04/05/16 – Ted Snider – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing Ted Snyder, regular writer for antiwar.com.
And you can also find him at Consortium News and other places from time to time.
This one we ran on April the 2nd.
Is a silent coup in democratic disguise taking place in Brazil?
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Ted?
I'm doing well, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
And well, so that's a really good question, isn't it?
But before we get into exactly about the coup, can you just start with a kind of cast of characters?
Personally, I know a lot more about Brazilian skateboarders than I do about Brazilian politics.
And I bet the average listener is probably in the same boat there.
We've heard of Bob Byrnquist, but who's got power there?
And what are they fighting about?
Yeah, that's the funny thing is, it's really not making the news.
No, you know, Brazil is like, I think it's the eighth largest economy in the world.
And yet this is just not making the news.
So the major cast of characters right now is President Dilma Rousseff, who's in her second term as president, and her predecessor as president, the really, really popular Lula da Silva.
So they're the sort of main characters on the one side.
And on the other side, you've got a Brazilian judiciary system who is going after them on corruption charges and massive street protests in the streets of Brazil, protesting against the president.
So the story looks like, the way the Western media is presenting it, the way the Brazilian media is presenting it, the story looks like a good story.
It looks like, it appears like democracy in action.
You've got mass protests and democratic voice in the streets, and you've got a judiciary system doing what it's supposed to do, and that's checking corruption in the legislative branch of government.
So it looks like functioning democracy.
Maybe that's why it's not making the news, because it really just looks like democracy.
But the scary thing is that it might not be.
All right.
So, well, and now, as far as the appearance goes, and I know this is ridiculous and maybe is meaningless, but one of those Brazilian professional skateboarders that I'm thinking of, I remember seeing him wearing a protest shirt, basically had anti-president slogan on it, written in marker like he'd made it himself, in solidarity to join in the protests since he knew he was going to be on TV.
And so there's a regular guy.
He's certainly not born rich and powerful, this particular skater I'm thinking of.
And he sure seemed to think that there's some terrible corruption that needed to be opposed here.
It is just democracy, Ted.
So, you know, Scott, there's two things to say about that.
And one is that even in Brazil, there's deception because the media, which is which is closely allied to the right wing opposition, PSD, PSDB party, and even to the old Brazilian dictatorship.
And this is a very, very small group of people that control the media, are hostile to the government, lined up with the opposition, and they dominate the news in Brazil.
So the news reaching the street is is news of a corrupt government and a nobly crusading judicial system.
So there's a lot of there's a lot of misconception, there's a lot of propaganda.
But the second thing to be said is that...
No, no, no, you go ahead.
I'll come back to it.
The second thing is that there is reason to protest.
The Brazilian government is corrupt.
There's corruption at every level of the government and the economy is tanking.
So there are legitimate reasons to protest.
The problem is that that this operation is called Lava Jato in Brazil, which is usually translated in the media as car wash.
I understand it's better translated as something like speed laundering with a connotation of corruption or laundering money.
But the Lava Jato project, it really did start off as a noble judiciary police investigation into corruption at every level of Brazilian government.
The corruption that it first uncovered was a corruption of kickbacks and bribery and money laundering, mostly revolving around Brazil's massive oil company, Petrobras.
The problem is that what started as a noble attempt to stop corruption at all levels of the government got, well, it's a car wash, it got carjacked.
And instead of looking at both parties, the PT of Dilma Rousseff, which has corruption, and the PSDB, which is the opposition, which has even more corruption, it shielded the PSDB and it only went after the PT, the governing party for the corruption.
So what started as a legitimate attempt to catch corruption on both parties became a coup when it shielded the right-wing opposition and began to target only the PT, the governing party.
So there is reason to be complaining in the streets, but the things that they should be complaining about, it's gotten hijacked.
I see what you're saying.
And that was where I was going to interrupt, too, was, well, the first part of that, that the executive branch is corrupt, that must be true.
I mean, we're talking about politicians and an executive branch.
I don't think there are any exceptions to that.
