I admit I don't really drink Anheuser-Busch products. They'll do in a pinch, but not likely to reside in my cooler or fridge. I am still severely disappointed in the sale of this great American company and icon to a foreign brewer. It's not xenophobia or fear of globalization. It's just one of those brands that I think of as fundamentaly American and by its loss we are losing yet another piece of our national identity.
I blame stockholders, cause they don't care about anything other than their pocketbooks and look what it has wrought us. A nation in the flails of an economic downturn that may not have a bottom, driven by "profits" at any cost. Except the profits, it turns out, were lies in too many cases.
I feel that this issue with stockholders and boards does tie into the nationalistic ideas of Bud. We tend to view natioanlism with a judgemental eye and history has given us good reason. However, a moderate amout of it is a good thing. It may give people pause, to consider the greater good of their fellow countrymen and women, before their own personal greed, I mean gain.
If we sell off our ownership, where does that leave us? A nation owened by many other nations. It will eventually erode our power to even defend ourselves. I'm obviously beyond beer at this point, but where does the Great American Sell Off end?
Who is this nut?
- kired
- "You need to believe in things that aren't true. How else can they become?" T. Pratchett
1 comment:
We are already owned - by the Saudis, the Japanese, and to an increasing extent the Chinese. And why? Because we've exported our manufacturing base. The only things we still have to export are our culture and security, and for some bizarre reason *we* pay for exporting the security - and we pay through the nose.
We are the most heavily armed nation in the world - if we stop behaving unilaterally, we could very easily turn security export into a profitable business, as soon as we figure out that we can't used the same people for Leviathan work that we do for Sysadmin work.
You should pick up "The Pentagon's New Map" by Tom Barnett, or even better C-SPAN has a couple of DVDs I've snapped up on the subject where Tom explains his ideas for military types - they're a few years old, but it helps put the last hundred years or so in a clear context. Ultimately, we need to stop pretending that great-state war is the way things are going - the wars we are in are battles between the connected and the disconnected, and by reducing disconnectedness, we reduce the motivation for warfare, either symmetrical or asymmetrical. Also, in many ways our Iraq problem is the same as our Afghanistan problem was in the 80's - our endgame sucks.
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