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.”
Jeter is a Knight Fellowship recipient – Stanford University’s highest professional journalism award — as well as author of FLAT BROKE IN THE FREE MARKET (WW Norton, 2009) and co-author of A DAY LATE AND A DOLLAR SHORT (Wiley & Sons, 2010).
Articles
| 02/19/20 | Patreon| Jon Jeter | Tell A Story, Shame the Devil: How Pundits, Tweets, and Listicles Destroyed American Journalism | The cover story of the December 6th, 1993 issue of the New Yorker was akin to a thunderclap. Written by Mark Danner, the article entitled The Truth of El Mozote is a 22,000-word account of the My Lai-like massacre of nearly 1,000 villagers in the central American country of El Salvador. It begins: |
| 01/29/20 | Patreon| Jon Jeter | From Kobe to Cape Fear: When the Face of Sexual Menace is Black | As I recall the incident some 20 years later, it was my second trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo. I was sitting in the passenger seat of a midsized car alongside my driver, Pierre, and interpreter, Tom and we were returning to the hotel in the capital city of Kinshasa after a frustrating morning of trying to wrest |
| 01/23/20 | Patreon| Jon Jeter | Happy Birthday to the Most Beautiful Boogeyman: Celebrating 55 Years of Life in a Country Long Dead |
I must’ve been about 9 or 10 when I accompanied my father to the Indianapolis farmers market on an Indian summer weekend afternoon in 1974 or 75. Knowing my father’s appetites as I do, we had likely devoured a few German sausages and cheese, and with our work done, were preparing to return home when I
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| 12/15/2019 | Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox | Cutting Through the Impeachment Quagmire with Jon Jeter: (Recording of MoP Monthly Community Conference Call: 12/15/19) |
The latest entry in March on the Pentagon’s Community Conference call series is a conference call with “recovering” journalist Jon Jeter.
Jon and Cindy share their analysis of the impeachment imbroglio from a non-partisan perspective.
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| 12/04/2019 | Patreon| Jon Jeter | Blood Libel: New Journalism and the Second Assassination of Fred Hampton | On Thursday, December 4, 1969, at about 4:30 AM, three unmarked Chicago police cars and a panel truck left the 26th Street office of the Cook County state’s attorney and headed west. The lakefront air was bitterly cold, and the vehicles moved deliberately past the empty lots, gutted warehouses, and walk-ups that dotted the city’s west side like rows of rotting teeth. |
| 11/05/2019 | The Critical Hour Podcast | High-Level Trade Talks With China Fail, While Tariffs Double | On this episode of The Critical Hour, Dr. Wilmer is joined by Dr. Jack Rasmus, professor of economics at Saint Mary’s College of California; Jon Jeter, author and award-winning correspondent; and Caleb Maupin, journalist and political analyst. |
| 10/8/19 | Patreon| Jon Jeter | Dead Man Done Walking: The Afro-Pessimist’s Plan for Reparations | Richard Wright’s 1940 masterpiece, Native Son, features what is likely the first Afro-Pessimist protagonist in the annals of American literature. As most everyone recalls from freshman Lit, Bigger Thomas was the black Chicago chauffeur who murdered his white employer’s daughter in a fit of panic after she and her boyfriend had dragged |
| 10/31/19 | Patreon| Jon Jeter | The Come-Up: How Coupling Class-Consciousness With Identity Politics Can Inseminate the Reparations Movement | The son of a Bavarian cattle trader, Mayer Lehman, set sail for the United States in 1850, joining his older brothers Henry and Emanuel who’d just opened a general merchandise store in Montgomery, Alabama directly across the street from the warehouse where slaves were auctioned off. When he arrived, business was jumping and the cotton high — crop yields doubled between 1849 and |
| 6/18/2019 | The Globalist | A Hungry Future | Are the days of inexpensive food over? |
| 5/15/2019 | Black Agenda Report | Adrift in a Decolonizing World, the White Settler Makes a Final, Furious Stand | From Ramallah to Rio, Capetown to Caracas, Green Bay to Gaza, the sun is setting on the colonial racial order. |
