NERMEEN SHAIKH: We begin today’s show in
Brazil, where former President Luiz Inácio
Lula da Silva has been convicted on corruption
charges Wednesday and sentenced to nine-and-a-half
years in prison.
He will remain free on appeal.
Lula has been the front-runner in the 2018
elections and is widely considered one of
Brazil’s most popular political figures.
The former union leader co-founded Brazil’s
Workers’ Party and served as president from
2003 to 2010.
During that time, he helped lift tens of millions
of Brazilians out of poverty.
The sentencing of Lula comes a year after
his successor, President Dilma Rousseff, also
of the Workers’ Party, was impeached by
the Brazilian Senate in a move she has denounced
as a coup.
Prosecutors allege a construction firm spent
about $1.1 million refurbishing a beachside
apartment for Lula and his wife in exchange
for public contracts.
He is also facing four other corruption trials.
AMY GOODMAN: But Lula says he has been the
victim of a political witch hunt.
Lula’s legal team has vowed to appeal the
conviction.
In a statement, they said, "For over three
years, Lula has been subject to a politically
motivated investigation.
No credible evidence of guilt has been produced,
and overwhelming proof of his innocence blatantly
ignored," they said.
Meanwhile, many of the lawmakers who orchestrated
Rousseff’s ouster last year are also facing
corruption scandals.
Last month, federal prosecutors charged President
Michel Temer with corruption, accusing the
president of taking millions of dollars in
bribes.
We go now to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where
we’re joined by the Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist Glenn Greenwald for the hour.
Glenn is the co-founder of The Intercept.
Well, Glenn, we’re going to talk about a
lot of issues this hour, but let’s start
in Brazil.
Talk about the indictment of the former president,
Lula.
GLENN GREENWALD: It’s hard to put into words
what an—
AMY GOODMAN: The conviction.
GLENN GREENWALD: —extraordinary political
earthquake this is for Brazil.
Lula has been the singular dominant figure
in Brazilian politics for more than 15 years.
He is identified internationally as being
the brand of the country.
He was president for eight years, from 2002
until 2010, and oversaw extraordinary economic
growth, left office with an 86 percent approval
rating, and is currently leading, as you said
in the introduction, in all public opinion
polls for the 2018 election.
He’s a polarizing figure now, to be certain.
There’s a large segment of the population
that despises him and that doesn’t want
to see him return to power, but there’s
a large segment of the population that wants
to see him be president again.
Certainly, he has more support than any of
the other prospective 2018 candidates.
And so, to take somebody who is this dominant
on the Brazilian political landscape, not
just in terms of its recent past, but also
its short-term future, the person overwhelmingly
likely to become the country’s next president
through the ballot box, and convict him on
charges of corruption, bribery and money laundering,
and sentence him to a decade in prison, just
a little under a decade in prison, you really
can’t get much more consequential than this.
Independent of the merits of the case against
Lula—and the extraordinary thing about this
case is that there’s a lot of different
corruption charges and claims against Lula,
including being at the center of the Petrobras
corruption.
This has always—this was always regarded—has
been regarded as an ancillary case, not very
strong.
It involves kind of obscure questions about
who is actually the owner of this triplex
apartment that received the benefits.
Lula insists that he is not even the owner
of the apartment, whereas the state insists
that that was just a scam, that he really
is the owner and these benefits went to him.
But leaving aside the merits of the case,
which will now be adjudicated on appeal, if
you look at actually what has happened, it’s
amazing, in Brazil.
You have, first, the leader of the country
who was elected president, Dilma Rousseff,
impeached on charges that, even if you believe
them, are extremely petty in the context of
the corruption claims lodged against the people
who removed her.
So, you took out the elected president of
PT, which severely harmed PT, and now you
take the next PT candidate, who was president
and who likely will be president again, and
you convict him on charges and make him ineligible
to run for office for the next 20 years.
