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Book Summary and Reviews of Flat Broke in the Free Market by Jon Jeter

Flat Broke in the Free Market by Jon Jeter

Flat Broke in the Free Market

How Globalization Fleeced Working People

by Jon Jeter

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  • Published:
  • May 2009, 256 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

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.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. Jeter's stinging criticisms are a catalyst for a truthful and painful discussion about who a 'global economy' helps and who it destroys." - Publishers Weekly

"Jeter overreaches, but he usefully exposes the underbelly of the free-market system." - Kirkus Reviews

This information about Flat Broke in the Free Market was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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