Background Briefing - Tuesday, November 30, 2010

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Today we will look into a number of stories and issues in the news. We will begin in a moment and talk about the future of the Bush tax cuts about to expire at the end of the year. After first spurning the president’s invitation, the Republican leaders of the House and Senate met today with the President in the White House and agreed to further meetings involving the Secretary of the Treasury and the head of the OMB with a designated Republican and Democrat from the House and the Senate. Joining us to examine the fate of both income and estate taxes in the lame duck session, is Lee Farris, the senior organizer on estate tax policy for United For A Fair Economy.

Then we will look into the pattern of assassinations of Iranian Nuclear Scientists and Senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders with one of the founders of the Revolutionary Guard Corps Moshen Sazegara. On Monday one senior scientist was assassinated on the streets of Tehran and a second was seriously injured by assassins on motorcycles who attached bombs to the victim’s cars, this following the assassination of an Iranian nuclear physicist killed by a bomb last January outside his home in Tehran. We will look into the possibility of fratricide within the Guard Corps who along with President Ahmadinejad blame the Zionists and the Americans for the assassinations.

Then finally we will get an update on Sunday’s disputed elections in Haiti as ballots are being counted amid anger and protests from voters. Brian Concannon, the founder and director of the Institute For Justice and Democracy in Haiti joins us to analyze the charges of widespread fraud and ballot stuffing and also address the continuing deterioration of conditions following last January’s earthquake in spite of substantial aid amounting to $500 per person in a country where people work for a dollar a day, in contrast to the far more devastating floods in Pakistan where the victims there received an average of $3 and 20 cents in humanitarian aid from foreign donors.