It certainly looks like, whether, again, these
claims are meritorious or not, that there
is a real attempt to preclude the public from
having the leaders that it wants, which are
the leaders of PT.
And at the same time that you have that going
on, once Dilma was removed from office, you
move from a center-left government, with PT,
to a center-right government, with her successor,
Michel Temer, who formed a coalition with
the right-wing PSDB party, and now they’re
talking about removing Temer and installing
the next person in line, Rodrigo Maia, who
is the head of the lower house, essentially
the speaker of the house, who is a member
of the right-wing Democrats party, which means
you’ll go from a center-left party to a
center-right party to a right-wing party without
a single vote being cast.
And so there’s a lot of concern and a lot
of perception on the part of Brazilians that
this is a further blow to democracy, that
this is really just politically driven, that
there are all kinds of corrupt figures on
the right, including President Michel Temer
and Senator Aécio Neves, who was the candidate
the right ran against Dilma in 2014 and almost
beat her, about whom there’s much more tangible
and concrete evidence of criminality, and
yet haven’t been convicted, haven’t even
left office.
Aécio is still in the Senate.
He was ordered by a court to be removed, and
now he’s been returned.
And Temer remains running the country, even
though the whole country heard him on audio
approving bribes paid to witnesses to keep
them silent.
So, I think it has to be underscored that
there is reasonable debate about how strong
the case is against Lula.
But the way in which these cases are being
prosecuted, the people who are paying prices
and the people who are being protected, does
give a strong appearance of it being politically
motivated, whether that’s really the intention
or not.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Glenn, there have been
reports that protesters—or people came out
on the streets yesterday following the conviction,
both in support of the conviction and opposed
to it.
So could you talk about that and the people
who have been—who have approved, who think
this is a good decision made by the judiciary
to convict Lula?
GLENN GREENWALD: Sure.
So this goes back to the protest movement
against Dilma, which the Brazilian media,
which is a corporate media very much opposed
to Dilma and very much in favor of impeachment,
depicted as this kind of uprising on the part
of the people.
And the reality was always much different.
There is a huge segment of the population,
primarily the wealthy, the oligarchs, the
upper-middle class, that dislike PT because
of its socialist policies.
PT has become much less socialist over the
years.
They’ve actually gotten into bed with some
oligarchs, the way the Democratic Party has
in the U.S.
But they’re still perceived as a socialist
party.
And compared to the right, they certainly
oppose austerity more.
They favor greater spending on social programs
and the like.
And so there is a segment of the country that
hates PT on ideological grounds.
And that is the segment of the population,
that has been trying to defeat PT at the ballot
box for 16 years now and has failed to do
so, that were out on the streets demanding
Dilma’s impeachment.
The same people who wanted to beat her at
the ballot box and failed then went to the
streets to demand her impeachment, which is
not surprising.
And so, the people who are out on the streets
now demanding that Lula be imprisoned or celebrating
his imprisonment are the people who have just
always hated PT and hated Lula strictly on
ideological grounds.
Then there are people, sort of the hardcore
loyalists of Lula and Dilma and PT, who are
out on the streets protesting his imprisonment.
This is really the big question that continues
to lurk over Brazil, which, I should remind
everybody, is the fifth-largest or fifth most
populous country on the planet.
It’s a country of 260 million people.
So it really matters what happens here.
The lurking question is: Are you going to
move beyond the kind of hardcore political
junkies on the right and the left, when it
comes to street protests?
We haven’t seen massive street protests
demanding the removal of Michel Temer, and
we haven’t yet seen people pouring out onto
the streets in anger over Lula’s conviction—albeit
it’s been less than 24 hours since it happened.
We might see that.
And the reason is, is that Brazilians are
just exhausted.
This is not a country where there are isolated
corruption cases against specific political
figures.
This is a country which, for decades, has
had a political class that is systematically
corrupt.
It runs on corruption.
