Author

Jon Jeter

Jon Jeter is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, published author, and award-winning journalist with more than two decades of experience as a foreign correspondent on two continents. A former Washington Post bureau chief who has reported from Africa, South America, and across the United States, Jon has dedicated his career to exposing the economic systems that perpetuate poverty and exploitation throughout the African diaspora.

Jon is the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market (W.W. Norton, 2009), a searing examination of how free market policies devastate working-class communities from Johannesburg to Chicago, and co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short (Wiley & Sons, 2010). He is a recipient of the Knight Fellowship, Stanford University’s highest professional journalism honor, and a former producer for Chicago Public Media’s acclaimed “This American Life.”

Jon's Latest Articles

500 Years, No Pay Raise: The War on African Wages and the Economy Fighting to Break Free

By Jon Jeter ● World ● April 2, 2026

They took the land, the labor, and the minerals. They left behind an economy where working 89 hours a week earns you $77 a month, and you still owe your boss a cut for hiring you. The Plunder Papers follow the money from a Nairobi father to the extraction machine the West built and never turned off.

‘Everything Must Go!’ Blacks on the Continent and in the Diaspora Experiencing a Crisis of Ownership

By Jon Jeter ● World ● March 2, 2026

From Kenya’s fire sale of Safaricom to skyrocketing utility bills in Black neighborhoods across America, privatization is reversing the gains of liberation movements worldwide. The second installment of Jon Jeter’s Plunder Papers.

A Brilliant Boy, a Garbage Dump, and the $415 Standing Between Him and Medical School

By Jon Jeter ● World ● February 2, 2026

This story marks the first installment in “The Plunder Papers,” an ongoing investigative series by two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Jon Jeter examining why Africans continue to live in grinding poverty seven decades after the alleged close of the colonial era.