$50 Trillion Moved From the Working Class to the 1% | Ben Johnson, Inequality by Design

$50 Trillion Moved From the Working Class to the 1% | Ben Johnson, Inequality by Design

$50 trillion has moved from the working class to the top 1% of Americans over the past four decades. Clara Mattei talks with Ben Johnson, co-author of Inequality by Design, about how the rules were written to make that happen.Drawing on four decades of public data, Ben Johnson and economist Dr. Ryan Mattson trace the widening gap between what the economy produces and what working people take home. A federal minimum wage frozen at $7.25 since 2009. A purchasing-power gap between minimum and average wages that has grown past $22 an hour. GDP figures that climb year after year, with the gains collecting at the very top. According to a RAND Corporation study, about $3,700 a year has left the pocket of every American below the top 1%, every year, for forty years. The book grounds these numbers in the lives of real people, then follows the policy choices that built the gap.The conversation widens to the long view. Johnson compares today's inequality to Bourbon France in the years before its revolution and to Tsarist Russia in its final decade, reading the historical record of where extreme concentration of wealth has led before. They look at worker-owned alternatives like Mondragón, the Spanish cooperative that employs tens of thousands and shares its profits, and they close on whether new technology and AI spread opportunity widely or gather it into even fewer hands.Ben Johnson holds undergraduate degrees in Russian and international relations and spent years as an emergency medical technician, which put him face to face with the families behind the statistics. He is now a member of the FREE Assembly. Inequality by Design: How a Rigged Economy Fractures America and What We Can Do About It is available now from Upriver Press. https://www.upriverpress.com/home/inequality-by-designAs of June 2026, Ben Johnson is running for Tulsa City Council District 9.CHAPTERS00:00:00 3,000 Billionaires and Counting00:01:22 Inequality by Design00:02:11 Why the Book Starts With People00:04:08 Why Your Paycheck Buys Less00:06:14 What the GDP Numbers Hide00:09:26 Where $50 Trillion Went00:11:19 How the Money Leaves Your Town00:12:24 Where Profit Really Comes From00:14:19 Who Sets Your Wage00:15:27 When Workers Own the Company00:16:57 Oklahoma Minimum Wage at $7.25 Since 200900:18:44 Why Investors Buy Land They Never Use00:23:58 America and France Before the Revolution00:28:21 When Money Loses Its Value00:30:40 Have America's Flour Wars Begun?00:31:53 The Revolution's Unfinished Promise00:33:47 Why Revolutions Split and Fail00:35:37 The Third Way That Keeps Getting Crushed00:40:10 What We Can Do About It00:42:40 Will Technology Save Us?00:46:07 Cancer Cures or Another Yacht?00:47:09 Beyond "Profit Line Go Up"🔔 Subscribe to FREE (Forum for Real Economic Emancipation) @FreeFreeForum⁩❤️ Watch, learn more, and join the FREE Forum: https://freefreeforum.org🌱 Support FREE & Help Us Grow: https://www.freefreeforum.org/donate🎧 Listen as a PodcastApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/free-with-clara-mattei/id1828302105Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5m5xbrPzTSmdGZFQuZP7ZC▶ Connect with FREELinktree: https://linktr.ee/FreeFreeForumSubstack: https://freefreeforum.substack.com/X: https://x.com/freefreeforumBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/freefreeforum.bsky.socialInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/freefreeforum/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@freefreeforumFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/FreeFreeForum#Inequality #Economics #Capitalism #Meritocracy #minimumwage

The Alternative to Capitalism Nobody Talks About | Eleanor Finley & Camila Vergara

