Miller merger menaces Milwaukee

Talossa-area brewer Miller Brewing Company and Denver, Colorado-based Coors Brewing Company have recently announced a merger to combat Anheuser-Busch, the largest brewing company in the United States. The merger plan has sparked fears from some in the Greater Talossan Area (GTA) that Miller’s Milwaukee jobs will be adversely affected.

Miller currently employees approximately 1700 people in the GTA – 800 at its corporate headquarters and 900 at its flagship Milwaukee brewery. The new company, called MillerCoors, expects to realise $500 million in annual savings from the merger. Most of the savings will come from consolidation of distribution systems, but cuts in administrative jobs are likely. Company officials claim that there are no plans to close any of Miller’s six or Coors’s two breweries, but no decision has yet been made about where the joint venture will be headquartered. Representatives of Milwaukee’s regional development campaign are already aggressively courting MillerCoors to make the case for basing the new company in the GTA.

The current merger is not the first for either brewer. Miller Brewing Company is actually foreign-owned, having been purchased by South African Breweries to form London-based SABMiller, Plc in 2002. That acquisition cost Miller 200 jobs in its Milwaukee headquarters. Coors merged with Canadian brewer Molson in 2005 to form Molson Coors, closing two breweries in the process. Miller was founded in Milwaukee by Frederick John Miller in 1855. Coors was established in Golden, Colorado by Adolph Coors and Jacob Schueler in 1873.

The MillerCoors merger could have repercussions for Talossa, as the Royal Bank & Post is currently in the process of selecting a beer that embodies Talossa’s Milwaukee roots for the Kingdom’s currency standard. As Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel columnist Jim Stigl put it: “Milwaukee is funny. We sometimes try to deny our inner beerness until someone threatens to take it away. No matter how many breweries we lose, people from elsewhere still think beer, as opposed to machine tools or blond bricks, when you say Milwaukee.”

Meanwhile, Miller won eight medals at this year's Great American Beer Festival, besting Coors (and all other participating brewers) in its home territory, Denver. Miller's three gold, three silver, and two bronze medals included gold in the American-style specialty lager category for its Icehouse brand. Former GTA brewer Pabst Brewing Company won an additional two gold and two silver medals for beer actually brewed under contract by Miller, including Old Milwaukee Light, gold medal winner in the American-style light lager category. And one of the GTA's smaller brewers, Lakefront Brewery (despite its name, located just across the Milwaukee River from Maricopa Province) won a silver medal in the gluten free category for its New Grist.

For more information:

Ganging up on Bud
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=673035

MillerCoors Won'tChange CityImage
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=673873

Barrett wants “full-court press” to keep headquarters
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=672950

Great American Beer Festival Winners List
http://www.beertown.org/events/gabf/pdf/gabf07_winners.pdf

Letter to the Editor: Talossa and Shifting Paradigms

As a newcomer to this great project in quirky yet fun and freedom-loving society I have a great respect for the traditions that have developed over the past three decades. With one uncomfortable exception. It's official policy of isolationism. It is an inconceivable notion that such a great nation and an egalitarian polity would remain silent on global injustices and choose not to engage in the great debates of our time concerning the future direction of human society.
It is our right and our responsibility as a partner of equal standing in an international community of democratic and peace-loving nations to contribute to efforts that upend traditional norms of Westphalian sovereignty which too often have provided aid and succor to tyrants and dictators who assail their own beleaguered peoples with unending misery and injustice and allow otherwise noble nations with the power and influence to help stop such misery to remain in a state of complicit and apathetic silence.
Paradigms that have dominated worldviews from Tokyo to Tashkent and from the White House to the Kremlin are now failing to comprehend the hopes and needs of an emergent global community and it is high time for our administration in Abbavilla to recognize such developments.