But obviously, the objectionable part is, thank goodness for the heroic crusading judiciary which is trying to help us.
Yeah.
And, Scott, you know, again, there's a couple things to say about that, and they're very bizarre.
When you talk about an executive branch in government that must have corruption, no one disputes there's corruption in the Brazilian government.
It's well known that the Brazilian government is infested with corruption.
But the funny thing is, when they went after President Rousseff, when they went after Dilma Rousseff, and they tried to impeach Dilma Rousseff, or they're trying to impeach Dilma, the charges they've brought against her have nothing to do with Lava Jato, and they have nothing to do with corruption.
They've actually found no corruption on Dilma.
The charge against her is that she used borrowed money to make it look like the Brazilian budget was on target.
This is not illegal.
This is not an impeachable offense.
It's apparently, I'm told by economists, something that governments do often.
When they went after Lula da Silva, again, this has nothing to do with Lava Jato, and it has nothing to do with corruption.
The two charges against Lula is that they claim he owns some beachside property that he says he doesn't own, and they claim that he took money to give speeches to corporations.
Now, neither of these are corrupt, neither of these are impeachable, and most importantly, both of them occurred after he was president.
He wasn't taking money as present to make speeches.
This was after.
These are not impeachable offenses.
So, although there is corruption, it's not at all clear that the two people that they're targeting the most are implicated in the corruption.
All right.
Now, it should be made clear here, at least from my point of view, I don't know exactly what your dog is in the fight other than it's just interesting or what, but to me, I don't care if you switch the parties around, which one is left or which one is right.
If we're talking about Ukraine, for example, they're all right-wingers.
It's just a question of whether you're talking about the sock puppets of the Americans or the sock puppets of the Russians or, you know, these kinds of questions.
So, my only interest in this and, you know, an American citizen's only interest in this should be that our government should not be involved and that whatever is happening on the streets of Brazil, it can be as interesting as hell.
We can want to learn all about it as much as we can, but the most important reason to be informed about it all is so that we, the people, can force our government to respect the independence of the state of Brazil and that they can work out these problems themselves without the Americans making it worse for them.
So, that's what intrigued me, Scott.
Excuse me.
That's what intrigued me is not so much the specific story in Brazil, but the larger pattern that the specific story in Brazil seems to fit into.
The pattern that intrigues me is that since 2009, since the Obama administration basically began, there's a pattern of coups in South America, but also in other places, in Eastern Europe and in the Middle East, there's a pattern of coups that seem to bear a unique signature.
If you go back to the beginning of U.S. coups in the late 1890s, early 1900s, the early coups were military coups, right?
They involved guns and tanks.
Then in 1954, 1953 in Iran and Guatemala, coups changed and they became not military but covert CIA coups.
The pattern that strikes me is the coups that were sort of always in the shadows have delved deeper into the shadows and they're so dark now, they don't even look like coups, that they're coups disguised as democracy.
The danger of that is that they don't make the news in America because they're not even recognized to be coups.
They look like democracy.
This is what intrigues me because, and I'll talk about these coups if you like, but in many of the coups that bear this pattern, the fingerprint of American intervention is totally clear.
I'm not arguing yet that it's totally clear that that's the case in Brazil, but what I'm suggesting is that Brazil looks an awful lot like a kind of coup that has been happening in the last seven years and that those coups do have an American hand behind them.
Okay.
Well, yeah, do give some examples and then draw your parallels as best you can.
Okay.
So, Scott, my argument is that coups in disguise have cloaked themselves in two ways in the last seven years.
The first way involves protests in the street, and the protests in the street are presented by the Western media as mass democratic demonstrations, but one of the peculiar features of democracy is that governments don't get elected by the unanimity of the people.
They get elected by the majority of people.
So if you get a situation like the situation in Iran when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got elected the second time and he got elected by about a 63% majority, you know, that leaves 37% of the people that are disaffected and disappointed.