| 4/12/2019 | Truthout | Democratic Candidates Say They Support Reparations. Do They Mean It? | Many Black voters are questioning the sincerity of candidates’ promises. |
| 4/27/2019 | The Critical Hour Podcast | Top Stories: Assange’s Fight, Biden’s Race To WH, Census Questions Who’s In US | On this episode of The Critical Hour, Dr. Wilmer Leon is joined by Jon Jeter, author, two-time Pulitzer Prize, former Washington Post bureau chief and award-winning foreign correspondent |
| 2/27/2019 | Truthout | Flat Broke, Black Voters Want More Than Just Another Black President | Black voters increasingly view Black political leadership as complicit in covering up Wall Street crimes. |
| 10/30/2018 | Black Agenda Report | Worse Than Apartheid: Black in Obama’s America | The U.S. Black-white wealth gap is larger than in South Africa at the height of apartheid. The statistic is all the more remarkable when considering that South Africa virtually mandated… |
| 10/1/2018 | Mint Press | 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. |
| 9/28/2018 | Mint Press | 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. |
| 9/24/2018 | Mint Press | 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. |
| 9/24/2018 | Mint Press | 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. |
| 9/12/2018 | Mint Press | 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. |
| 9/3/2018 | Mint Press | 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. |
| 8/30/2018 | Mint Press | 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. |
| 8/9/2018 | The Chicago Reporter | Is the only way to fix policing to end it? | After years of abuse, cover-ups and costs, many Chicago activists say it’s clear that policing can’t be reformed. |
| 8/1/2018 | Mint Press | An Open Letter to New York Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger | The Times has always been a newspaper by, and for, the elite, but by squeezing out the few alternative voices that you once employed, it no longer publishes those articles that illuminate and connect us to a world outside the Beltway, or beyond Harvard Square. |
| 7/27/2018 | Mint Press | Stand Your Ground: As Florida Case Illustrates, A 33-State License to Kill | For all practical purposes, the consequence for killing an unarmed African-American in Florida is often less than that for killing a beaver in Maine. |
| 7/18/2018 | Mint Press | The Helsinki Furor and America’s Eternal Search for External Enemies | For the vast majority of Americans, the real menace is not Putin. It’s much closer to home: the gendarmerie who brutalize people of color, banks that swindle borrowers out of their life-savings, schools attempting to lobotomize our children, and a health-insurance cartel that makes more money the sicker we are. |
| 6/29/2018 | Mint Press | How Democrats Could Turn Kennedy Replacement into Revival | Democrats could use a hot-button, and unpopular issue like the repeal of Roe v. Wade to restart a conversation with ordinary, working-class Americans who feel abandoned by the neoliberal, pro-investor policies of first the Clinton Administration and then the Obama administration. |
| 6/29/2018 | Mint Press | The Upside of Janus: Court’s Ruling on Dues Check-Offs Could Help Democratize Unions | The Supreme Court’s much-pilloried Janus decision could actually prove to be a good thing in the long-run by democratizing labor unions and revitalizing a moribund movement that was the engine of America’s postwar prosperity. |
| 6/26/2018 | Mint Press | Hepatitis Spikes as Poverty and Isolation Take Hold Among America’s Forgotten | What’s happening in Michigan is the largest outbreak of hepatitis A in the state’s history. But Michigan is hardly unique: In nearby Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky — and as far away as San Diego, Salt Lake City, and New York City — the number of hepatitis A cases is spiking sharply. |
| 6/23/2018 | Mint Press | The US Ruined Their Countries, Now Trump Calls Them “Animals” and Sends Them Back | Unmentioned in America’s immigration debate is the role that both Democratic and Republican administrations have played in creating the volatile situations that force Hondurans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans and other Latino refugees to flee in the first place. |
