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.”

Low Energy, High Profits: How Privatizing Public Utilities Left Us All in the Dark

More than a generation after President Ronald Reagan barked at his subordinates, “Don’t just stand there; undo something!” government officials from South Africa to southern California have embarked upon an unprecedented dismantling of the public sector.

Jon Jeter
Por Jon Jeter

PHILADELPHIA -- The Maryland rapper Sean Born’s 2012 album Behind the Scale includes what one reviewer described as the “candidly soulful single” “Lights On,” which has the driving and catchy up-tempo beat that tends to characterize much of contemporary hip-hop. Its lyrics, however, have none of the swagger that the genre is known for and is, in

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CNA and Retiring Head RoseAnn DeMoro Leave Labor in Critical Condition

Dubbed by many the nation’s most progressive labor union the CNA in fact provides a case study in how organized labor — the engine for creating the most prosperous working class in the known world — finds itself at death’s door at the exact moment when American workers are in dire need of advocates.

Jon Jeter
Por Jon Jeter
Former presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, of Vermont,, left, flanked by RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of National Nurses United, speaks in support of Proposition 61 in Sacramento, Calif., Nov. 7, 2016. (AP/Rich Pedroncelli)

OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA -- “C’mon people, what are some more nurses values?” I was nearly four months into my stint in the communications office at the California Nurses Association, or CNA, when I found myself in a half-lit, mildewed, second-floor conference room in the union’s downtown Oakland office, seated among a clutch of maybe seven or eight

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US Just Had a Black History Month, Now It Needs a White One

The idea behind Black History Month is that people can only begin to overcome the past by acknowledging it. The same idea would apply with at least as much force to a White History Month.

Jon Jeter
Por Jon Jeter
George Washington, shown here in an 1853 lithograph, oversees his slaves at Mount Vernon. (The Granger Collection, NYC)

As long as you believe you are white, there is no hope for you. -- James Baldwin At 4:44 am on July 30th, 1864, Confederate sentries guarding a rebel stronghold just east of Petersburg, Virginia heard an awful, subterranean roar, followed in quick succession by a tremor underfoot that seemed to last, soldiers would say later, for somewhere

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The Great and Growing Gap Between Public Policy and Public Will

Time and again, when it comes to the most vital political issues of the day, a clear pattern emerges: Americans want one thing and their elected representatives deliver just the opposite.

Jon Jeter
Por Jon Jeter
A minister belonging to a group demanding Congress reject the Trump administration's budget proposals and health care bill, is arrested during a demonstration in the Russell Senate Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, July 18, 2017. (AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

WASHINGTON (Analysis) -- Polls released in the aftermath of the February 14 massacre at a South Florida high school showed a peculiar divergence in public opinion. While Americans support stronger gun control measures by a margin of nearly two to one, nearly 60 percent of respondents also doubt that their lawmakers will enact stricter

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The Hope and Change That Wasn’t in Post-Apartheid South Africa

The ANC’s Cyril Ramaphosa promises change for South Africa, but with a history of favoring neoliberal policy and entrenched with the old guard and its ties to the former apartheid regime, many South Africans are holding out hope.

Jon Jeter
Por Jon Jeter
People walk past a mural of former South African President Nelson Mandela in Katlehong, south of Johannesburg, South Africa, May 11, 2015. (AP/Themba Hadebe)

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA -- If ever there was a pivotal moment for South Africa’s young democracy, it was likely two years after voters of all races went to the polls for the first time, when President Nelson Mandela’s ruling party, the African National Congress, decided to proceed with construction of a mammoth, $8 billion dam project in

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Trump Infrastructure Plan and Inequality: A Culture’s Road Ahead

Trump’s stingy infrastructure plan will merely deepen decay-promoting austerity policies by further shifting the responsibility for road and bridge repair from the federal government to the profit-driven private sector, and already-strapped state and local jurisdictions.

Jon Jeter
Por Jon Jeter
President Donald Trump arrives to speak about infrastructure at the Department of Transportation, Friday, June 9, 2017, in Washington. (AP/Andrew Harnik)

INDIANAPOLIS – The morning commute in this landlocked Midwestern city is an obstacle course of potholes, buckled pavement, and shards of fugitive cement. Like infantrymen navigating a minefield, motorists swerve and stop, and zig and zag in rush hour traffic to avoid the peril from below. Drive east on Kessler Boulevard, however, and just past

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As American as Apple Pie: Rape in a Culture that Looks the Other Way

Along with slavery, and genocide, rape is universally regarded by major religions as a crime against humanity, meaning that there exists no circumstance in which the commission of the act is morally defensible. The United States, of course, was founded on all three.

Jon Jeter
Por Jon Jeter
Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, D-Del., adjusts her 'RECY" button as she joins other House members in wearing black in support the metoo and timesup movement, ahead of tonight's State of the Union address on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2018. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus and members of the Democratic Caucus wore red pins in memoriam of Recy Taylor. Taylor was abducted and raped while walking home from work in Alabama in 1944. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

FORT MYERS, FLORIDA -- Shortly before midnight on September 3, 1944, an African-American sharecropper named Recy Taylor was walking home from church with two companions in Abbeville, Alabama when the women noticed a green Chevy sedan drive past four times before finally rattling to a stop just a few feet ahead. Seven white men, armed with knives

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