Now Those Foreigners Are Trying to Take Our Beer!

[marmar]

via AlterNet's PEEK:



Now Those Foreigners Are Trying to Take Our Beer!

Posted by Thers, Whiskey Fire at 8:14 AM on July 13, 2008.

This aggression will not stand.



Someone allegedly named "G. Tracy Mehan, III" at The American Spectator laments, for purely sentimental reasons, the possibility that a Belgian conglomerate might purchase Anheuser-Busch.

I believe in free markets, free trade, creative destruction, fierce business competition, and shareholder value.

I also believe in my hometown company, Anheuser-Busch. I believe in family business, local institutions, free beer on brewery tours, Clydesdale draft horses, and Grant's Farm, the Busch family estate with an authentic (or close enough) Bavarian Bauernhof stable and courtyard with little motorized trams to cart you around....

My high degree of angst is caused by the $46 billion (that's with a "b") tender offer by the Belgian brewer, InBev, to buy out St. Louis's trademark business which, for the moment, has been rejected by the brewery's board of directors. In countless churches throughout the city, worshipers pray, devoutly, that this is just not a negotiating tactic in quest of a more generous offer. Just say no!

This proposed transaction puts my economic principles at odds with my sense of rootedness in time and place.

I grew up with guys in South St. Louis who, if they were able to land a job at the brewery, thought they had died and gone to heaven. Good pay, great benefits and free beer-within limits. Landing an A-B beer distributorship was the stuff of myth and legend. Cindy McCain chairs Hensley & Co., one of the largest such operations in the country.

Yes, globalization is coming home to roost. Holy bats in the Bauernhof! Do I have to abandon my free-market, free-trade principles? Probably. Can I reconcile myself to a Belgian takeover of my town's premier business and cultural icon? Of course not.

No sir, you Flems and Walloons, this Bud's not for you.

This is stupid, sure -- but it is it any dumber than any other doctrinal schism? Well, yes, probably. Fewer people are as likely to die as in the Albigensian dust-up, in terms of immediate causes. But that just goes to show a lamentable lack of dogmatic fervor: some An-TWERP is going to STEAL YOUR SHITTY BEER, and you're not willing to burn him at the stake, or perhaps the griddle? (Waffle joke: accomplished.)

The point is that neither nationalism nor "free-tradism" in this account are anything more than dogma. Which is what they are in pretty much every other "conservative" depiction of same, but usually not so clumsily.

Everything's for sale, kid. Even your prejudices. Especially your prejudices. Get used to it.


http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/91309/

[sshan2525]

1. God help anyone who tries to mess with our shitty beer.

As a comitted beer drinker (I have the figure to prove it), I'd rather drink a glass of warm piss than a Bud (or a Miller or any of the other domestic swill that they have the affrontery to call "Beer"). The Belgians certainly couldn't make it any worse.

[DainBramaged]

2. You watch, some Rethug will get the deal quashed because it is

"anti-competitive". For the record, I haven't drank an AB beer in decades. And don't intend too either.


I knew the end was near when Junior left DEI and lost the Bud sponsorship.

:sarcasm:

[jakem]

3. They can have our beer!

as long as we can still buy theirs...

[marmar]

5. True....I don't even like beer, but I like Belgian beer.

:beer:

[peekaloo]

4. Beer ban!

oh Lawd, McCain saw it coming! :sarcasm:

[Champion Jack]

6. Well, it's not like they are taking a good beer to make it worse

[Dead_Parrot]

7. Interesting...

So InBev produce Leffe, Oranjeboom and Hoegaarden, which are rather nice examples of the brewer's art, whereas A-B produce Budweiser which is, frankly, piss in a bottle.

Lucky escape for InBev, if you ask me...

Bio: "G. Tracy Mehan, III, an attorney, served in the administrations of both Presidents Bush at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Presently, he is a consultant in Arlington, Virginia."

Ahh. That explains the fondness for all-American toxic waste. :)