PeaceWorks Kansas City is joining Our Revolution – Kansas City, Missouri in co-sponsoring an interview with Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research on “Unrigging the media and the economy”. The first half hour will be broadcast live on 90.1 FM, KKFI, Kansas City Community Radio, Feb. 23, 6 PM. Or click here at that time to connect via Facebook Live for the entire event.
Dr. Baker will be interviewed by Spencer Graves, Secretary of PeaceWorks Kansas City, and Joe Ballegeer, an activist with Our Revolution – Kansas City, who is scheduled to receive a PhD in economics from the University of Missouri at Kansas City this spring. The discussion will focus partly on Baker’s book, Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer (free from his website). He will also comment on legislation that is either currently pending or likely to be introduced in the current 2021-22 US Congressional session. This updates his discussion on KKFI last October, when he supported the Local Journalism Sustainability Act of 2019, while noting he would prefer something substantially stronger, as outlined in his (2016) Rigged. In this book, he notes that the unemployment rate for blacks tends to be double that of whites, and for black teens it’s much worse. Between 2010 and 2016, the employment rate for black teens increased from 14.5 to 21.5 percent. He noted that, “it is difficult to envision a social program that would have the same effect on the career and life prospects of young blacks as increasing their probability of getting a job by 50 percent.. He also noted that, “The gains from getting to full employment will not be evenly shared. They will go disproportionately to blacks and Hispanics and to people with less education.”