Respectfully,
Breneir Tzaracomprada

The Ziu & The October Clark

Before reviewing current legislation up for consideration in the Ziu a quick summary of the changing political landscape is in order. Two representatives have been dismissed due to inactivity recently. Joseph Walkland was removed from the Cosâ after missing two consecutive votes and Ián Lord von Metáiriâ is no longer a member of the Senäts after the same circumstance.

The leader of the Defenders of the Throne (DOTT) party, Count Danihél Lord Lauriéir has appointed Sir Fritz von Buchholtz, UrN to the vacant slot as of October 10, 2007.
Now, on to current legislation. The October Clark of the Ziu was promulgated on the 1st of the month by Secretary of State Mick Preston and included three amendments to the Organic Law (Org Law). If passed by the Ziu , these amendments would need further approval by a majority of the electorate.

The first amendment, 37RZ15, The Provincial Government Unshackling Act, would restore provincial freedoms with respect to the establishment of internal governance structures and maintaining adequate activity. Under the mandates of the amendment, the King would appoint a Cunstaval or military governor to administer a province in the absence of local governmental authorities. The Cunstaval would act as a caretaker until the development of such governmental authorities. The second amendment, 37RZ16, The Tim Act, would repeal the House Law of 1989 and the previous royal Succession Act (25RZ37). It establishes the line of succession for the Lupul dynasty and states that should there be no legitimate successors within the current dynasty then succession would revert to the previous dynastic order and would follow that line moving in retroactive manner chronologically.The third and final amendment, 37RZ15, The Al Act, would amend section 6 of the Organic Law to allow for a resolution in each house of the Ziu, approved by two-thirds majority, to suspend or reverse a suspension of someone in the line of succession. This is purported to place some balance of popular will in the choosing of a royal sovereign.

All three amendments passed were passed by the Ziu with the only significant opposition coming from the DOTT. On the procedural vote of confidence the government was upheld by a vote of 157-21. The next Clark will be promulgated on the 1st of November.

Welcome to the Talossan Voice

Azul fellow Talossans,

Welcome to the first ever article of the new Talossan newspaper: La Vôce Talossán (the Talossan Voice). Here at the Talossan Voice, we are dedicated to bringing you high quality news about your country. We promise that we will always have at least three articles every two weeks for you to read, and every other issue, we will publish the “Wittenberg Post of the Month.” Where we will take the best/funniest/most interesting Witt post and put it in the paper. But most of all, we are dedicated to brining you fair and balanced news, we will always "tell it how it is,” and maybe we’ll even actually publish a few articles in the Talossan-language version of this paper (but don’t get your hopes up).

But enough about how great this paper is going to be, it’s time to introduce our stellar team of reporters:

First, straight out of the great province (that definitely doesn’t have too many vowels in its name) of Maritiimi-Maxhestic: Brenéir Tzaracompradâ. Brenéir is our Talossan Law Correspondent, who is dedicated to explaining the strange language used in almost everyone bill put before the Ziu, he’s also decided he’s going to report on some world affairs, approximately “whenever he feels like it.” S:reu Tzaracompradâ is also the leader of the unofficial (as of this writing) new Talossan political party: La Renaixençá Talossán (LRT).

Next, from the southwest of our great country... the province of Maricopa we have: Sir Cresti Matálwos Siervicül, UrN. Cresti is our Cestoûr Affairs expert, though not one himself, he often tries to mingle with these barbaric folk, and indulge himself in their strange, otherworldly culture, and then stuffs these experiences into a newspaper article. We expect many to be about beer... maybe some will be about something else, but since this is Talossa, you can expect that probably every other article will be about beer company mergers or something. Also, Cresti is our unofficial translator, mostly because he is, as many Talossans fondly call him, “The Brain”, and therefore, since he knows everything, we figured he was the natural choice to be a translator. Also he is the head of the Ladintsch Naziunal, but that’s a minor detail compared to that Brain thingy.

We had a lot of fun (and by fun I mean hard work) preparing this first issue, so we hope you enjoy this issue, and all the issues that are to come.

Alexandreu Gavárþic’h
Editor-in-Chief