| 6/21/2018 | Mint Press | If Trump Does It, It’s Atrocious — But Hasn’t the US Been Doing Much the Same for Decades? | Rather than reflexively opposing Trump, the Democrats would be wise, from a political perspective, to recalibrate their failed foreign-policy positions, and reestablish their bona fides with the American electorate as the party for peace. |
| 6/21/2018 | Mint Press | With Progressives Like These, Who Needs Conservatives? | “The left has moved so far to the right that they have no memory or understanding that many of us on the left come out of a black revolutionary tradition. In their mind, they’re always the ones who should be running shit.” |
| 6/19/2018 | Mint Press | America’s Record High Suicide Rate Reflects Declining Economy, Culture | The nation’s rising rate of suicide, the highest since 1986, corresponds to a shape-shifting economy that is in the final stage of its mutation from an industrial economy to a post-industrial economy, in which living standards are declining and employees work harder for less pay. |
| 6/15/2018 | Mint Press | Trump’s “Beautiful” Employment Numbers Mask an Ugly Reality for US Workers | No matter the jubilation articulated by the White House, Wall Street or the Washington press corps, happy days are most definitely not here again. So what accounts for the yawning chasm between a utopian jobless rate and a dystopian reality for a growing number of Americans? |
| 6/8/2018 | Mint Press | White Farms and Black Farms: Will South African Land Finally Shed Apartheid’s Proportions? | Many here say that South Africa’s constitution has never been an impediment to land redistribution; the problem was always the political will of the ANC, which abandoned Marxist ideology for a neoliberal approach. |
| 6/6/2018 | Black Agenda Report | Racist Roseanne Was Way Off: Valerie Jarrett Hailed from Planet of the Rich | “Throughout her public life, Jarrett served the Empire and not the people, African-Americans least of all.” |
| 6/1/2018 | Mint Press | Racist Roseanne Was Way Off: Valerie Jarrett Hailed from Planet of the Rich | Valerie Jarrett’s ties to Wall Street earned her the label “elitist” from many blacks in Chicago, who are suspicious of her strong relationships with right-wing luminaries as diverse as Rupert Murdoch and Condoleezza Rice. |
| 5/30/2018 | Mint Press | Pleasing Investors at the Expense of the People, Argentina Sells out to the IMF | President Mauricio Macri has put the country back on the neoliberal path with policies that favor big agricultural producers inside the country, and investors both inside and outside of Argentina. |
| 5/25/2018 | Mint Press | 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. |
| 5/24/2018 | Mint Press | 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. |
| 5/17/2018 | Mint Press | 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. |
| 5/10/2018 | Mint Press | 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? |
| 4/30/2018 | Mint Press | 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. |
| 4/25/2018 | Mint Press | 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. |
| 4/20/2018 | Mint Press | 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. |
| 4/20/2018 | Mint Press | When a Black Journalist Wins a Pulitzer, Chances Are It’s For Writing White | With the American Empire at its nadir and seeking both absolution and scapegoats, black journalists, academics, police, filmmakers and philanthropists are the post-Obama Orientalists, increasingly charged with writing about people of color for white people. |
| 4/17/2018 | Mint Press | Speaking Fees, Selfies, Sucking Up to Power: How BLM Lost its Mojo | The Black Panther Party remains beloved in the African-American community 52 years after its founding — revered for its nutrition and health programs, fearless defense of the people, and self-sacrifice. The BLM leadership, on the other hand, poses for fashion magazine photo spreads. |
| 4/3/2018 | Mint Press | Winnie Madikizela-Mandela: A Death in the Family for Millions of South Africans | “I am not Mandela’s product,” Winnie Madikizela-Mandela once told an interviewer. “I am the product of the masses of my country and the product of my enemy.” |
