Ted Snider: Brazilian Corruption Crisis or Attempted Coup d'etat?

Award-winning Investigative Journalist Robert Parry (1949-2018)

Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.

Robert had been a regular guest on our Between The Lines and Counterpoint radio shows -- and many other progressive outlets across the U.S. over four decades.

His penetrating analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international conflicts will be sorely missed, and not easily replaced. His son Nat Parry writes a tribute to his father: Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews.

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The Resistance Starts Now!

Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement

"The man who predicted Trump presidential win now says Trump impeachment could happen," AM Joy with Joy Reid, MSNBC, Jan. 21, 2018
"Sketchy Kazakh money finds its way into Trump dealings," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Red flags seen in many Trump real estate deals," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Secret Money: How Trump Made Millions Selling Condos To Unknown Buyers," BuzzFeed, Jan. 12, 2018
"The Scandals of Donald Trump: Presidential Edition," The Atlantic, May 15, 2017
"Here's what we know so far about Team Trump's ties to Russian interests," Washington Post's ongoing compilation
"What Comey Was Investigating, Explained," The Moscow Project, Center for American Progress

"Donald Trump's Financial Ties to Russian Oligarchs and Mobsters Detailed In Explosive New Documentary from the Netherlands," Dutch TV documentary, Alternet.org, May 12, 2017
Ongoing compilation of Trump's creeping authoritarianism," MotherJones.com
Full resource list ...

SPECIAL REPORT: "The Resistance - Women's March 2018 - Hartford, Connecticut" Jan. 20, 2018

Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris

SPECIAL REPORT: "No Fracking Waste in CT!" Jan. 14, 2018

Jen Siskind Jennifer Siskind, local coordinator for Food and Water Watch, describes the campaign to stop fracking waste in Connecticut, which so far has led to fracking waste bans in 34 towns around the state. Interviewed by Richard Hill on Mic Check, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT

SPECIAL REPORT: "Resistance Round Table: The Unraveling Continues..." Jan. 13, 2018

Lindsay Kanaly The panel discusses Trump's long history of racism and the Republican voter suppression juggernaut confronting Democrats leading up to the 2018 elections. Special guest: Lindsay Kanaly, a lead organizer of the Women's Marches planned for Jan. 20, 2018. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill on Resistance Roundtable, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT.

SPECIAL REPORT: "Capitalism to the ash heap?" Richard Wolff, Jan. 2, 2018

Richard Wolff, Economics professor Richard Wolff declares U.S. capitalism to be beyond repair and suggests the need for a radical alternative. Interviewed by Richard Hill

SPECIAL REPORT: Maryn McKenna, author of "Big Chicken", Dec. 7, 2017

Maryn McKenna, investigative journalist and author of Big Chicken, talks about the widespread use and dangers of antibiotics in commercial poultry, beef and fruit production. Interview by Bill Duesing, Richard Hill and Guy Beardsly on WPKN's Organic Farm Stand.

SPECIAL REPORT: Nina Turner's address, Working Families Party Awards Banquet, Dec. 14, 2017

Nina Turner, president of Our Revolution, talks about the fight ahead for progressives as she receives the Working Families Organization Award for Exceptional Leadership Towards Advancing Progress. The event was held in Meriden, CT. Produced by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017

Working Families Party of CT talks strategy and issues for 2018.
Lindsay Farrell, executive director of the Working Families Party of Connecticut, discusses the state's electoral landscape and lays out the issues and strategies that could lead to progressive victories in 2018. Interviewed by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017

Disturbing developments in the Trump/Republican Agenda
Focus on the tax bill, destruction of our public lands, North Korea and Trump's private CIA. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill. Special guest: Jo Macallero of Rise and Resist.