And the only thing that has changed is that
you now have an independent judiciary, a judiciary
that’s a little bit more or a lot more aggressive
about holding people in political office accountable.
There’s more transparency.
And so it’s being exposed.
And what Brazilians have seen is that the
entire political class in Brasília, virtually,
is itself corrupt, that their political system
is one based in corruption.
And so, they really aren’t convinced that
they should be out on the street demanding
Temer’s removal, as much as the country
hates Temer across the board, because they’re
not convinced that whoever replaces him is
going to be any better, just like Temer replacing
Dilma actually made things worse.
And I don’t know how much loyalty there
is to Lula at this point among the broad population,
given that people are really disenchanted
with and exhausted by political scandal.
And so, I don’t—if I had to bet, I would
say there isn’t going to be a mass uprising
protesting Lula.
There will be some people out on the street
who are hardcore PT followers, but I don’t
think you’re going to have massive social
instability over the fact that Lula got convicted,
especially since they haven’t put him in
prison.
They said he could remain free pending appeal.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to the ousted
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who was
recently here in Democracy Now!’s studios
in New York.
She was talking about Lula.
DILMA ROUSSEFF: [translated] I think that
Lula will run for president, unless there
is an effort to convict him on appeal, because,
today, if Lula were the candidate, well, he’s
still the only person who has a significant
number of votes.
He has a 38.5 percent support.
The others in the latest polls all had around
10 percent, 9 percent, 5 or 6 percent.
So there is that difference.
There is a concern on the part of those who
carried out the coup.
They are very concerned about this situation.
Now we have to see how things evolve.
I think it’s very difficult to convict him
twice.
I don’t think there’s any basis for that,
because the witnesses who were called, when
I called him, they did not incriminate him.
In addition, I think there could be other
efforts to avoid the 2018 elections, because
certainly those who carried out the coup and
are pushing the coup program are not going
to enjoy popular support.
I can assure you of that.
AMY GOODMAN: To see the full-hour interview
with the ousted President Dilma Rousseff,
you can go to democracynow.org.
Glenn, your response?
GLENN GREENWALD: So, I think maybe she overstates
just a little bit the inevitability of Lula’s
victory.
As is true for polls in the United States
a year or more out of an election, polling
tends to be about name recognition, and then,
ultimately, as the election proceeds and people
pay more attention to the more obscure candidates,
they’re able to get some traction.
But she’s definitely right that if you had
to bet your money on one person to win in
2018, it would be Lula.
That’s certainly who I would put my money
on, not just because he’s leading in the
polls, but because there is no political talent
even close to Lula in terms of his ability
to just be persuasive and charismatic and
to appeal to people’s gut in a way that
very few other politicians that I’ve ever
seen in my lifetime are capable of doing.
So you certainly wouldn’t bet against him.
And, you know, you—I’ve been on your show
many times talking about the impeachment process,
and you know what a political upheaval and
crisis it was for this country to remove Dilma,
to remove a democratically elected president
who is part of a party that won four consecutive
national elections.
It really tore the country apart.
Imagine if the elites of this country endured
all of that, went through all of that to get
her out of office, only for a year and a half
later PT to return to power in the person
of Lula.
So, yes, they are petrified that Lula is going
to return to power.
They do want to make certain that he is ineligible
by making him ineligible through this criminal
process.
But there is another aspect to it that I think
is important to point out.
It’s not so black and white, this morality
play, because there are a lot of politicians
in Brasília across the political spectrum—on
the right, on the left and on the center—who
are very vulnerable to corruption charges
and to having criminal proceedings brought
against them.
And they are petrified, all of them.
They have watched some of the country’s
most powerful politicians and its oligarchs
go to prison, including Eduardo Cunha, who
was the most powerful and feared politician
in Brazil over the last several years, who’s
now sitting in a federal prison without any
real hope of getting out anytime soon.
It’s a serious threat.
And what we see now is them start to unify.
