It’s All for Sale

By James Ridgeway. <i>Duke University Press. $18.95.</i>

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Our burgeoning tendency to regard the world’s diverse treasures less as aspects of the commonweal and more as goods to be bought and sold for corporate gain is at the core of James Ridgeway’s new book, It’s All for Sale. Fresh water, human body parts, even the sky itself are now becoming “commodities” in world trade.

Ridgeway grapples here with an old idea — that everything has a price. But he has documented new extremes in the commercial mindset that brought us plantation slavery, clearcutting old growth forests, and the hoovering up of every last edible fish in the ocean. His method of demonstrating just how far that mindset has gone is bluntly straightforward: He summarizes historical and present-day world trade in an exhaustive catalog of stuff that can be — and is — exploited for a profit, from cobalt and cocaine to genes and human excrement. And he often points to the jarring effects that a specific trade can have on citizens, consumers, and nations, such as the body-organ brokers in China who are literally profiteering on the bodies of death-row convicts.

There is surprisingly scant analysis here. While Ridgeway often seems to be building — statistic by statistic, fact by fact — toward a philosophical or political climax, in most chapters he shies away from conclusions. It’s All for Sale is thus most valuable as a reference work — a lean but handy encyclopedia of our age’s relentless blending of utilitarianism and greed.


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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

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And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

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