Book review: Jon Jeter's "Flat Broke"

Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People
By Jon Jeter
Hardcover, $25.95, 256 pages
W.W. Norton: New York
May 2009

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the United States is giving birth to the first generation of Americans whose life expectancy will be shorter, not longer, than their parents'. Our system of global finance has put us on the precipice, teetering on ruin. As of mid-2008, the United States has bequeathed to the world the biggest speculative bubble, the worst housing crisis, and the gravest economic meltdown in nearly eighty years, and the response from America's political class has been the largest single transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in at least a century.

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Globalization is an international shakedown, and its targets are ordinary people across the globe, men and women made sojourners in the country of their birth by global finance and its missionaries.

As Washington Post bureau chief first in southern Africa and later in South America, Jon Jeter has had a ringside seat watching the devastation unfold as a result of what he calls the "economic fundamentalism" that has created a "transnational underclass."

"This book," he writes, "takes the measure of that biblical cataclysm."

And this book, with Jeters' powerful writing and obvious empathy for the underdog, will break your heart.

Rather than relay dry statistics and charts alone, Jeters uses personal stories of the exploited and downtrodden worldwide to bring attention to the plight of the hundreds of millions suffering under the yoke of the new colonialism -- economic imperialism spread by the cooperation of the World Bank, multinational corporations and the private/public elite who run the world. This is not to say he ignores stats altogether; there are end notes and attributions throughout.

But it's people and their stories first for this former reporter, and his ability to put his subjects comfortably in their natural settings, in their normal routines, is magical.

The lives he has captured as vividly as Kodachrome include:

• Rose Shanzi of Zambia, who spends all afternoon praying to sell 75 cents worth of tomatoes so she and her five kids can eat that day, in a free-for-all market where every broke person is trying to sell pittances to every other broke person in the hot sun of an African afternoon. It's a crap shoot, and more often than not, she loses.
• Sylvia Ozuna of Buenos Aires, a prostitute, turns over care of her child to a minder so she can hit the streets for $10 a throw. She originally moved to Argentina six years ago from Paraguay with a plan to go to medical school, and she'd worked cleaning offices until the peso was devalued and her economic world bottomed out.
• Miguel Machado of Buenos Aires, who takes five of his children each night with him to rummage through the garbage for recyclables while his wife takes care of babies at home. Originally a sugar cane field worker who bettered himself by moving to the city to work in a mill for $600 a month, his world collapsed like Ozuna's with the Argentine peso.
• Isabella Lopes da Silva of Brazil, a former secretary who lost her job (as did her son-in-law and daughter) in the Brazilian GDP contraction of 2003, and now has been reduced to using local superstitious ritual and prayer to try and get relief.
• Paulo Roberto, a Brazilian cabdriver, son of a maid, with "four children, ulcers and a lot on his mind," who celebrates his 46th birthday realizing he'll never escape the grind of poverty as a fellow victim of the Brazilian economy.
• Agnes Mohapi, 58, living with her 24-year-old daughter in Soweto, suffering electricity outages and water contamination as the post-apartheid government of South Africa struggles to join the globalization game by putting the screws to its services to citizens while it tries to dress itself up to appeal to foreign investors.

There are others in these pages, too, all of whom are fighting in trenches they rarely realize are shared by others half a world away. Even the so-called First World is not immune; Jeters spends a whole chapter examining the role of former Black Panther Bobby Rush, rehabilitated now as a member of Congress who's gotten in bed with telecoms and other corporations in troubled relationships Rush claims are designed to bring grants back to the South Side of Chicago. And Jeters looks at another Chicago native, Sonia, seemingly upwardly mobile with her current enrollment in graduate school, yet unable to find a man who is of her "class" and/or not threatened by her success.

Gentrification of both people and property, the author intimates, are hollowing out not just physical neighborhoods, but traditional emotional relationships as well, both familial and societal. As byproducts of a thoughtless, near-primeval drive toward globalization, anything that can't be quantified--human awareness, the spirit of a public school, the historical meaning of place--is not even consciously discarded. It's simply dumped. The aspects of human life that are important as lived are simply ignored, creating a fellowship of the dispossessed, even when, in cases like Sonia's, her dispossession is created by her rising on the ladder of what is applauded as "success" in the imperial worldview.

And it's undermining the foundations of democracy as well:

This is the new global class war, a conflict that increasingly recognizes neither race, nor geopgraphy nor traditional alliances. Worldwide, widening inequality has increasingly estranged ordinary working people from the proxies they choose to represent them in democratic discussion.

These characters in Flat Broke are painfully real, full of integrity and valor as they struggle to keep roofs over the heads of their children and aging parents--willing to dig through garbage, sell their bodies, kill their own dreams, pray to discredited gods for relief, barter over rotting vegetables.

Through these stories, we get a glimpse of what "hyperinflation" means when it's at street and gut level. Far outside the ivory tower realms of Milton Friedman's University of Chicago, these are how those "acceptable" levels of unemployment or deregulation or "destablization" play out, in the gutters and squalid homes of once-making-it families who have become, in the eyes of Masters of the Universe, disposable garbage.

Jeters tells these tales sadly and nobly, with a mingling of melancholy and anger. Ultimately, he points to efforts to revitalize local economies as the most likely way to gradually pull the miserable millions out of the morass created by the greedy. Chile, post-Friedman experimentation, when the state reverted back to using some common-sense protectionist policies and re-regulation of national assets, seems to be providing one clear example of a way forward.

But in the end, it's going to take political will, and attention to consequences, and demands for information and accountability of multi-nationals and government to find a way ahead for those suffering in poverty worldwide. It may not seem like much, but awareness of the scope and origin of the problem has got to be the first step, and Flat Broke is one of the best foundational platforms imaginable to get informed and viscerally connected with the depth of the crisis. It's a marvelous book, tenderly written and passionately conceived.