The 30% of the people in the polling booths is a small number, it's a small minority that loses, but when 37% of 40 million people, which is like 50 million people, pour out into the streets, and they never had any numbers like that in Iran, but you've got this potential of millions of people to pour out into the streets, it suddenly looks like a massive democratic demonstration, and when the media amplifies that, then this voice that's not heard in the silent voting booth is suddenly heard hugely in the streets, and it looks like these massive democratic demonstrations, but in fact this isn't a minority that's converted into a majority, this is the same minority that lost in the polls, and unable to win in the polls, they take to the streets where they're more able to win.
This pattern was seen, as I said, in Iran, for the first time probably when Ahmadinejad lost, sorry, when Ahmadinejad won, and yet all the polls, 14 well-conducted research methodological polls, found that Ahmadinejad won by the amount he was expected to win by, the charges that it wasn't legit were never actually brought forward, this wasn't a majority in the streets, this was the minority that lost in the polls, taking it on the street.
The same thing happened in Venezuela in the first post-Chávez election, when America hoped that Chávez's party would lose, and they didn't lose, then you got again these complaints that it wasn't fair, but the complaints were never filed, everybody, including the Carter Center, certified them as fair elections, but what you get is this disaffected minority in the street being made by the media to look like a majority.
The same thing's happening in Brazil right now, there's massive demonstrations.
Well, hold it right there, just real quick for argument's sake and all of that, they did the same thing in Serbia, in Georgia, in Ukraine in 2004 and 2014, the same thing in Tajikistan, and they tried it in Lebanon in 2005 with the Cedar Revolution, and so this is what, back in 2004, Justin Raimondo called the Ukrainian template of these color-coded revolutions.
Mostly they have, they don't always, but usually they have a nice little bit of color-coding and some pretty obvious NED and George Soros fingerprints on them.
I'm not- I think- Oh, and I guess you could add the second Egyptian revolution too, the pseudo-revolution of 2013, where they had a little pretend kind of pseudo-Tahrir Square as the excuse to overthrow Morsi.
Yeah, I think, in some of the papers I've written, I've included the Morsi argument in this pattern, where the people in the streets did the same sort of thing, and- So I'm just trying to help, they're like, hey, we got more of these than you can count on both hands in the last just 15 years here, pretty much, or 10 years, 12 years.
I think the technique on the streets sort of got perfected and around, but the idea, I think, actually goes back to, it goes back to Serbia, where you get this idea that if you create enough confusion and protest and violence in the streets, then you can convince an outside power to come in and intervene.
I think that, you know, Dan Johnson's argued that that technique was used in Yugoslavia as far back as those wars, and then you see the sort of thing in Venezuela too, where you see, you know, leaked documents where the Venezuelan opposition in conversation with Americans has talked about the need to create violence in the streets and let people get killed to justify forces coming in.
The sort of idea of the peaceful protests in the streets, the color revolutions, was really perfected, and then this happened in Iran, it happened in Venezuela, it happened in Egypt, there was elements of it in Turkey, there's elements of it in Brazil.
Glenn Greenwald has written recently, he's based in Brazil, and Greenwald's written recently that if you survey these people in the streets and you poll these people in the streets and you observe these people in the streets, that what you find is that these are the same people that are the minority.
These are the wealthy, white groups that have animosity towards the PT and that are closely aligned to the PSDB.
What you see in the streets in Brazil is what's being presented as this voice of the majority is really the same minority that's failed at the polls for four consecutive elections.
And so they panicked because democracy is not working for them.
But what really caused the panic wasn't the four consecutive losses.
What really caused the panic is that Lula da Silva, who left office after two terms because the Constitution of Brazil says a sitting president after two terms has to sit out.
So he sat out.
Lula da Silva has made it fairly clear that he's going to run for president.
This is a guy that left office with 80 to 90 percent popularity ratings, most popular politicians in the history of Brazil.
When this happened, the PSDB went into panic because they're foreseeing now six consecutive elections out of office, realizing that the numbers in the polls are never going to be big enough to put them back in.
They take those exact same numbers and they put them in the street, and in the street they look massive.