Recently, Lula gave an interview in which
he actually sort of defended Michel Temer
and said, "Let’s not jump to conclusions
about whether he’s really guilty.
We need to see the evidence."
There’s starting to be a movement on the
part of all these politicians who are vulnerable
to corruption charges to unify against the
Lava Jato investigators, against the corruption
investigators.
And so, how much of a threat Lula really poses
to the oligarchical class?
He’s become very close allies with a lot
of the leading plutocrats, a lot of the leading
oil and construction executives.
He’s made a lot of money by doing business
with a lot of these extremely wealthy and
powerful financial interests in Brazil.
He’s not the Lula from 1986, where he was
this firebrand, you know, hardcore socialist
union leader.
He’s been integrated into the power structure.
And so, I do think that they want to make
sure PT doesn’t come back to power, but
I don’t think it’s accurate to depict
it as them viewing Lula as some kind of towering
enemy of the elite.
I think that the elite has found a way to
work with Lula and accommodate their interests
with Lula.
And so I don’t know how petrified they are
of his return.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Glenn, very, quickly, before
we go to break, I wanted to ask you about
something else that occurred on the very same
day that Lula was convicted—that is, yesterday,
Wednesday—which is that the Brazilian Senate
approved a government-sponsored series of
labor reforms.
So could you tell us about those reforms and
how the approval by the Senate, as reports
are suggesting, might boost the Temer government—Temer
himself, of course, facing corruption charges,
as you mentioned, and, in fact, Brazil’s
first sitting head of state to be formally
charged with a crime?
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, I’m really glad that
you ask that, because there’s no way to
discuss the situation in Brazil without understanding
the agenda of international finance and domestic
oligarchs, in particular, their desperation
to impose extremely harsh austerity measures
on an already suffering poor population.
Michel Temer, shortly after he was installed
as president, came to New York and spoke to
a gathering of hedge funds and foreign policy
elites in New York and said that the real
reason Dilma was impeached was not because
of these budgetary tricks she was accused
of using, but it was because she was unwilling
to impose the level of austerity that international
capital and the business interests in Brazil
wanted.
That’s why they put Temer into office, to,
quote-unquote, "reform" pensions and labor
laws, to make people work longer, to extend
their retirement rate, to reduce their benefits.
This is what the whole thing is about.
And it’s amazing because every time it looks
like Temer is going to stay, the real increases
in strength, as does the Brazilian stock market.
Every time it looks like he’s in trouble,
the real decreases, and the Brazilian stock
market weakens, because international finance
wants Temer to stay, because he’s the only
one willing to impose these harsh austerity
measures, because he’s already so unpopular
and so old that he’s not going to run again
and can’t run again, so he doesn’t care.
He’s willing to do their dirty work for
them.
At the same time, yesterday, when Lula got
convicted and it looked like or the court
has declared him ineligible to run again in
2018, what happened to the real?
It skyrocketed against the dollar.
The Brazilian stock market boomed because
international finance wants the right to take
over and continue to maintain power in Brazil.
So, everything is about the underlying attempt
to take away the benefits from the nation’s
poor that PT has legislated for them, to make
people work longer hours, to make them have
fewer benefits, to transfer wealth from the
laborers in this country and the poor in this
country back to the oligarchs.
That’s why Dilma was removed.
That’s why Michel Temer is in power.
That’s why they want to make Lula ineligible.
And so, that is absolutely what lurks at the
center of all of this intrigue.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Glenn, please stay with
us.
We’re talking about the former Brazilian
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, convicted
on corruption charges and sentenced to nine-and-a-half
years in prison.
When we come back, we’ll speak with the
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald
about the Putin-Trump versions of their meeting
at the G20, and also about the latest brouhaha,
the Donald Trump Jr.-Jared Kushner-Manafort
meeting with a so-called Russian government
lawyer.
And we’ll also talk about what’s happening
with NSA whistleblower Reality Winner.
Stay with us.
