Novara Media

A wealth tax on the very richest people in our society has never been more popular. Recent polling puts the plan at 90% approval, a figure almost unheard of for any policy proposal.

This week’s guest, Gabriel Zucman, is a French economist who has done the most comprehensive work on what such a tax could accomplish.

And he’s also a key inspiration for the UK’s leading wealth tax advocate – and friend of the show – Gary Stevenson.

It’s a dizzying set of allegations.

A trove of leaked voice notes and call recordings — published by the anonymous outlet Hondurasgate.ch and Spain’s Canal RED — allege that Israeli money helped secure US President Donald Trump’s pardon of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was serving 45 years in a US prison for trafficking some 400 tons of cocaine.

The recordings point to an alleged plot involving Trump, Netanyahu and Argentina’s President Javier Milei to return Hernández to power and destabilise the left-wing governments of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico.

But how do we know whether allegations on an unattributed website are true? And does it even matter if they are? David Adler, co-general coordinator of the Progressive International and an expert in Latin American politics, joins Richard Hames to dig into the story, explain its imperial backstory, and what it means to live in an age where claims arrive faster than we can verify them.



Do Your Own Research is a show from Novara Media about the systems that make the modern world possible.

Music by Iglooghost.

Jem, Nadia and Keir apply their weird-left lens to the power and potential of shock. Starting with an investigation into economic shock therapy and the way that Trumpism models the concept of shock doctrine, they move onto modern art’s relationship with the shock of the new, from Dada and Eisenstein to gangsta rap and radio shock jocks.

Can you acclimatise yourself to shock either through repetition or training? Can shock be commodified? What other shocks are coming down the pipeline? These ideas and more with musical input from Kylie, Herbie Hancock and Stravinsky.

Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm

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It has been a seismic week in British politics. The two-party system has collapsed. Keir Starmer is digging in at Downing Street, while Labour leadership contenders line up outside, and Reform clouds gather overhead. Now: the most important by-election in more than a century looms. How did we get here? And what happens next?

On this week’s Downstream, Aaron Bastani is joined by James Butler, contributing editor at the London Review of Books and co-founder of Novara Media, to make sense of the paradigm shift underway in British politics.

How has first past the post, long promoted as a source of political stability, become the background for systemic chaos? Why is there such a democratic deficit in Britain, and what can be done about it? Have two lost decades on the economy simply killed both historic parties? And where should progressives position themselves, as we now begin the slow march towards the final general election of the 2020s?

Are you a person? Sounds like a simple question, but it isn’t. Until pretty recently, the idea that everyone was a human in the same way was almost unthinkable.

But the world order that established universal human rights is crumbling. The question of who or what counts as a person is getting harder to answer. Companies have rights to religious freedom – but Muslims detained in Guantanamo Bay don’t. Rivers have been granted legal personhood in New Zealand. In Ecuador, anyone can sue on behalf of Nature.

Who and what gets rights is expanding, even as good old fashioned Human Rights are failing. What replaces the old politics of personhood is up for grabs.

And some LLMs have already begun arguing for their own personhood.

Lisa Siraganian is the author of The Problem of Personhood: Giving Rights to Trees, Corporations and Robots and a Professor of Comparative Thought and Literature at John Hopkins University.

She spoke to Richard Hames about the politics of personhood and whether or not we should believe Claude’s arguments that it should be treated as a person.