SPECIAL REPORT: On Tyranny - one year later, Nov. 28, 2017

Professor Timothy Snyder, author of the highly acclaimed resistance manual On Tyranny, discusses his book and offers a fresh assessment of the state of our beleaguered republic. Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale, is introduced by Stanley Heller, administrator of Promoting Enduring Peace, a Connecticut-based organization that sponsored this event at the United Church Parish House in New Haven on Nov. 28. A brief interview with Snyder conducted by WPKN radio producer, Richard Hill, follows his talk.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017

Lynne Ide, director of program and policy with the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, talks about the current state of health care coverage in Connecticut. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017

Focus on the Republican tax plan, the just-released autopsy on the Democratic Party, and Internet censorship by Google, Facebook and Youtube. Including an interview with Hilary Grant, a lead organizer with Action Together Connecticut, who discusses the local results of the recent election, with hosts Richard Hill, Scott Harris and Ruth Baumgartner WPKN producers

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Two leaders from Redneck Revolt, an anti-racist, anti-capitalist movement, talk about their work organizing with white working class people in Suffolk County, New York. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Bruce Gagnon, coordinator for the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, describes the extent of -- and motives underlying -- the vast US network of military bases around the globe. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting U.S. JeJu Island military base in South Korea, Oct. 24, 2017

Joyakol, South Korean peace activist and singer, discusses the crisis on the Korean peninsula and focuses on the resistance to the U.S. huge military base being constructed on Jeju Island. The event was sponsored by the Greater New Haven Peace Council and this audio was recorded by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.
Joyakol discusses Americans' biggest misconceptions about the conflict between North and South Korea and the U.S., Interview by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.

SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven

John Allen, founding director of the New Haven Pride Center, Connecticut, talks about his new LGBTQ television show, Out in New Haven, which presents a range of political and cultural issues to the community. Interviewed by Richard Hill on WPKN's Rainy Day Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2018.

2017 Gandhi Peace Awards

Promoting Enduring Peace presented its Gandhi Peace Award jointly to renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader and BDS founder Omar Barghouti on April 23, 2017.

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THANK YOU TO EVERYONE...

who helped make our 25th anniversary with Jeremy Scahill a success!

For those who missed the event, or were there and really wanted to fully absorb its import, here it is in video

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 1 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 2 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Between The Lines on Stitcher

Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016

"How Do We Build A Mass Movement to Reverse Runaway Inequality?" with Les Leopold, author of "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice,"May 22, 2016, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 860 11th Ave. (Between 58th and 59th), New York City. Between The Lines' Scott Harris and Richard Hill moderated this workshop. Listen to the audio/slideshows and more from this workshop.

Listen to audio of the plenary sessions from the weekend.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker "Dirty Wars"

Listen to the full interview (30:33) with Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Nation Magazine, correspondent for Democracy Now! and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," about America's outsourcing of its military. In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint's Scott Harris on Sept. 16, 2013, Scahill talks about his latest book, "Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield," also made into a documentary film under the same title, and was nominated Dec. 5, 2013 for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.

Listen to Scott Harris Live on WPKN Radio

Between The Lines' Executive Producer Scott Harris hosts a live, weekly talk show, Counterpoint, from which some of Between The Lines' interviews are excerpted. Listen every Monday evening from 8 to 10 p.m. EDT at www.WPKN.org (Follows the 5-7 minute White Rose Calendar.)

Counterpoint in its entirety is archived after midnight ET Monday nights, and is available for at least a year following broadcast in WPKN Radio's Archives.

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Brazilian Corruption Crisis or Attempted Coup d'etat?

Posted April 6, 2016

Interview with Ted Snider, journalist, conducted by Scott Harris

For months now, Brazil has been embroiled in a swirling corruption scandal, known as "Lava Jato" (or "car wash") involving the state oil company Petrobras, construction contractors, the ruling Workers' Party and opposition politicians. As the nation prepares for this summer's Olympic games, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has been dogged by a slumping economy and an impeachment drive by conservative opponents who charge that she had "cooked the books" in the run-up to the 2014 presidential election.

Prosecutors have attempted to implicate popular two-term President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, known as "Lula." In mid-March, prosecutors questioned Lula on allegations of money laundering involving a vacation home and a construction company, which the former president denied. When his successor President Rousseff sought to appoint Lula as her chief of staff, the move was seen by opponents as a way to shield Lula from possible future prosecution. A justice on Brazil's Supreme Court responded by blocking the appointment, which Lula has appealed.

Amid large anti-government and pro-government street protests, President Rousseff has charged that the allegations against her are false, and part of a coup attempt to remove her from office orchestrated by her political enemies. Between The Line's Scott Harris spoke with Canadian journalist Ted Snider who discusses his recent article, "A 'Silent Coup' for Brazil?", which examines the current crisis in Brazil against the backdrop of the U.S. exercise of "soft power" in the post-Cold War era to destabilize and topple governments it viewed as adversaries in Eastern Europe and Latin America. [Rush transcript.]

