Beer prices rise for the Consumer as Costs of Production Fall and Profits Rise

A number of brewers announced recently that the price of beer that the consumer pays will be going up citing rising costs. In the CNN story above the reasons given are less vague. The brewers claim to be raising prices to offset rising commodity prices and fall in volumes. Though, commodity prices have fallen recently and have caused farmers and dairies to worry about staying profitable this year. Also, ten days ago Anheuser-Busch InBev announced that their second quarter profits had grown despite the drop in volume because of cost cutting measures. One has to work through the maze of business doublespeak in these non judgmental articles regarding price increase and increased profitability to understand that cost cutting and "synergies" in these cases refers to job cuts as a result of the InBev takeover of Anheuser-Busch.

If you are the kind of person who likes to buy American and support American jobs, it is getting harder and harder to find an economical beer. Though some of the big brewers still employ Americans.

Depression Era Tactics

We have really hit the shit now people. Labor is dusting off tactics that they haven't used since the bad old days of company towns and anarchists. Laid off workers have occupied a factory in Chicago. They were given short notice of the closing of the plant and are attempting to get the severance and vacation pay due to them. This is actually connected to the $700,000,000,000.00 bailout because one of the banks that got assistance from the Treasury is the bank that finances this company that employees these workers and said bank refuses to loan the company the money it needs to keep up with its payroll, forcing it to close its factory doors. Which is exactly why there needed to be better controls put on this massive act of corporate welfare so that Paulson wasn't left with the sole option of begging the banks to not horde the cash but deploy it. Because if they won't spend the money then the bailout can't serve the purpose it was authorized for.

Labor Relations

The Teamsters held a protest Saturday to protest high gas prices, and a bad deal they got from FedEx as well as to tell their membership not to vote for John Mccain.

As is usually the case with these sorts of things, the old media isnt covering it. Honestly, I find it frustrating to cover myself. They don't say anything meaningfull about why they are protesting or what they are angry about or what they want to solve the problem. This whole exercise was just to get a bunch of surly men together, dressed alike, to shout slogans at each other. I doubt its effectveness and whether it has any meaning.

I desperately wanted to air their grevances and give some much needed coverage to labor issues here, but all I got was an ear full of rhetoric.