BRAZIL-Food for thought and analysis

A useful glance backward

Those in Brazil long enough will remember Lula’s rise from labor leader to politician.

He once declared that the Congress was composed of at least 300 picaretas (a slang term used to describe what we can call “kleptocrats”). He also announced that he was opposed to “everything out there” and swore to bring it all down.

He remained true to both statements. The PT compromised the kleptocrats in the Congress with the mensalão vote-buying scandal and later with the virtual destruction of Petrobrás.

It’s a maxim of systems lore that “the system always kicks back”. 

The economy and political structure of any country is a huge complex system with numerous interdependent variables. When the mensalãothreatened the workings of one important sub-system (i.e. the legislature) the system recognized a threat to itself and kicked back with an investigation by another sub-system (i.e. the judiciary). The threat migrated to yet another sub-system (i.e. Petrobrás) and endangered the system further by incapacitating a national icon.

The “kickback” was the Lava-Jato investigation that has uncovered and sanctioned numerous additional threats to system survival.

The reason the system “kicked back” is that it was workingas designed by the 1988 Constitution and reinforced by the Real Plan and sought to preserve itself.

When the PT assumed the Executive Office, Lula set about following through on his stated objectives and beliefs. An objective look backward over the past 14 years reveals a repeated and systematic assault on the system.

The 28 January edition of the publication Relatório Reservado informed that the alleged “rifts” between Lula and Dilma were an elaborate pre-designed plan to carry out the disintegration of the system. 

The article is based on an interview with an individual “inside” the plan. The evidence for the existence of a pre-designed plan is circumstantial but the incidents over the past 14 years certainly lend plausibility to the allegation. 

I have argued often in this blog that the administration often engaged in a game that I have called being “competently incompetent” – i.e. committing policy errors on purpose and alleging subsequently that it was “poorly informed”, “betrayed” by unscrupulous cads, etc. etc.

Whether this is a correct assessment or not remains to be known. However, the history at least points in that direction.

If the assessment is correct, we are in for three more years of continued and worsening problems.

Hedge the enterprise and see to its survival!