources accrue to royalty, or to a plutocracy, or to foreign corporations' shareholders and management, and are not reinvested in the community, not surprisingly, we get human misery and inferior infrastructure and schools.
And it would seem quite rational for people living in such situations, particularly young men, to rebel against such a thing. Not knowing precisely what the problem is, they do not seek to solve it, only to avenge their loss.
The BBC's website says this:
There is a relatively small number of things which BBC must not do. For example, it must not carry advertising, neither can it express its own editorial opinion about current affairs or matters of public policy, other than broadcasting. That is not to say, of course, that controversial programmes are never broadcast, but great care is taken to ensure that arguments are well balanced.
Balance! Ah! Let's balance the privileges of those who claim the world's natural resources as their own entitlement, with the birthright of all the people of each country to those natural resources. We all learned in elementary school what each country and region of the world produces and exports. What we didn't talk about was who in each country (or beyond its borders) is considered to be entitled to the natural resources revenue, or how public spending there would be financed when the natural revenue source was diverted into private pockets, or what the privatization of these resources does to a country's economy and wealth distribution. That is political economy.
Report the news. Don't talk about what underlays it. Wouldn't want to rock that boat, would we?
Where do they do this? Try Alaska, for starters. Just a starter, but no state in the US has less income inequality -- despite their high cost of living.
For a look at what happens when this is ignored, look for the upcoming film The End of Poverty? from Cinema Libre Studio. (It premiered at Cannes last year, and will be in theaters this fall.)
And to explore the ideas of Henry George, start with some of his speeches, at wealthandwant.com followed by his landmark best-selling book, Progress & Poverty.
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