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.”

Mainlining the Capitalist Sugar-High: The Age of Corporate Buybacks

Trump’s tax cuts have triggered a wave of corporate stock buybacks that may steady stock markets but have done little to raise wages or create jobs.

Jon Jeter
By Jon Jeter
President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence meet with Harley Davidson executives and Union Representatives on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Feb. 2, 2017. AP | Pablo Martinez Monsivais

WASHINGTON -- Weeks after he was sworn in as president, Donald Trump met with Harley-Davidson executives and union representatives at the White House, to win support for his tax-plan proposal: I think you’re going to even expand — I know your business is now doing very well, and there’s a lot of spirit right now in the country that you weren’t

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Civilian Police Review Boards: Toothless Testaments to Institutional Racism

Civilian review boards fail to stop the bleeding in their communities thanks to their institutional toothlessness. Their lack the authority to subpoena police or investigate police abuse leaves them at the mercy of police to self-investigate.

Jon Jeter
By Jon Jeter
Erica Bailey, daughter of Aaron Bailey, wipes a tear during a news conference, Oct. 31, 2017, in Indianapolis. Two Indianapolis police officers won't face criminal charges for the June shooting death of Aaron Bailey, who crashed his car while fleeing from a traffic stop, a special prosecutor announced Tuesday. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings)

INDIANAPOLIS -- The rector at Christ Church Cathedral here, Steve Carlsen, was crestfallen when a special prosecutor in November declined to indict either of the two police officers who fatally shot a church volunteer in late July of last year. Forty-five-year-old Aaron Bailey was unarmed when he crashed his car into a tree in the wee morning hours

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Why a Prized Indiana High School Goes Against the Grain of Education Reform

The yawning gap between the kind of schools that America’s ruling class chooses for its own children, and the curriculum it increasingly imposes on other people’s children provides compelling evidence that the plutocrats and policymakers do not view education as a ladder to help lift up the masses, but rather as a tool for reproducing inequality.

Jon Jeter
By Jon Jeter

While some social policy formulators are advocating rigorous teaching methods in the formal skills for disadvantaged children, they are tending to enroll their own youngsters in schools that are more open, more permissive, and that tend to give increasing emphasis to the arts and the humanities. Many observers are beginning to view schooling in

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US to Iran, North Korea: We Get Nuclear Weapons and You Don’t

Lost in the debate over Trump’s announcement Tuesday that his administration planned to walk away from an agreement limiting Iran’s nuclear ambitions is a fundamental question: If the U.S. has nuclear weapons, why can’t Iran or North Korea or yes, even Brazil possess their own?

Jon Jeter
By Jon Jeter
An anti-war protester wears a mask showing US President Donald Trump in Berlin, Germany, Saturday, Nov. 18, 2017 during a demonstration against nuclear weapons near the Brandenburg Gate. (AP/Michael Sohn)

WASHINGTON -- The United States’ invasion of Iraq was but a few months away when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva -- or Lula, as he is commonly known -- was sworn in as president of Brazil, Latin America’s largest country. Big things were expected of the plain-spoken former lathe-operator who’d lost a pinky finger in a showdown with a hydraulic press and

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Savoring Every Bite: Cheering the Fall of Black America’s Scold

Remembering the sucker-punches that “the Cos” delivered to their cause, there is no shortage of blacks who today are basking in the afterglow of a race traitor getting his comeuppance for trafficking in the worst Amos-n-Andy racial tropes.

Jon Jeter
By Jon Jeter
Bill Cosby speaks to students during at a tribute marking the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education at Riverside Church in Manhattan, N.Y., Monday, Feb. 2, 2004. Cosby got serious with 500 ninth-graders at a talk commemorating the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling. The event was hosted by Columbia University's Teachers College, where Cosby's son Ennis was a doctoral student when he was fatally shot in 1997. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

INDIANAPOLIS –- The four of us, all black men, watched in stunned silence as the news unfurled across the barber shop’s television screen: a jury in Pennsylvania had found Bill Cosby guilty of drugging and sexually assaulting a woman at his home. Finally, my barber broke the silence: I hope they serve pound cake in jail.” The room erupted in

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Nuttier than a Fruitcake: White America’s Racial Psychopathy

With a cartoonish bigot in the White House, state terror that is reminiscent of the Jim Crow era, and epochal inequality, there is, as of old, a whiff of insanity in white Americans’ racial attitudes, a hint of a nation coming unglued, foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog.

Jon Jeter
By Jon Jeter
A group of President Donald Trump supporters is seen from the media van traveling in the president's motorcade en route to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., Feb. 3, 2018. (AP/Carolyn Kaster)

Were it not, perhaps, for Stanley Kubrick’s deft direction, the fight scene in the 1960 Hollywood classic Spartacus might well have been laughable rather than iconic. At nearly six-feet-four-inches tall, the African gladiator Draba, played by the former pro football star, Woody Strode, towered over Kirk Douglas’s eponymous character. The two

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With Golden Opportunity in Coming Elections, Will Democrats Rediscover a Soul?

With roughly 920 days until the next presidential election, the pivotal question is whether the Democratic establishment has learned its lesson from the 2016 debacle and will turn to a Bernie Sanders-like progressive to rescue the party from ruination and stave off Trump’s second term.

Jon Jeter
By Jon Jeter
Jason Kander, left, former Missouri Secretary of State, campaigns for Jon Ossoff, Democratic candidate for Georgia's 6th congressional district, right, during a stop at Ossoff's campaign office in Chamblee, Ga., Monday, June 19, 2017. The race between Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel is seen as a significant political test for the new Trump Administration. The district traditionally goes Republican, but most consider the race too close to call as voters head to the polls on Tuesday. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

WASHINGTON (Analysis) -- At first glance, Jason Kander would seem to be a political consultant’s dream -- or perhaps nightmare, if you’re a Republican. Approaching his 37th birthday, the former Missouri secretary of state is boyishly handsome, whip smart, a social-media savant, and appeals to both millenials and seniors. What’s more, he articulates

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