Jon Jeter

Jon Jeter is a published book author and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist with more than 20 years of journalistic experience. He is a former Washington Post bureau chief and award-winning foreign correspondent on two continents, as well as a former radio and television producer for Chicago Public Media’s “This American Life.”

Global De-Dollarization Spells Jolts and Crises for US Economy

The Trump administration’s bellicosity has combined with the volatility of the global economy to sharply accelerate what has become an international movement: ditching the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

Jon Jeter
By Jon Jeter
US Dollar

BEIJING -- In January, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to denounce Pakistan’s commitment to fighting terrorism. Twenty-four hours later, Pakistan’s central bank announced that it no longer would use the U.S. dollar in international transactions, and would instead switch to the Chinese yuan. Four months later, in response to the Trump

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A Greedy Economy on Borrowed Time: America Under the Sword of Damocles

Economists and financiers fear that the Treasury will have to print more and more money to service that debt, ultimately devaluing the currency and triggering hyperinflation, similar to what Germany experienced in trying to repay its onerous foreign debts following World War I.

Jon Jeter
By Jon Jeter
American Flag

NEW YORK -- On the afternoon of December 31, 1999, I boarded a flight from Chicago O’Hare airport for San Francisco International and found myself seated next to a bear of a man, who, at 6 feet 6 inches tall, and more than 300 pounds, squeezed into the middle seat of an emergency row. His unkempt sandy blonde beard contrasted with a ratty,

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The Dow of Inequality: Counting the Casualties of America’s Class War

The neoliberal approach to handling a dire economic downturn may soon produce a political crisis, reminiscent of the debt crisis that led to Hitler’s rise 80 years ago. The political class seems to be taking note: the stark inequality reflected in the soaring stock market and shrinking paychecks is unsustainable.

Jon Jeter
By Jon Jeter
Banksy Class War Inequality

NEW YORK -- The revelation that the Dow Jones industrial average and the Standard and Poor's stock index closed at historic highs this past Thursday afternoon reminded me of an early autumn afternoon a dozen years ago in a glorious San Francisco apartment high in the sky. The apartment, perched atop a rise in the city’s Russian Hill

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Why the NAACP and His Friends at the Top Can’t Make Ben Jealous the Next Maryland Governor

Ben Jealous’ abysmal campaign reflects the inertia of an African-American polity that was on the move only a generation ago and beginning to restructure central cities that were wholly unresponsive to people of color.

Jon Jeter
By Jon Jeter
Ben Jealous NAACP

BALTIMORE -- At first glance, Ben Jealous appears to be a good bet to become Maryland’s first black governor. Running in a blue state -- where Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one and nearly one in three voters is African-American -- against an incumbent Republican governor, Jealous is a liberal Democrat, a son of Baltimore, and the former

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A Tale of Two 9/11s and the Lessons America Chooses Never to Learn

After 9/11, Bush famously asked “Why do they hate us?” The answers might have been found on another 9/11, 28 years before, when the U.S. in Chile took a decisive step down the road to empire.

Jon Jeter
By Jon Jeter
Sept. 11

NEW YORK -- Of apartheid South Africa’s myriad atrocities, one of the most medieval was a system in which white settlers plied their farmworkers with alcohol in lieu of wages. Known by the Afrikaans word for tot, or drink, the dop not only kept workers docile -- and wages low -- but, in fostering widespread and chronic dependency, the practice

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On Labor Day, Where’s Labor? How Did American Workers Lose Their Power?

Corporate executives have wooed both Democrats and labor union leaders with increasing assertiveness, in a concerted effort to thwart the interracial labor movement that is the only fighting force to ever battle the plutocrats to a draw.

Jon Jeter
By Jon Jeter
Workers march together during a 1946 May Day parade in New York City. Photo | Bettmann Archive

MINNEAPOLIS -- (Analysis) Three scenes from America’s class war: In 1897, the president of Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills in Atlanta hired 20 Negro women to work in the folding department of one of the mills. The other 1,400 workers, all white, promptly walked off the job in protest. According the historian Philip S. Foner in his book Organized

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Why a Two-State Solution May Be the Only Answer to America’s Enduring Racial Divide

American white supremacy is akin to a religious cult: motivated by ignorance and fear, a critical mass of Whites regard non-Whites in much the same way that villagers in Salem regarded the witches they burned at the stake for practicing witchcraft.

Jon Jeter
By Jon Jeter

I will state flatly that the bulk of this country’s white population impresses me, and has so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long. They have been married to the lie of white supremacy too long. The effect in their personalities, their

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