War, austerity, and a political class that offers no way out. What does an actual alternative look like — one that's already being built?Dr. Camila Vergara sits down with Eleanor Finley, author of Practicing Social Ecology (Pluto Press), to trace how democratic, ecological alternatives to capitalism move from theory into practice — from the commons of New England to the municipalities of Burlington, Vermont, to the feminist communes of Rojava in northern Syria.Drawing on Murray Bookchin's intellectual legacy — rooted in Marx, anarchism, indigenous philosophy, and Hannah Arendt — this conversation maps what it takes to build real political power from the ground up: cooperative production, direct democracy assemblies, libertarian municipalism, and the internal transformation required to sustain a movement.In this episode:• What social ecology is and where it comes from• The Burlington Greens, Bernie Sanders, and the limits of electoral politics• How the Rojava revolution built democratic confederalism under siege• Why women's liberation is central to any serious socialist project• The "revolutionary personality" — patience, hope as discipline, conflict resolution• What activists in the US can learn from movements abroadEleanor Finley is a political ecologist and activist. Practicing Social Ecology is out now from Pluto Press.📚 Practicing Social Ecology (Pluto Press): https://www.plutobooks.com/product/practicing-social-ecology/📚 Systemic Corruption (Princeton University Press) https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691207537/systemic-corruption🔔 Subscribe to FREE (Forum for Real Economic Emancipation) @FreeFreeForum⁩❤️ Watch, learn more, and join the FREE Forum: https://freefreeforum.org🌱 Support FREE & Help Us Grow: https://www.freefreeforum.org/donate▶ Connect with FREELinktree: https://linktr.ee/FreeFreeForumSubstack: https://freefreeforum.substack.com/X: https://x.com/freefreeforumBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/freefreeforum.bsky.socialInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/freefreeforum/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@freefreeforumFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/FreeFreeForum00:00:00 Introduction00:00:39 What Is Social Ecology?00:05:28 Murray Bookchin: Origins and Intellectual Roots00:11:26 Theory Into Practice: Social Ecology as Praxis00:12:24 Agroecology and the Back-to-the-Land Movement00:17:57 Beyond the Garden: The Political Sphere00:19:14 Libertarian Municipalism Explained00:22:35 The Burlington Greens and the Limits of Electoral Politics00:26:33 Rojava: How the Revolution Began00:27:57 Democratic Confederalism: Building Counter-Power00:33:32 Women at the Center of Revolution00:35:51 Production for Need, Not Profit00:37:22 Changing Ourselves to Change the World00:38:22 The Revolutionary Personality00:39:22 Hope as a Political Commitment00:40:54 Responsibility, Conflict Resolution, and the Left00:45:16 Closing Reflections#SocialEcology #DirectDemocracy #Rojava #MurrayBookchin #EleanorFinley #CamilaVergara #PoliticalEconomy #DemocraticConfederalism #FreeFreeForum

What the American Left Got Wrong | An Indigenous Elder's Diagnosis

Why does the American left keep losing? Roberto Mendoza — 82 years old, six decades of organizing from Alcatraz in 1969 to Standing Rock in 2016 — sits down with economist Clara Mattei to name what he thinks went wrong, and why it keeps going wrong.His answer isn't strategy or messaging. It's values. And Marxism, he argues, still shares too many of them with capitalism.Materialism. Industrialization. Top-down hierarchy. Roberto walks Clara through the three places where the supposed alternative to capitalism ended up reproducing it — why the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of those contradictions, and why China today is better understood as state capitalism than communism.Then he offers the alternative he's spent decades building: a side-by-side reading of indigenous values against capitalist ones — generosity vs. hoarding, reciprocity vs. extraction, commons vs. private property, direct democracy vs. top-down rule — and points to the Zapatistas in Mexico and Rojava in northern Syria as places where those values are being built into actual institutions.A conversation about what the American left got wrong, what indigenous political thought has always known, and what it would take to build something that doesn't collapse back into what it claimed to oppose.In this conversation:- Why patriarchy was the main weakness of the 1960s and 70s left — including inside the Black Panther Party- How materialism became the shared value between Cold War rivals- Why Soviet planning reproduced capitalist hierarchy- China as state capitalism, not communism- The full indigenous-vs-capitalist values framework- The Zapatistas, Rojava, and Murray Bookchin's communalism- Why small, decentralized, and democratically-controlled beats large and efficient- Standing Rock, Wounded Knee, and the changing strategy of indigenous resistance- Why happiness lives in relationships, not material accumulation🔔 Subscribe to FREE (Forum for Real Economic Emancipation) @FreeFreeForum⁩❤️ Watch, learn more, and join the FREE Forum: https://freefreeforum.org🌱 Support FREE & Help Us Grow: https://www.freefreeforum.org/donate▶ Connect with FREELinktree: https://linktr.ee/FreeFreeForumSubstack: https://freefreeforum.substack.com/X: https://x.com/freefreeforumBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/freefreeforum.bsky.socialInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/freefreeforum/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@freefreeforumFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/FreeFreeForum#claramattei #robertomendoza #marxism #indigenouswisdom #politicaleconomy #zapatistas #rojava #freepodcast #leftpolitics

Why the Dollar Gets Stronger as the Bombs Fall | Iran War, Oil Prices, and the New Imperialism

