Beer is on the wrong side of America's class war

Unlike the “artificial intelligence” “industry,” which is currently Ponzi-scheming itself and our 401(k)s into a bajillion-dollar data-center bubble precision-engineered to plunge the world into a global depression, the booze business makes its money in the straightforward manner of selling an actual product. Beer, wine, or liquor in exchange for money on the barrel. For better or worse, that’s the business model.

Crucially, the money comes from actual people. There are no techno-fascist venture capitalists lining up to incinerate billions of dollars floating the trade. The Trump administration is glad to loot the United States Treasury on behalf of the president and his cronies, but has yet to offer any such direct taxpayer-funded graft to Big Booze, or small booze, or anything in between.¹ The game is drinkers buying drinks for money.

This has posed a few problems to the bev-alc trade lately. For example, with Trump’s masked immigration raiders terrorizing Hispanic communities, those people—arguably the single most important demographic to the American beer industry, and material to wine and spirits as well—are buying fewer drinks with their money. Imagine that! Bev-alc executives, having already been thoroughly cowed by right-wing operatives in the wake of the Bud Light fiasco, would rather not acknowledge that Trump’s lethal fascist siege is bad for business. They prefer to blame the dismal state of “the economy,” as though that’s somehow separate from all the fascism, rather than a direct result of it. OK, man. But particularly in the brewing industry, where pricepoints are traditionally lower and volume and velocity must be higher, trade leaders are confronting the unwelcome idea that some customers may no longer be putting money on the barrel because they simply can’t afford to.

Or, to put it another way: there’s a top-down class war raging in this country, and beer is on the wrong side of it.

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