So this gets presented as democracy, but the voice on the street that looks like a mass majority is really just the same minority that lost in the polls.
That's the first form, right?
And we're seeing that in Brazil.
The second form of democracy in disguise in these coups became perfected, I think, in Latin America.
And these are coups that look like the workings of the legislative and the judicial system.
I think the first major coup of this type was in Honduras, where the democratically elected left-leaning Manuel Zelaya, who, like Lula da Silva in Brazil, was allied with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, at least loosely allied with them, the right wing wanted to get Zelaya out of power.
Zelaya had announced a plebiscite, a referendum, to ask Hondurans whether they wanted to draft a new constitution.
The opposition presented this as Zelaya illegally seeking a second term in office.
Zelaya never said he was seeking a second term in office.
He said they were going to look at whether they wanted a new constitution.
One of the questions might be, should presidents be allowed to serve a second term?
He never said he was going to serve a second term.
But the Supreme Court ruled that is treason.
They kidnapped him at gunpoint, they swept him out of Brazil, they declared a new president.
And you have a coup that looks like the Supreme Court defending the constitution.
But it's a coup.
A little bit after that, in Paraguay, the second Latin American country to have a government that had moved to the left out of American orbit, when Fernando Lugo came to power.
And then what happens there is the right-wing opposition, they opportunistically capitalize on this skirmish over dispute of land that left about a dozen people dead.
They completely, unfairly blame that on President Lugo.
They gave him 24 hours to prepare a defense against impeachment, they gave him two hours to present it, and then they impeach him.
And what's interesting about this is that in both of these cases, the Americans knew what was going on.
It's very clear in Honduras and Paraguay that the Americans knew what was going on.
In Honduras, it's almost comic, because the embassy, obviously, the American embassy in Honduras never thought this would be made public, but the WikiLeaks made it public.
So they actually sent a cable to the State Department of the White House out of Honduras, and the cable was called, Scott, the name of the cable was Open and Shut, the Case of the Honduran Coup.
And in the paper, they clearly tell the State Department that it was an illegal and unconstitutional coup, and that none of the arguments of the coup defenders have any validity under the Honduran Constitution.
Same thing happened in Paraguay, where the embassy cables said that the opposition is going to capitalize on any Lugo misstep to impeach him, even, and I'm quoting, they said, even if it's on spurious grounds.
So in these places, the Americans knew there was a coup.
They never called either of these coups a coup.
They never asked for the return of Zelaya.
They recognized the coup government.
They continue to support it.
I'm not arguing yet that the Americans are behind the Brazilian coup.
I don't know that for sure yet.
What I'm saying is that this coup that looks like a constitution, that looks like democracy disguised where the courts are trying to impeach presidents, much like in Honduras and Paraguay, where it looks like democracy, but it's not.
They're only going after one party, not the other.
It looks like other Latin American coups that Americans have been behind.
That's what I'm saying.
It would be naive not to ask the question whether America is behind the Brazilian coup in the same way they were behind the Honduran coup, the Paraguayan coup, and the attempts several times in Venezuela.
Well, and, you know, I'm sorry, this is kind of a diversion and it's, you know, elementary and silly in a way to bring it up even.
But I don't know, man.
I can't help it, Ted, but bring up the point about how little the U.S. government apparently – and never remind Brazil, as you're saying, it's a matter of suspicion in this case, but there's, you know, Paraguay and Honduras and so many others – just goes to show how much they really care about democracy.
And you look at Latin America and how much real progress has been made from, you know, the old history of right-wing fascists and Marxist guerrillas and whatever.
And now you have, you know, basically kind of pseudo-leftist, but not, you know, communist and tied to the Kremlin or anything, elected governments and all this.
And, you know, assuming that the Americans mean what they say about democracy at all, one of the first rules is you've got to be able to, you know, grin and bear it when you lose so that you can keep the democratic system that guarantees your chance to do better next time.
