BRAZIL-Some comic relief at the end of yesterday!!

It must have been one helluva party!

Try to imagine that you had been living in a house for a long time and you kept making occasional patchwork repairs as things broke down, needed painting or replacement, etc.

One day you decide to fix everything at once – the plumbing, painting the entire place, redecorating and re-wiring. It looks like a completely new place when you are finished.

That’s a pretty good way to think about Brazil and its long history of chronic inflation and periodic crises. The Real Plan is the equivalent of your once-and-for-all reform project. All you had to do then was to keep up the house and your periodic fix-up requirements would be much smaller and far less complex. 

Of course, there would still be things that had to be done. After all, entropy ensures that nothing lasts forever in its current form.

To celebrate your re-finished home, you decide to have a “housewarming” party. You invite all the neighbors.

The party is off to a good start; canapés and open bar; the works. For the first few hours, everyone was well behaved.

However, as the booze continued to flow, the party started to become a bit rowdy. It quickly slipped out of control and people started breaking things, knocking over lamps, standing on the coffee table and chairs and spilling drinks and food on your new carpets. When the canapés ran out, someone sent out for pizzas, lotsof pizzas that you had to pay for on your credit card. Pizza boxes were strewn all over the place. When the bar was drunk dry, someone sent out for beer, lotsof beer. Again, you had to pay with your credit card.

Someone turned your stereo volume up to the maximum, and removed the soft jazz and put funk and gangster rap music in its place. 

Some people invaded the kitchen, raided the refrigerator, and starting cooking food with your new pots and pans, which once used, were simply piled into the kitchen sink. Glasses and ash trays were broken and cigarettes were extinguished on your carpeting and new furniture. Your lawn was strewn with beer cans, pizza boxes and the remains of partially eaten pizza as well as the bodies of a few unconscious revelers who had passed out.

The party went on into the wee hours of the morning and when everyone had finally departed, your re-furbished home looked worse than when you had begun your project and you were left with the job of cleaning up the mess and the wreckage. You hardly know where to start!

The situation you imagine is a pretty good representation of what transpired over the past 13 years of the PT’s reign in Brazil. In the early years, the PT behaved itself reasonably well, keeping its transgressions under wraps while allowing the Real Plan to work its magic. The mensalão vote-buying scandal came and went with only minor damage to the party and even less to its leader, Lula.

By the time Lula had managed to elect his successor, a new scheme to replace the mensalão had been created – the state-owned company Petrobrás became the source of funds diverted to shore up a project for the PT to remain in power in perpetuity. 

The execution of the project would fall to Lula’s chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff.

The “party” quickly became rowdy. Dilma took on the challenge of knocking down the pillars of the Real Plan, throwing the private sector into an unprecedented crisis and creating a fiscal imbalance of equally unprecedented seriousness.

It doesn’t matter now if the damage was deliberately planned or was simply the result of incompetence or, most likely, a combination of both. The wreckage is there and must be dealt with.

The press reported that the financial cost of the past 5 years of the PT in power left a “hole” in the fiscal accounts of between R$250 billion to R$600 billion (depending on whom you talk to).

Brazil has not only lost its investment grade rating. Its rating has recently been further reduced and the country is now in the company of Bolivia, Croatia, Paraguay and Guatemala all of which are growing faster than Brazil. The recent downgrades were accompanied by a negative outlook, so continued downgrades are considered likely.

If Dilma’s impeachment trial results in a guilty verdict, Michel Temer will have a short period of time to try to get the mess cleaned up before the 2018 elections. If Dilma should return to office, she will be able to make things even worse. 

A few posts ago I wrote regarding an alleged PT plan to put a “hybrid” communist regime in place. The fact that the alleged plan is largely a fantasy of a delirious, authoritarian political left does not preclude the fact that there are many who believe it will work. Just tryingto impose it will set Brazil so far back that it could require an entire generation to recover.

As I was writing this post, the talking heads reported that the interim President of the Lower Chamber, Waldir Maranhão, unilaterally determined that the entire impeachment process against Dilma Rousseff was a null act and that the decision of the Lower Chamber as regards the admissibility of the charges against the president should be disregarded. He sent his decision directly to the Senate. 

Never mind that the report from the Lower Chamber had first been subject to analysis by a Special Commission, approved, and submitted to a plenary session in the Chamber where it was approved with a 2/3 majority and then forwarded to the Senate. In the Senate it was also analyzed by a Special Commission that also voted in favor of an impeachment trial in the Senate.

Nevertheless, Waldir Maranhão, interim President of the Lower Chamber felt it his “duty” to override all of the foregoing steps as defined by the Supreme Court and the 1988 Constitution, and unilaterally announce that it was all “hogwash” and should be dismissed. (That has been the PT’s argument from the outset! In a public statement, Dilma said the charges were “ridiculous”).

The rest of the day was occupied with Maranhão’s decision. The talking heads were in a tizzy. The Senate Special Commission that was supposed to decide yesterday on whether to vote on the question of Dilma’s impeachment got tied up in debate as representatives of the PT sought to justify Maranhão’s act.

In spite of the furor, President of the Senate, Renan Calheiros solemnly ignored Maranhão's decision. Because of the furor, Maranhão is now in trouble. His own party is considering expelling him. The Lower Chamber is considering a plenary vote to kick him out of the presidency and out of the Chamber as well and he has been told that he will never again be elected to any office in his home state of Maranhão .

By the end of the day – sometime just after midnight – Maranhão wrote another missive, this one cancelling his previous cancellation of the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff.

Reportedly, he had met with José Eduardo Cardozo and the Governor of his home state of Maranhão to obtain the text of his first declaration. Considered a quintessential “quid pro quo” politician, no one offered any information as to what was promised to him in exchange for his co-operation. One has to hope it was sufficient to overcome the negative outcome of his act. 

His will probably be the shortest term of office of any previous President of the Lower Chamber. And his political future does not look too bright either! He might have to start a new career, perhaps in stand-up comedy!

Analysis:

Some time ago I wrote in a post that the PT had a plan to make Brazil a Marxist enclave in the Americas. I had no idea at the time that it might have been based on the political philosophy of Groucho Marx and not his brother Karl!

The whole episode was one of the most hilarious that I have seen in years. His first act as head of the Lower Chamber was to cancel the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff and his second was to cancel his cancellation – all in a single day! The only thing missing was someone to show up and push a cream pie in his face!