Oil just crossed $100 a barrel. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. Gas prices are surging. And the dollar? It's getting stronger — not weaker. That's not a paradox. It's by design.In this episode of the FREE Podcast, economist Clara Mattei sits down with Costas Lapavitsas (Professor of Economics, SOAS University of London) to explain what no mainstream outlet will: the Iran war isn't a disruption to the global economic system — it's a product of it. From the dollar's imperial grip to the hollowing out of US industry to the $2 billion a day being spent on bombs instead of schools, this conversation maps the economic machinery driving the current crisis.Costas brings a new theory of imperialism rooted in Marxian political economy — connecting the financialization of the last four decades, the rise of China, the structural decline of the US as a productive power, and the escalation of militarism that follows when a declining hegemon refuses to let go.In this conversation:• Why the dollar strengthens during war — and who pays for it• Oil at $100+: what breaks next in the global economy• The US spends $2 billion a day on this war — enough to fund free college or universal childcare• How US multinationals hollowed out the domestic economy they claim to defend• Trump as symptom, not author — why this crisis predates and outlasts him• Capitalism and militarism: why markets produce war, not peace• The military-industrial complex: corrupt, inefficient, and structurally incapable of rebuilding US productive power• The WWI analogy: why this moment has no natural point of equilibrium• Why Costas sees hope in American workers and youthGUEST:Costas Lapavitsas is Professor of Economics at SOAS, University of London, and a scholar of contemporary capitalism and imperialism. His latest book is The State of Capitalism (2023). Recent articles include "A Topography of the New Dollar Imperialism" (New Left Review) and "Trump's Chaotic Imperialism" (forthcoming, Socialist Register).Watch Ad-FREE: https://www.patreon.com/freefreeforum🔔 Subscribe to FREE (Forum for Real Economic Emancipation) @FreeFreeForum⁩❤️ Watch, learn more, and join the FREE Forum: https://freefreeforum.org🌱 Support FREE & Help Us Grow: https://www.freefreeforum.org/donate🎧 Listen as a PodcastApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/free-with-clara-mattei/id1828302105Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5m5xbrPzTSmdGZFQuZP7ZC▶ Connect with FREELinktree: https://linktr.ee/FreeFreeForumSubstack: https://freefreeforum.substack.com/X: https://x.com/freefreeforumBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/freefreeforum.bsky.socialInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/freefreeforum/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@freefreeforumFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/FreeFreeForum#IranWar #OilPrices #DollarImperialism #Imperialism #StraitOfHormuz #MilitaryIndustrialComplex #ClaraMattei #CostasLapavitsas #PoliticalEconomy #AntiCapitalism #FREEPodcast #EconomicCrisis #USHegemony #GasPrice

Why Economics Can't Explain Poverty — It Was Designed Not To | Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven

Oxfam reports the super rich in the Global North extracted over $30 million per hour from the Global South in 2024. So why does mainstream economics keep telling these countries they just need better institutions?Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven (Senior Lecturer in International Development, King's College London; co-author of Decolonizing Economics) explains how the economics discipline systematically erases colonialism, imperialism, and uneven development from its models — and what that erasure costs the majority of people on the planet.In this episode of the FREE Podcast (Forum for Real Economic Emancipation), Clara Mattei and Ingrid break down:• How Eurocentrism operates as a structural bias inside economic theory• Why Nobel Prize-winning frameworks like Acemoglu and Robinson still blame the Global South for its own poverty• How "institutional reform" functions as a cover for extraction• The case of Ghana's Ashanti Goldfields: 125+ years of colonialism, financialization, dispossession, and forced mergers• How the IMF, World Bank, and structural adjustment deepen underdevelopment• • International financial subordination: why Global South countries pay more to borrow, hold dollars they don't control, and lose domestic firms to multinational competition• Why development economics narrows the lens to individual behavior instead of confronting the global system• The Nobel Prize in Economics as a political instrument• What decolonizing economics actually requires — and why it's a political project, not an academic exerciseGuest links:📚 Decolonizing Economics: An Introduction — https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=decolonizing-economics-an-introduction--9781509545476📄 Cracks in the Gold Standard (new article on mining & development in Ghana) — https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X25000919🌐 Ingrid's website: https://ingridhk.com/📝 Developing Economics blog: https://developingeconomics.org/🤝 Diversifying and Decolonising Economics (D-Econ): https://d-econ.org/Subscribe for future episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@FreeFreeForumLearn more: https://freefreeforum.orgSupport FREE & Help Us Grow: https://www.freefreeforum.org/donate#decolonizingeconomics #globalsouth #capitalism #imperialism #developmenteconomics #Ghana #NobelPrize #IMF #WorldBank #structuraladjustment #freepodcast #ClaraMattei #economics #unevendevelopment🔔 Subscribe to FREE (Forum for Real Economic Emancipation) @FreeFreeForum⁩❤️ Watch, learn more, and join the FREE Forum: https://freefreeforum.org🌱 Support FREE & Help Us Grow: https://www.freefreeforum.org/donate🎧 Listen as a PodcastApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/free-with-clara-mattei/id1828302105Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5m5xbrPzTSmdGZFQuZP7ZC▶ Connect with FREELinktree: https://linktr.ee/FreeFreeForumSubstack: https://freefreeforum.substack.com/X: https://x.com/freefreeforumBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/freefreeforum.bsky.socialInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/freefreeforum/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@freefreeforumFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/FreeFreeForum