It's All for Sale: The Control of Global Resources - Softcover

Ridgeway, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822333740 ISBN 13: 9780822333746

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2004

Synopsis

Five companies dominate the U.S. petroleum industry. Five control the worldwide trade in grain. Two have a corner on the private market for drinking water. In terms of actual dollars, trade in heroin, cocaine, and tobacco ranks alongside that in grain or metals. There are more slaves in the world today than ever before. Resource by resource, It’s All for Sale uncovers and discloses who owns, buys, and sells what. Some resources—such as fuel, metals, fertilizers, drugs, fibers, food, forests, and flowers—have, for better or worse, long been thought of as commodities. Others—including fresh water, human beings, the sky, the oceans, and life itself (in the form of genetic codes)—are more startling to think of as products with price tags, but, as James Ridgeway shows, they are treated as such on a massive scale in lucrative markets around the world. 

Revealing the surprisingly small number of companies that control many of the basic commodities we use in everyday life, It’s All for Sale confirms in specific detail that globalization has been accompanied by an extraordinary concentration of ownership. At the same time, it is about much more than what company has cornered the market in corn or diamonds. Corporations and captains of industry, wars and swindles, oppressors and the oppressed, empires and colonies, military might and commercial power, economic boom and bust—all these come alive in Ridgeway’s canny and arresting reporting about the global scramble for power and profit. It’s All for Sale is an invaluable source for researchers, activists, and all those concerned with globalization, corporate power, and the exploitation of individuals and the environment.

About this title

About the Author

James Ridgeway is a staff writer for The Village Voice. Among his many books are The Pocket Guide to Environmental Bad Guys (with Jeffrey St. Claire); Red Light: Inside the Sex Industry (with Sylvia Plachy); Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads, and the Rise of a New White Culture; and Powering Civilization: The Complete Energy Reader.

From the Back Cover

"James Ridgeway's "It's All for Sale" is a wake-up call to the human community of the consequences of an economic system whose appetites for raw material is limitless, and in which there are no limits, no boundaries about what is a commodity and what is not. The privatization and enclosure of biodiversity, of water, of air and the trade in human beings and human organs are indicators that we could be witnessing an end of being human. Essential reading for the ecology movement, the justice movement, the peace movement, and all who believe 'Our world is not for sale.'"--Vandana Shiva, founder of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology in New Delhi, India

Reviews

Purportedly an alarming account of the "commoditization of natural resources and of life itself," this volume is actually something tamer—a comprehensive guide to the world’s major commodities, from diamonds and human beings to the skies and oceans. Ridgeway, a staff writer for the Village Voice, professes horror that a small number of corporations would ever seek to form cartels and exploit the fundamental necessities of life (even though he notes in his introduction and elsewhere that this has always been the case) and observes that things are getting worse. Maybe. It is disturbing to read that, after World War I, America and Britain created a joint venture known as the Iraq Petroleum Company and that "with modernized industry Iraq could produce quantities of oil sufficient to rival Saudi Arabia." Still, Ridgeway doesn’t balance his accounts of cartels and exploitation with an examination of the economic forces that drive commoditization, the advantages of economic development for developing countries or the process of economic evolution. Worse, Ridgeway discusses only problems, not solutions. The book is organized commodity by commodity. Ridgeway gives a brief, and sometimes fascinating, description of the usefulness and history of each substance, its exploitation by the few and its inevitable depletion. But he stops short of suggesting any wise or fair methods of allocating resources, and this omission seems to suggest that corrupt markets are inevitable. Perhaps Ridgeway’s largest failing is his tacit suggestion that commoditization is necessarily evil. Things have an economic as well as a spiritual existence, and the recognition of their market value is a useful, and necessary, first step in determining their true price.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822333740
• ISBN 13: 9780822333746
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 272