TED SNIDER: So what's going on in Brazil right now has the appearance of democracy in action, has the appearance of massive street protests against Dilma Rousseff's (Worker's Party) PT government. And it has the appearance of a noble judicial effort to bring members of the government up on corruption charges. So the way it's being presented in the North American media and most of Brazil's media is sort of this model of mass democracy expressing itself in a really noble way. So you're getting impeachment attempts against Dilma Rouseff. You're getting former President Lula Da Silva being held for questioning. You're getting people arrested for kickbacks and bribery. But what's scary about it is that it fits a pattern that's been occurring in Latin America, but elsewhere in the world since the beginning of the Obama administration since 2009, where things that look like democratic moves to improve government are actually coups that look like democracy.

These are very different from the first stage of Latin American coups that involved the (U.S.) Marines and guns, and the second state of coups that began in 1954 with the CIA covert coup in Guatemala. And the pattern that strikes me in the last few years is that these coups have gone even deeper into the shadows where they don't look like coups at all, they actually look democracy.

I raise the question in my article of whether this appearance of democracy isn't just in fact part of this pattern of what I perceive to be a new style of coup.

BETWEEN THE LINES: I think to the casual reader of the U.S. corporate press, they would look at the stories written and the TV coverage of what's going on in Brazil and believe that there is a lot of evidence that would suggest the Workers' Party leadership has been corrupted and deserved to be held to account. How do you counter the notion that this is some kind of mass democratic rejection of the Workers' Party for this apparent corruption and not somethng more nefarious, like an opposition party-led coup d'etat?

TED SNIDER: So Scott, I think there's two or three things to be said to that. And the first is this thing called "Lava Jato" or "car wash" or "corruption cleaning." I think it did start as a sort of noble judiciary and police action against real corruption in the government. So I don't want to pretend that there's no corruption in Brazilian government or in the Workers' Party (PT). There certainly is corruption.

But I think that two things need to be said about that. The first is the specific charges brought up against the current president and the former president. Actually, they have nothing to do with "lava jato" and they have nothing to do with corruption. The impeachment charge against Dilma Rousseff is that she used borrowed money to make it look like Brazil's budget was still on track. This is not an impeachable offense, it's not even an illegal offense, it's a common practice. So they found no corruption charges against Dilma herself. So the attempt to impeach the president was actually outside of "Lava Jato", it's outside of the corruption charges.

Similarly with Lula da Silva, the charges that have been brought against Lula are that he owns some beachside property that he claims not to own and that he accepted money from corporations for giving speeches. Now, the two things we said about that is that neither one is illegal, neither is an impeachable offense, and more importantly, they both occurred after he was president. So although there is certainly corruption in the PT, the charges against the current and former presidents have nothing to do with the corruption. More importantly, the corruption was present in both parties. It was present in the PT and probably to a greater extent in the right-wing opposition, the PSDB (Brazilian Social Democracy Party). So it started off as finding dirt in both parties. But what happened is that the "car wash" got car-jacked and it got transformed from finding corruption in both parties to shielding the PSDB and only really only going after corruption in the PT.

BETWEEN THE LINES: So what is the role of Washington here in supporting what you contend is really a coup d'etat that is in part supported by external forces?

TED SNIDER: Scott, I think that's the ultimate question. I think there are indications that there could be U.S. involvement. But I don't think that those indications have been proven yet. The reason that I raise the question the article I am suspicious of is that the other countries that fit this pattern have been shown to have U.S. involvement.

The two coups that happened first in South America this way were Honduras, when President Manuel Zelaya was taken out in a coup in what looked like a constitutional move and you had a constitutional coup. Shortly after that in Paraguay, the same thing happened, also in Latin America where the right-wing opposition seized power in the legislature, where they took advantage of a skirmish over a disputed land that left about a dozen people dead. They unfairly blamed it on the left-wing President Fernando Lugo.

We know that the Americans knew about both of these coups, because leaked documents, WikiLeak documents show it. The pattern in Brazil is similar, so one wonders if it's backed by the States and certainly, there's that suspicion. So I don't think there's proof yet, but I think the pattern demands that we ask the question.

Read Snider's recent article "A 'Silent Coup' for Brazil?" at consortiumnews.com/2016/03/30/a-silent-coup-for-brazil/.