Artigo do Chattanooga Register

N.R. Sugerimosa leitura primeiramente do artigo publicado neste site, na seção DESTAQUES, sob o título Uma guerra de cem anos e uma guerra de vinte anos.

Esse texto foi escrito por Olavo Cabral Ramos Filho, na época Superintendente de Engenharia de Transmissão de Furnas Centrais Elétricas S. A . Distribuído, sem nenhuma repercussão em dezembro de 1988 em Furnas e na Eletrobrás, como sendo uma transcrição do jornal Chattanooga Register de artigo do jornalista Eric Blair publicado em 5 de dezembro de 1988.

Nem o jornalista nem o jornal existiram.

O artigo na Transmission and Distribution Review existiu e chamou a atenção para o livro Power Struggle – The Hundred Year War over Electricity publicado em 1986.

“One week before having travelled to < />South America I had the pleasure to read the article ‘Public Power – A Century of Struggle and Conflict’ , published in the last september issue of Transmission and Distribution Review. Then I met several people of the electrical energy sector in Brazil, from the Federal Capital to Rio, São Paulo, the southern region and the northeast.

A short resumé of my impressions, that shall be enlarged in a future paper is the following:

Dominant capitalistic groups in South America, and let us keep it specific to Brazil, are voicing a neo-liberal rethoric. It is true that such position seems to be a fashionable one or, at least, a peculiar international coincidence based in ‘Reagannomics’and ‘Thatcherism’. Nevertheless in Brazil liberal economic ideology is limited to something like the savage and wild pioneering capitalism in the America of the late XIX and early XX centuries. A ruling class attitude and action that is far from being eradicated of American society but has been successfully minimised along our history by intense community public control. In this respect Brazil is just commencing a new era of hope in a general environment where liberalism has a slave owner connotation. The electrical energy sector evolved throughout the late XIX century and early this century from a majority of foreign private investment to an intensive large and no doubt competent public control of generation, transmission and distribution. Obviously when I say ‘Public Control’ I should better say ‘Government Control’, quite different from the meaning of the word ‘Public’ stressed throughout the book by Richard Rudolph and Scott Ridley and the above mentioned T & D article.

Being very brief in this first report just back home in Tenessee, I shall say that the ambience in Brazil would be described in a similar way as the House Investigating Committee reported in 1956 on the electrical energy situation in the USA: ‘Commencing in 1953 the new officials in the excutive departments began a determined effort to sabotage and wreck the Federal power program.’

‘Liberals’ down that viable, large and socially unjust country are always imitating the evil characteristics of American capitalism They are eager to correct the path of the electrical energy sector not by improving the present federal and state control towards a growing real public one in the pattern described in the last paragraphs of the T&D article. On the spot I had the chance to feel a sort of capitalism wilder than anything americans and europeans have witnessed any time in the history of the last two centuries.”

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