I'm not a beer drinker. If and when I do have a beer, it's usually a Black and Tan (Guinness and Harp combo) in an Irish pub. But somewhere in the way back, I may have chugged a Bud or two.
Even if you don't down brewskis, Bud is one of those brands that must have nearly 100% recognition in the US. And, despite their Old World, Germanic name, there is something absolutely All-American about Budweiser.
It's the Great American Beer, isn't it?
It's the summer picnic. The baseball game. The cooler at the beach.
And the can? Well: it's red-white-and-blue.
All those Clydesdales? Sure, the breed may have started in Scotland, but those are American parades they're clomping through, aren't they.
So the idea that Anheuser-Busch might be acquired by "foreigners" - in this case, InBev, a Belgian beer company - is a little disturbing to the American psyche, especially as we head in to prime beer-drinking season. (The U.S. still owns summertime, right?)
This is all part of an overall trend, of course. There's our pronounced desire to consume more than our share of "stuff". Consuming stuff - a combination of cheap goods made somewhere else, and over the top luxuries - seems to have become our definition of "the economy". Not to mention our definition of ourselves. And to keep ourselves in the running as the world's premier consumers, we've passively, blithely, and weirdly accepted our status as a debtor nation.
Does it really matter that UniLever (a "multi-national" - but I don't think that, strictly speaking, the US is one of those nationals) owns Ben and Jerry's ice cream? That a Dutch firm, Aholt owns the Stop & Shop grocery chain? That you can "Put your John Hancock, on a John Hancock" insurance policy, but the profits from those premiums goes to Manulife in Canada?
In the short run, it lets us all keep on keepin' on all that spending. (Which keeps us from having to do any thinking at all about anything as tedious and boring as savings.)
But in the long run, it really can't be good.
So I'll leave you with an excerpt from a piece by Geoff Colvin in Fortune (published in February):
But here's why the trend is troublesome, and more so now than ever. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the rest of the world currently owns way more of America (stocks, bonds, real estate, etc.) than America owns of the rest of the world, by a margin of $2.6 trillion (as of year-end 2006; a 2007 figure is due in July and will be larger). Net foreign ownership is increasing very rapidly; it has multiplied by a factor of five in just the past decade. As it grows, we must send more dividends and interest to foreign owners, giving them more money with which to buy more U.S. assets, earning more dividends, and so on.
This compounding effect is small when net foreign ownership is low, but at today's levels the effect is becoming significant and ever harder to reverse. Where it leads is grim: As a nation we eventually cease to be capitalists and become simply wage earners. As Warren Buffett put it in a prophetic Fortune article more than four years ago, a country that goes too far down this road can be "colonized by purchase rather than conquest."
Okay, okay, I really can't let some of the semi-final words be about ceasing to be capitalists. Not that I'm not happy to live in a capitalistic system, which - at least in our neck of the woods - seems to come hand and hand with a lot of swell freedoms. I'd just like to see one that's a tad less consumerist and a tad less "winner take all". As for the word capitalist, doesn't it make you think of the mustached guy in Monopoly with the top hat and the cutaway?
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