Anheuser-Busch Treason

Cheap Dollar, Tawdry Shareholders. Most Newarkers will have heard by now that Anheuser-Busch, which has an industrial brewery in Newark across Route1-9 from the Airport, has consented to sell itself to foreigners. Once this outrageous deal goes thru, by the end of the year, I will no longer drink Budweiser, Bud Lite, Rolling Rock, nor any other Anheuser-Busch product for the rest of my life, or until the company throws off its foreign overlords and resumes existence as an American company. In the famous words of comic Judy Tenuta, "Yeah, that could happen."
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The free traders who have ravaged the U.S. economy have given us a dollar that is worth less than 2/3 of a euro. When the euro was created in 2002, it was worth 82 cents; now it's worth $1.60. InBev, the company that is buying A-B, used high-value euros to buy a company valued in cheap dollars. So the free traders have combined with greedy shareholders who care nothing about anything or anyone but their financial bottom line, and who would sell the United States to the devil if they could clear a nice profit on the deal, to destroy a great old American company. I don't consent to co-conspire in that treason but once the takeover is completed will never again drink any A-B product. I won't buy any, I won't drink any offered at a party. As far as I'm concerned, Anheuser-Busch even now exists only about as much as does the Pabst brewery with its iconic bottle-shaped water tower on South Orange Avenue, which looked like this in late afternoon, Sunday the 13th.

It's ironic that this treason was agreed to on July 14th, Bastille Day in France. In 1789, the people of Paris, long subjected to abuse by the ruling class, snapped, and stormed the Bastille, a fortress and prison in Paris. They seized the weaponry for their revolution, freed the prisoners, and later tore the whole damned thing down, stone by stone. We could learn something from France.
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Naturally, most Americans will pay no heed to the movement of ownership of Anheuser-Busch from the United States to Belgium and Brazil, but will continue to buy Bud and other A-B brands, and thus send yet more American money abroad, helping to lower the dollar's value even further so that traitors in the boardroom and stock-owning class will receive more and more offers to sell more and more of the United States to foreigners. And sell they will. If they could sell the Government, they would. And at what point does it simply not matter whether we still own our Government or not, because all power is held by the rich, many of them foreigners and others technically American but utterly devoid of nationality, owing loyalty only to wealth?

Before the Government is completely taken over by foreigners, let it do one thing: warn people of how far things have already gone so we might see the future and decide if we want to race headlong into it: require all foreign-owned products to show the flag of the country or countries of the manufacturer, and simultaneously forbid the U.S. flag, and the word "American" or similar locutions, like "made in the U.S.A.", to be used in advertising of any product made by a foreign-owned company. (Where, as in the case of InBev, people from more than one country own a company, the various foreign flags would all be shown, at relative size, with the SMALLEST shown being easily distinguishable by a person of ordinary vision. The same could be done with foreign content in "American" products, such as cars, such that if the design comes from and profit goes to a foreign country, and many of the parts come from foreign countries, every flag of a country that represents more than, say, 5% of a vehicle would be shown in proportion, with the ownership element being valued at 100%. Returning to the Anheuser-Busch example, if InBev were 60% Belgian and 40% Brazilian (I don't know the actual ownership shares), the label on a bottle of Budweiser would have a one-inch wide Belgian flag plus a Brazilian flag 6/10 of an inch wide.)
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Maybe when Americans go to the store or bar and see the Belgian and Brazilian flags on Budweiser and Bud Lite bottles and cans, they will look for a U.S. flag on some other beer instead — while there are still a few American brewers left. They'll have to pass by Miller, tho, which would carry a South African flag; and Coors, which would bear a Canadian flag.

Maybe Americans will finally wake up if they no longer see the U.S. flag on ANYTHING, but foreign flags on EVERYTHING. Or maybe the only patriotism we have left is jingoist militarism. A country with no actual sovereignty may nonetheless continue to assert itself not by protecting its patrimony or its people's jobs but by making war on weaker countries and killing hundreds of thousands of foreigners. Not the right foreigners, the corporate class that owns everything, of course. No, just the poor slobs who are as abused by their ruling class as we are by ours. Ah, the valiant U.S. military sure makes a person proud. There's not a single Third World country that can stand against it — and of course it will never be sent against a First World country with comparable technology.
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If the U.S. Government refuses to show people what is already gone, we could go the other route entirely. Let's rent out the white stripes on the flag for ads for the foreign corporations we are now owned by, InBev, Toyota, Ikea, BP, HSBC, Sony. We could change advertisers each month. Don't worry. There are so many foreign owners of most of what passes for things American now that we could go months without a repeat, at the rate of 6 white stripes for 6 new transnational advertisers a month. And don't worry about the costs of replacing the flags each month. They'll all be Made in China, cheap, and paid for by the corporations of the month. You can have your very own flag for free, and when you salute it, you'll be pledging allegiance to reality, not some silly fantasy of national independence and democracy. We have corporatism and plutocracy now. Get with the program.

Let's change the name of the country too, while we're at it, to something more representative: say, Transnational Corporations of America. See, that way we can still call ourselves "Americans", because "America" will remain part of the name. Out with the U.S.A. In with the T.C.A. Yeah, that's the ticket.

I passed by the Pabst site on the way home from the Bergen Street Pathmark tonite, 9 days after the pix above, and saw that there is NOTHING left of the building above ground level. I took a picture, from the same general area as above (I was stopped at a red lite again). I didn't have time to change the setting on the camera to Nite Scene, and had perishables (in particular, ice cream) in the car so didn't pull over to set up a tripod, but 'you get the picture'. This, dear readers, is what the economy of the United States is coming to, at the hands of the traitorous rich.