Why write Who Owns the World?
Most things that are real, are personal, especially books. I wrote this book with a tiny, fierce woman in the front of my mind. She was my long dead grandmother, Granny Cahill. You’d not hear her coming up behind you at the table, just an ear ringing ‘wham’ on the side of your head and a cry of "Eat that cabbage leaf -yer cousins died for the want of less than that". She was referring to the Irish potato famine of 1845. Us kids thought she was an actual famine survivor, such was her ferocity over wasted food. I was over 40 and she was dead, before I realised that she had been born in 1868, twenty years after the famine more or less ended.
But she had a point about what gave America its 2nd great wave of Irish emigrants, and left a million of their cousins behind, dead, in the small, landlord held fields of the most fertile country in Europe.
The site forensics on the famine dead shows the immediate cause of death as starvation and illness for most. The contingent or real causes of death were different. First there was the law. The laws of the time allowed Irish landlords, and many of them were Catholic’s, not absentee English Protestants, to expel a peasant the same day the peasant paid the rent. The same laws then allowed the landlord to pull down the peasant’s hovel. often in front of their dying eyes. The landlords weren’t compelled to ignore their conscience however. With the exception of a rare and often noble Anglo Irish few, most landlords of all religions and none used the law to kill or exile a quarter of a whole people. The peasants died in their hundreds of thousands or fled to where a young nation asked that it be given
"… Your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free.. send these the homeless, tempest tossed, to me"
But even deeper than lethal law, lay an almost unknown fact. In his book The Story of Land Jack Powelson, a professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, revealed that, for almost all of history, in fact until the American war of Independence in 1776, the population of the earth had never owned land. Over a span of 10,000 years on a land rich planet, the population of the earth had been essentially landless. Ownership was confined to between 1% and 3% of the human race. The Irish peasants owned no land, and died because of that.
More recently, irresponsible bankers destroyed most of the world’s money and made countless families homeless and jobless. They often did it by lending money to land speculators on the basis that land was scarce. In America over 90% of the population lives on, and owns, less than 4% of the continental USA. What little they owned has been taken from hundreds of thousands of American families, because the law permits it. Has anything much changed since Ireland in 1845 ? Not much for most of the race, according to Who Owns the World.