Flat broke in the free market
Subtitle: how globalization fleeced working people
By: Jon Jeter.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co.
Published: 2009
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 232
ISBN-13: 9780393065077
Subjects: Free trade -- Social aspects; International trade -- Social aspects; Economic development -- Social aspects; Economic policy -- Social aspects; Working class -- Social conditions; Globalization -- Economic aspects
Description: A powerful, accessible, and eye-opening analysis of the global economy.

Growing up in an African American working-class family in the Midwest, Jon Jeter watched the jobs undergirding a community disappear. As a journalist for the Washington Post (twice a Pulitzer Prize finalist), he reported on the free-market reforms of the IMF and the World Bank, which in a single generation created a transnational underclass.

Led by the United States, nations around the world stopped making things and starting buying them, imbibing a risky cocktail of deindustrialization, privatization, and anti-inflationary monetary policy. Jeter gives the consequences of abstract economic policies a human face, and shows how our chickens are coming home to roost in the form of the subprime mortgage scandal, the food crisis, and the fraying of traditional social bonds (marriage). From Rio de Janeiro to Shanghai to Soweto to Chicago’s South Side and Washington, DC, Jeter shows us how the economic prescriptions of “the Washington Consensus” have only deepened poverty—while countries like Chile and Venezuela have flouted the conventional wisdom and prospered.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.