Re: Abomination of Desolation [put in a place where it shouldn't be].

[Carlos Eduardo Rebello <crebello@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect wrote:

> Carrying the Flag For Free Trade;  Brazil Still Embraces Globalization
>
> By SIMON ROMERO
> SAO PAULO, Brazil, Dec. 1
>
> Acquiring a telephone was a distant dream for Rene Vieira da Conceicao
> Muniz, a maid in a small town in southeast Brazil. The government's
> inefficient telecommunications monopoly made telephone lines a luxury of
> the upper classes, far from the reach of Ms. Muniz, a mother of three whose
> monthly salary is the equivalent of $57.
>
> But the privatization last year of Brazil's phone system, part of a much
> wider opening of the nation's economy to foreign investment, trade and
> competition from abroad, has changed the situation. Two months ago,
> Telefonica, the Spanish telecommunications company that bought the local
> telephone operation in Ms. Muniz's region, began an installment plan for
> low-income clients to buy cellular phones over several months.

This, for me, fixes the question. The recent expansion in the supply of
phones in Brazil was mostly in celular phones, which do not require
heavy previous investment in physical structure (and when such
investments were made, they were mostly financed by the state-owned
National Bank for Economic and Social Development). Therefore, you have
people with pauper-level incomes using a relatively expensive telephonic
tool - that normally would be reserved for urgent calls or for people
with specific needs - for everyday needs, which means that the
lowest-income users are paying the highest prices avaliable for having
access to the telephonic service. Also, mostly cellular phones sold to
these new customers are "pre-paid", i.e, there is no bill to be paid,
only a card which a fixed number of telephonic pulses sold at the
highest fee in the market (As opposed to, say, my personal case and of
other customers who have chosen not to have "pre-paid" cell phones; I
pay a fixed monthly rent for having access to the cell telephone
service, irrespective of actual use of the said phone, plus a variable
fee for actual use, but the pricing of the pulses is such that, the more
I use the phone, the lesser I pay for the single pulse). In fact, what
is being sold is an expensive service at extortionate prices, and
notoriously unreliable to boot (The American co. ATL, which competes
with the Spanish Telefónica in Rio de Janeiro in the cellular phone
market - the fixed phone service being offered by a Brazilian group- had
its acronym translated as *Alguém Tentando Ligar* - "someone trying to
make the phone work"

Carlos Rebello