In recent weeks we’ve watched the massive Petrobras scandal in Brazil spread wider and wider, taking down politicians and business figures, big and small, until it finally reached the most powerful person in the land: the country’s corrupt president, Dilma Rousseff. She is now facing impeachment.
On April 20, Shannon Sims of Forbes reported on the novel responses by Rousseff’s stooges to the legislature’s vote to impeach her. Some of them are describing it as a “right-wing coup” – a ridiculous way to characterize a constitutionally legitimate action that is amply justified by Rousseff’s conduct in office. There are other, equally absurd takes on the impeachment: Congressman Jean Wyllys has called it “sexist,” an effort by anti-woman reactionaries to unseat Brazil’s first female head of state.
Rousseff herself is one of those who have called the impeachment a coup. She’s responded in a characteristically authoritative way, threatening to have Brazil removed from Mercosur, the South American common market, if she’s removed from office. She’s accused her potential successor, Vice-President Michel Temer, of being a leader of the “coup” – a charge that he denied angrily, rejecting the notion that Brazil is “some minor republic where coups are carried out.”
Meanwhile one David Miranda contributed an article to the Guardian in which he purported to explain the “real reason Dilma Rousseff’s enemies want her impeached.” Never mind her corruption in office. Rousseff, insisted Miranda, was being targeted by “rich and powerful” conservatives and the major corporations they own, for no other reason than that they oppose her left-wing politics.
Who is David Miranda? You may have run across his name while reading about the scandal surrounding Edward Snowden, the former contractor for the U.S. National Security Agency who stole sensitive secret papers and passed them on to journalist Glenn Greenwald, who in turn published them in the Guardian. At the height of the controversy, in August 2013, U.K. police detained Greenwald’s husband at Heathrow Airport on his way from Berlin to Rio de Janeiro and seized thumb drives containing tens of thousands of classified British Government documents. They’d been given by Snowden, who’d received asylum in Russia, to Laura Poitras, a partner in Snowden’s scheme, who’d then passed them on to Greenwald’s husband so that he could deliver them to Greenwald, with whom he lives in Rio.
The name of Greenwald’s husband? David Miranda.
This past January, Britain’s Court of Appeal ruled Miranda’s detention at Heathrow legal. The editors of The Spectator approved, describing Miranda as “a mule for industrial-scale sabotage” and arguing that “the right to a free press [does not] extend to the indiscriminate release of secret documents which put agents’ lives in danger, or alert terrorists to the gaps in our capabilities.” Indeed, as The Spectator pointed out, many of Miranda’s staunchest champions in Britain, who invoked the freedom of the press in his defense, are not consistently fans of press freedom; on the contrary, their real reason for standing with Miranda was patently that his actions were potentially very harmful to the U.S. and Britain and very helpful to those countries’ jihadist enemies.
It is no coincidence that Miranda, who in his capacity as Greenwald’s “mule” acted against the interests of the U.S. and Britain, is now standing shoulder to shoulder with the socialist regime of Brazil. His claim? That the massive, ever-growing street rallies against Rousseff’s corrupt regime are something of an artificial phenomenon – almost a mirage. The protests, he maintains, didn’t happen organically: they were incited by the anti-Rousseff media. Moreover, being “disproportionately white and wealthy,” the protesters themselves are “not remotely representative of Brazil’s population.” Miranda, as it happens, had already made much the same argument in an earlier article, published in March and written in collaboration with Greenwald and Andrew Fishman.
Attentive readers of this website may recall that supporters of the corrupt, authoritative governments of the late Hugo Chávez and his anointed successor, Nicolás Maduro, in Venezuela, have used much the same arguments (they’re rich, they’re white, they’ve been ginned up by the media) to discredit opponents of chavismo. The Tea Party movement in the U.S. has also been dismissed in similar terms. Somehow protesters aren’t authentic if they don’t fit the right demographic.
It’s worth noting, by the way, that the chavistas in Caracas have longstanding ties to Rousseff and her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in Brasilia. And the ideological continuities are obvious. And just as the chavistas’ incompetent administration, socialist policies, and corrupt conduct have combined to drag Venezuela’s economy into the gutter, so it has become increasingly obvious that the exact same attributes on the part of Brazil’s rulers threaten to bring down its own economy, which not long ago seemed to be on the verge of First World-level prosperity.
In any case, whatever you may think of Greenwald’s other activities, it’s certainly interesting to see him and Miranda – who made their names trying to compromise American and British security, all the while seeking to paint themselves as principled – shamelessly carrying water for the socialist thugs who run Brazil.
