BRAZIL-An impeachment trial is now likely

Is it really due solely to incompetence?

Try to imagine that you are a member of a left-wing political movement that seeks to establish a leftist authoritarian regime in Brazil. Your assignment is to make it possible.

What do you have to do?

If you follow the precepts of Lenin, Che Guevara, Régis Debray, or even ideologically neutral Saul Alinsky (Alinsky, by his own admission simply likes the game and how it is played) you must first tear down the existing power structure. 

Here are the basic rules of engagement:

• Your basic premise is that the system is wrong. There is nothing to debate. Whatever is proposed in defense of the system is, by  premise, wrong!
• Your objective is not to seek accommodation but rather to replacethe existing order with your own.
• If there is a strong private sector it has to be brought to its kneesso it is not able to thwart your plans to control its activities, its profits or its power.
• If there is a legislature, it must be compromised by whatever means works; corruption, stacking the legislature with your own people, blackmail, etc. You cannot allow your initiatives to be subject to debate or any other form of questioning. As stated in item 1, whatever the interests of those in power, they are wrong (by definition). That is your initial premise. The US Black Panthers in the 80s used this approach effectively: “You’re saying that because you’re white!” All debate ends at that point, unless you get sucked in to explaining that you are not white, which is clearly impossible if you are white!
• You must have a “Messiah” of the movement. This should be someone who can effectively talk to and claim to represent those you want to follow you. The “Messiah” must be able to rally the masses. He can foment fear, anger, hatred, frustration, or whatever it takes to ensure that the actions and reactions of the elite are perceived as hypocritical, self-serving, and patronizing. He should present himself always as “a man of the people”.
• You must constantly use the system against itself. Every system is designed to meet the needs and plans of its founders. When the USA was founded on the principal that all men are created equal, negroes were counted in the 1973 Constitutional Convention each as 3/5 of a person! So, some were 40% moreequal than others (by law). (Ironically, that decision was designed to avoid giving the slave-holding Southern States a disproportionately largerepresentation in the House of Representatives, and therefore considered a “do gooder” compromise! It was a two-edged sword that came back to haunt the US; First it did not thwart Southern dominance in the legislature, the South controlled it anyway until 1861. Second, when slavery was repealed in 1865 a “backlash” of frustration and anger on the part of former slaves and legislation to disenfranchise blacks in the South caused other problems for over one hundred years).
• Any and all actions by the Judiciary to thwart the actions of the movement must be challenged and the Judiciary weakened by whatever means possible – again corruption, the bureaucracy, the legislature, decrees, edicts, legally contesting the Judiciary.
• You must control the machinery of government. You have to fill the bureaucracy with members of your own “team” and your supporters. It doesn’t necessarily matter in the beginning at what level your loyalists operate or even if they are competent to perform their jobs. They are your "useful idiots". Even cleaning personnel and servants can gain access to information which you can use to gain actionable intelligence to anticipate the actions of the “opposition”. Many an ambassador has been betrayed by a butler; an executive by a secretary; a politician by a housekeeper or a gardener, etc. (And remember Edward Snowden?) The higher up your loyalists are in the hierarchy, the more effective your actions. You build on this network.
• Remember always that your objective is to seize power. “Doing the right thing” in your lexicon means doing whatever it takes to achieve that objective.
• Be a victim as necessary. Be prepared to find “devils” “Judases” and “gremlins” everywhere to justify your actions. When things go wrong, pull out the appropriate “devil”, “Judas” or “gremlin” (e.g. a snitch, an external crisis, opponents or unfair laws in the system, etc.)

Analysis:

The foregoing is a summary of some of basic rules for bringing down any system. If the opposing systems are mutually exclusive, no accommodation is possible. Only one can prevail.

For example, if the operational term in  the expressions “left-wing authoritarianism” and “right-wing authoritarianism” is “authoritarianism” (e.g as we saw in the case of So. Korea) there is room for negotiation. However, if the operational words are “left-wing” or “right-wing” they are mutually exclusive and negotiations are useless. Right and left are mutually exclusive in the brain (each side has a particular function although even there they do negotiate via synapses), most certainly in traffic (where driving in the wrong lane can prove disastrous) and most assuredly in politics (whenever “us” vs. “them” rhetoric prevails).

Every ordered system contains the seeds of its own destruction if only because of the Law of Entropy that says all order tends to disorder. (See my post entitled “Why do we manage anything?) Some systems go beyond the Law of Entropy and its founders cynically build in what serves their immediate objectives with little or no consideration for the risk involved.

That’s where YOU come in! As a “manager”, “executive”, "CEO”, “Executive VP” etc. you have to be attentive not just to the entropic dynamic but also to whatever might go wrong in the short run. For example, cutting wages of production workers might be a good short-term expediency to improve results. However, if the improvement leads to buying the directors a fleet of new BMWs, you might find that the wage reductions could lead to a worsening of results somewhat later rather than a sustainable improvement.

The short-term expediencies of the administration in Brazil have begun to converge in an acceleration of entropy combined with self-destructive decisions that has brought the system to almost total paralysis.

My hypothesis that there has always been a “method to the madness”, which I have mentioned numerous times in this blog, seems to be justified by the administration's applications of the rules of engagement mentioned above.

Can you think of any one of those rules of engagement that the PT has not employed to “creatively destroy” the current system in preparation for the imposition of the “New Economic Framework” envisioned by Dilma and her apparatchiks?

I continue to argue that the administration knew exactly what it was doing and was not incompetent when it came to tearing down the system. It was only incompetent in the execution of certain tactics. It lost a few battles but has not yet lost the war.

And it won’t all be over with impeachment – no matter how that effort works out!

There is going to be conflict - it could be of short or long duration - but it will occur.

Be prepared! (Being from New Jersey helps!!)