I have considered the possibility that an Idealistic Solar System might have to be run as an Idealistic Big Business. The key-word is "Idealistic". Good-Intentions often Pave the Road to Hell. I have hypothesized that a proper Solar System Government might require 10,000 individuals -- complete with a God -- King and Queen!! This is the sort of thing which probably makes everyone angry!! What if the movie
Jupiter Ascending contains some truth regarding how things really work in this solar system??!! Mention was made of "Human-Farming" -- complete with "Harvesting". "I hear they feel no pain."
Editor's Note: Almost 70 years ago Woody Guthrie wrote one of America's most famous folk songs in which he extolled the idea that this land is your land from California to the New York island -- his more descriptive way of saying this land is your land from coast to coast. 1.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxiMrvDbq3s 2.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqZ3oNsMVr0 If taken literally, it's almost as if the lyrics imply a sense of landownership to all US citizens. Whether this is true or not is a matter of interpretation, but for me the greater question this song triggers is what do we know about the land of America's fifty states? Or for that matter, what do we know about the land of the seven continents or the 197 countries that are profiled in this book? In particular, as the title of this book bluntly states, what do we know about who owns the world?
This book will answer questions you never dreamed to ask and reveal facts both startling and eye-opening. You'll learn that of the world's 6,602,000,000 citizens only about 15% of the population lay claim to owning any of its 36,933,896,500 acres of land. You'll also learn that 26 of the 35 still ruling monarchs own and control one-fifth of the world's land. And of these 26 monarchs, Queen Elizabeth II of England is the sole owner of 6,698,000,000 acres of land -- or approximately one-sixth of the entire land surface of the earth. By way of comparison, the Queen's landholdings total nearly three-times the size of the United States putting into clear perspective how and why she is the world's largest individual landowner.
As for the United States, two of the country's largest landowners are the federal government and media mogul Ted Turner, who owns many of the largest ranches. But more than just who owns what and how much they own, you'll learn how the country, as well as each state, is divided between farmland, forest land, and urban land. And maybe, like me, you'll be taken aback when you discover that in the world's third largest country four-fifths of the population resides (or crams) in urban areas. This revelation that so few people live in the wide open spaces of America is still difficult to fathom.
You'll also come to understand the role the four largest organized religions (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism) play in the scheme of world landownership. For example, the Catholic Church is one of the largest landowners in the world as the church has a presence in more than 190 countries. The Vatican is such a powerful and formidable state that it is recognized as an independent country in international law and is a member of the United Nations. I always knew the Catholic Church had power and influence, but for the first time I now understand just how much power and influence.
I promise this book will change the way you view the United States and the world, as I doubt you'll ever look at, or take for granted, the land you live on or visit ever again. More than likely, you'll want to learn more. Which is ideal, because this book only begins to tell the story as it's an edited and abridged version of
Who Owns the World: The Hidden Facts Behind Landownership by Kevin Cahill first published in Great Britain in 2006 by Mainstream Publishing Company.
The original book is a seminal work that not only reveals the history and extensive data behind landownership (particularly in Great Britain and Ireland), but explores in depth how an excess of landownership in too few hands (as has always been the case throughout history) is the single greatest cause for poverty throughout the world. Cahill's original book also makes the argument that the best, and fastest, way to overcome poverty is to grant each individual on earth one small slice of urban land for a home or an acre or two of rural land.
This book is a first resource for viewing the specific details behind the land and landownership of each country in the world. The first four chapters examine the arguments made in the original book, but more specifically these chapters provide background as to how the world's land has come to be divided by ownership and geography. Chapter five profiles the United States and the balance of the book focuses specifically on each country in the world. By studying the individual profiles of each country, it becomes immediately clear that Kevin Cahill is correct in his claim that landownership is indeed a game with too few players. A sad realization, but armed with the information these two books provide, on that hopefully can begin to be rectified before too long.
Introduction: When work on this book began in 2002, there was no map to follow. No attempt had ever been made to compile a structured, numerate account of landownership in the world, or to create a single summary of landownership in each country, however general. The ownership of most of Planet Earth could have been far more easily enumerated around 1900, when most of the planet's land was still held by empires, operating on the feudal or earlier Roman principle, that the emperor or sovereign owned all land in the empire. But no one made this attempt. Even Jack Powelson's great 1989 work,
The Story of Land, failed to close the thesis that was everywhere present in his book: that the human population is relatively landless now and had always been almost totally landless throughout history.
That fact raises the most profound questions in three specific areas: ethics, economics, and survival.
The ethical question arising from the history of landownership is simple: Why did the planetary population put up with a continuous crime, a crime committed mainly by the ethical leadership of the planet in the form of sovereigns and their supporting priesthoods? The leadership preached morals and good conduct, while engaging in the basest of greed and misconduct, a greed for land that regularly killed thousands, hundreds of thousands, and in many cases, millions. Hypocrisy is bad enough of itself. In relation to ethics and land, it has proved continuously lethal to the race throughout history.
In economic terms, there is no economics of landownership. That book or work has never been written because no economist has started out from the framework dimensions of the planetary land surface, and then the numbers of the planetary population. On this basis all current economics are ad hominem and as such totally unreliable, as we recently discovered.
Third, survival. The core greed of sovereigns -- now replaced by states but by states operating on the same principle as the sovereigns of old -- has, through the misuse of land and the resources that go with land, put the future of the planetary population at risk. The ecological and environmental leadership never properly address, indeed never address, the issue of land ownership and its role in conservation. To do so they would have to address their masters in governments and ruling establishments and profoundly disturb them -- something they will never do.
The issue of landownership is almost universally the subject of deceit by those in authority and those behind it. The most extraordinary example of this occurred in the UK between 1873 and 2001. In 1872 Parliament commissioned a record of every individual holding an acre or more of land in England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. The four-volume record, titled
The Return of Owners of Land, was everywhere referred to as the second
Domesday at the time of publication (between 1873 and 1876). This was a reference to the first
Domesday, compiled in 1086 by William the Conqueror -- known in France as William the Bastard -- a record of landownership in the UK. It was nothing of the sort, however, confined as it was to about 35 of the 40 English counties. It was the King's swag list, and books like it occur throughout history, starting in 2030 BC in Egypt. Works like the second or true
Domesday are extremely rare. That of 1873-1876 was excised from both the scholarly and the public record in the UK, between 1881 and 2001, when it reappeared in
Who Owns Britain and Ireland and formed the foundation of that book.
Who Owns the Solar System and Who Owns the Technology????!!!! Class-Warfare Really Gets My Goat!!!!