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

The author

James Ridgeway (1936–2021) was a veteran American investigative journalist, long a staff writer at The Village Voice and later Mother Jones, known for dogged reporting on corporate power, the far right and the environment. His books include Blood in the Face and Powering Civilization.

The book

It's All for Sale is organized as a commodity-by-commodity survey of who owns and trades the world's resources. Ridgeway treats the obvious commodities — fuels, metals, fertilizers, fibers, food, forests — alongside those we rarely price, such as fresh water, the oceans, the atmosphere and life itself, documenting in each case the concentration of ownership among a handful of firms.

How it reads

Part almanac, part argument. The reference-style structure makes it browsable, while the through-line is a pointed critique of globalized resource control. Some figures have dated since 2004, so treat the specific numbers as a 2000s snapshot; the larger pattern it documents has, if anything, intensified.

For more context

Readers can set its opposing case — that global markets allocate resources efficiently and lift living standards — against Ridgeway's, then weigh the evidence for themselves.

Sources

• Duke University Press
• Publishers Weekly
• Google Books