And if – and here's America will do – they'll basically, because of interests that have nothing to do with promoting democracy whatsoever, but usually corporate interests or whatever other status interests are involved, the Americans will engage in policies that just completely short-circuit and preempt the ingraining of that system, of that tradition in Latin America, which takes some generations to get used to, that we're going to not kill you if we lose this election.
I mean, you know, so there is no national democracy project going on here.
That's nothing but ever a ruse for what they're really up to, it seems, Ted.
Democracy promotion means that if democracy elects the guy we want, we support democracy.
And if democracy elects the guy we don't want, then we call him a dictator and take him out.
So if you look, you know, again, just focus on Brazil, because that's the sort of one we're talking about now.
But, you know, everybody knows about the coups in Guatemala, and everybody knows about Pinochet in Chile, and everyone knows about, you know, Salvador in Nicaragua.
The one that nobody talks about is that in 1964, Brazil elected their first moderately left-wing democratic government, and the Kennedy administration prepared a coup against him shortly after Kennedy's death.
They took him out.
No one talks about the Brazilian coup, but Brazil's tried democracies before.
The Americans took him out.
They installed a brutal dictator.
They taught him torture.
Dilma Rousseff herself was captured and tortured by that American-backed dictatorship.
And then finally, you get a guy like Lula da Silva who comes to power.
He loosely allies himself with this whole left-wing movement in Venezuela, Ecuador, Honduras.
And you get Latin America integrating, sort of coming together and cooperating, moving outside the American sphere of orbit.
And then in Brazil, you see massive movements of people out of poverty into the middle classes.
You see massive shrinking of the inequity gap.
You see education going up.
You see this massive, massive progress for the people of Brazil.
Four times elected, Lula da Silva twice, Rousseff twice.
So this is, you know, popular for the people, working for the people, but it's moving them out of the American orbit, allying them with people like Chavez in Venezuela.
And so these governments slowly get taken out.
So Honduras gets taken out, and Paraguay gets taken out, and in Venezuela they try to take them out.
In Ivo Morales, in Bolivia, they try to take them out.
And now in Brazil, you've got the same thing that, again, looks like they're trying to take it out.
I don't know yet that we have the evidence for sure that America's behind this.
Mark Weisbrot, who's an amazing scholar on Latin America, has recently written a paper where he argues that America is behind it.
I don't think he nails it yet.
I don't think there's the proof, but he certainly drops some tempting hints.
The history's not done yet.
The coup's not even finished yet.
I think we need a bit more time before we figure it out, but it fits a pattern of coups that America's trying to pull Latin America back into its sphere, and I think it would be naive, given how closely it fits the pattern, not to ask if there's an American hand behind this.
And one more thing along those lines.
At the end of your article here, you quote this professor, D'Souza Santos.
Who's that?
Yeah.
He's a Brazilian scholar.
Sorry.
He's in Portugal, but he's a scholar on Brazil.
He wrote a very interesting article, and he argues that this is America trying to pull its backyard back into its backyard, and he argues that Brazil is awash with investment by the same NGOs, you know, the NED and USA and people like that that have been behind the other coups.
I contacted him after writing the article, and I asked him if he had evidence of America being behind the coup, and I hope I'm not misrepresenting him.
He responded with, you know, tremendous certainty that America's behind it.
He sent me some papers, and it may have been translation problems.
I don't know.
I read the papers.
They were certainly, again, loaded with hints.
I wasn't satisfied with the articles that I could come on and say I've got a source America's behind this.
I think it's still a question, but he feels that way, and there definitely are these seeds out there that it's going to take time to look at, but we've got to look at them.
Yeah.
Well, I certainly appreciate you being careful about all that, the facts are the facts, and we know them when we can.
All right.
Well, listen, thanks very much.
It's very good work, and I really appreciate your time on the show as well, Ted.
Thanks for inviting us.
It was great talking to you again.
Oh, yeah.
All right, y'all.
That is Ted Snyder.
You can find him at Consortium News and at antiwar.com, original.antiwar.com slash ted underscore Snyder.
This one is called, Is a Silent Coup in Democratic Disguise Taking Place in Brazil?
Thanks.
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