Background Briefing has a new home at BackgroundBriefing.org.
Please visit and bookmark the new site. You can search show archives here.
Background Briefing has a new home at BackgroundBriefing.org.
Please visit and bookmark the new site. You can search show archives here.
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| We begin and go to Caracas, Venezuela for an update on the sudden change from reverence and mourning the death of President Chavez to bare-knuckle politics with the announcement of an election in 30 days that has the anointed Vice President Maduro calling his opponent Capriles a fascist and Capriles taunting Maduro by saying “the people didn’t vote for you kid”. Virginia Lopez, who covers Venezuela for the UK Guardian and Britain’s Sky TV joins us to discuss how much the decks are stacked in favor of the “Chavistas”. |
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Then we get an alarming report from an expert on Hungarian politics Kim Scheppele, the Director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University. She did research at the Constitutional Court of Hungary where today the ruling right wing government erased all of the Constitutional Court’s decisions, removing any checks and balances on a government that is displaying fascist tendencies and certainly tolerating, if not encouraging extremist attacks on gypsies and homeless people, activities that have an eerie echo of Germany in the 1930’s. |
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Then finally, at a time when 85 billion dollars in sequester cuts are dominating the debate, we get an accounting of how many trillions America’s Fortune 500 companies are hiding in profits stashed offshore to avoid taxes. Matthew Gardner, the Executive Director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy and an analyst with Citizens for Tax Justice joins us to discuss the enormous amounts of profits GE, Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Google and others hide offshore to avoid paying taxes. |
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