| 3/30/2018 | Mint Press | March For Our Lives: A New Generation Sets Aside Tribalism for a Progressive Cause | The dynamism and interracial character of last week’s March For Our Lives rallies provides further evidence that American workers have a chance of challenging the wealthy for a bigger piece of the pie only when they put their tribal differences aside to fight together. |
| 3/28/2018 | Mint Press | Rich Keep Saks in Clover, Poor Keep TJMaxx Growing, But No Middle to Shop at Sears | The death of the American shopping mall reflects the twilight of an American middle class that was the most prosperous of the Industrial era, imbued with unprecedented purchasing power by New Deal-era public infrastructure investments, and trade unions heavily influenced by a radical vanguard of Communists and African-Americans. |
| 3/26/2018 | Mint Press | The Untold Story: Russiagate and the Media’s Authoritarian Turn | There is no evidence that the WikiLeaks disclosures or the social media posts allegedly intended to undermine support for Clinton had any effect on the election. What almost certainly did was low turnout by Democratic voters, especially African-Americans. |
| 3/23/2018 | Mint Press | In Seeing African Corruption as Landlocked, George Clooney Misses the Boat | Any forensic examination of African corruption would reveal Western fingerprints everywhere, from the financing of a ruinous civil war and exploitation of oil and diamond reserves in Angola, to the pillaging of mineral resources in Zambia. |
| 9/24/2017 | The Valley Media | Honky Talk: The Lingua Franca of White Respectability PoliticsSeptember 24, 2017 | |
| 5/24/2017 | The Valley Media | Damn, Damn, Damn! Killing the Black Father in AmericaJune 16, 2017 | |
| 5/24/2017 | The Valley Media | It’s Nation TimeMay 24, 2017 | |
| 5/5/2017 | The Valley Media | The Nurses’ Union That Made Medicine SickMay 5, 2017 | |
| 4/28/2017 | The Valley Media | ToothlessApril 28, 2017 | |
| 4/17/2017 | The Valley Media | The Afro Pessimists’ ParadoxApril 17, 2017 | |
| 4/14/2017 | The Valley Media | The Shape of Things to ComeApril 14, 2017 | |
| 3/29/2017 | The Valley Media | Church Music: Assessing Hip-Hop’s Golden Era in a Gilded AgeMarch 29, 2017 | |
| 2/15/2017 | The Valley Media | Break Up the Knicks, Save New York CityFebruary 15, 2017 | |
| 1/19/2017 | The Valley Media | The Fire Last Time: Barack Obama and the Politics of Counter RevolutionJanuary 19, 2017 | |
| 12/21/2016 | The Valley Media | A Christmas Story: With No Room at the Inn, a Family Follows their StarDecember 21, 2016 | |
| 12/21/2016 | The Valley Media | Fight or Flight: Black in Trump’s AmericaDecember 21, 2016 | |
| 12/6/2016 | The Valley Media | Woke: A Bitterly Divided Nation Turns to Trump, and Sees Itself for the First TimeDecember 6, 2016 | |
| 12/3/2016 | The Valley Media | History, and Africans Everywhere, Will Absolve Him: Fidel Castro’s Singular Example of Racial SolidarityDecember 3, 2016 | |
| 11/23/2016 | The Valley Media | Trial By Fire: How a Forensic Scientist Used A Pig Fry to Implicate the Mexican Government in the Disappearance of 43 StudentsNovember 23, 2016 | |
| 9/7/2016 | Black Agenda Report | ESPN’S Journal of Black Respectability Politics | Michael Eric Dyson is up to his corporate tricks, this time in ESPN’s black-oriented web site The Undefeated. Dyson personifies the surrender of the Black middle class, in total synch… |
| 7/24/2009 | The Globalist | Government Intervention and Chile’s Salmon Story | How did Chile make good use of government intervention? |
| 6/22/2009 | The Globalist | Africa’s Giant Flea Market | What development failures led to Africa becoming a dumping ground for the rich world’s secondhand goods? |
| 2/29/2008 | This American Life | The true story of little-known rooms in the New York City Board of Education building. Teachers are told to report there instead of their classrooms. No reason is usually given. | |
| 12/1/2002 | Mother Jones | South Africa’s Driest Season | The government’s push to lure private companies to buy its utilities has led to water shutoffs and the worst cholera epidemic in the nation’s history. |