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Brewing Up Trouble?
By John W. Kennedy | June 18, 2008
I’m a bit bemused at all the hand-wringing going on in St. Louis by locals worried about the potential sale of Anheuser-Busch, the nation’s largest brewery. InBev, a Belgian conglomerate, has made an unsolicited cash bid to purchase Anheuser-Busch in an effort to become the world’s largest beer company.
The proposal has caused public protest marches, implementation of angry Web sites and denunciations from politicians.
More than 47,600 people, including Gov. Matt Blunt and Mayor Francis Slay, have signed an online petition to keep the brewery from falling into foreign hands. Blunt declared the “offer to purchase the company is deeply troubling to me.”
On Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill vowed to stop the deal between the beer titans.
InBev has said it has no plans to shutter any of the dozen breweries that make Budweiser, Busch and Michelob. But opponents are casting the battle as a patriotic cause in almost religious terms. “We can fight the foreign invasion of A-B,” declares the saveab.com Web site. “We will fight to protect this American treasure.”
Foreigners have gobbled up millions of acres of farmland and industrial sites, as well as thousands of businesses in the United States. Meanwhile, millions of manufacturing jobs—for clothing, toys, furniture, electronics, vehicles and just about everything else—have moved overseas. A visit to any major retailer shows that most of the consumer goods purchased in this country aren’t from this country.
Why is it that beer is stirring up such a fuss? Is that really our most precious commodity?
The bottom line is that foes of the sale can’t do much in a free enterprise system to try to keep a corporation from accepting a generous buyout offer. Our country might be better served if citizens exhibited as much opposition to some of the immoral social behaviors trying to overtake our land.
Topics: beer |