#indonesia #alcohol #politics #economics #islam
more alcohol sellers keep getting busted in my city. there's some kind of cooperation going on between the police, a small number of local journalists, and an islamic students union at the local university . islamic students or local journalists announce a location is selling alcohol on social media, then police bust it shortly after. as in within hours.
until now the police would take bribes from alcohol sellers and they would sell their drinks out of sight / behind closed doors. where to go for booze was an open secret but not a public issue . everyone was fairly mature and just looked the other way if they were not active drinkers. also police love drinking so sellers had to give away some amount of booze to police for free and that factored into prices ; goal of police action is not to eliminate alcohol but take a tighter grasp over the market
the main illicit distributor (bootlegger-san) of my county recently gave up his position after police demands for bribes kept increasing at a pace roughly equivalent with the recent inflationary events & another guy starting creeping onto his turf. bootlegger-san was sick of having to suck cop dick and having a rival emerge probably just doubled the stress. guy has already not been doing well mentally, socially, financially for a while for reasons (....) not much longer after the big bootlegger guy decided to give up his role as "the booze guy" ... did the joint operation between police, journalists, and students go into effect
There are two factors at play here:
(1) I think police are working with the students and press to increase pressure on the new distributor to keep him complaint ; if they expected a 10% "tax" from old bootlegger-san I wouldn't be surprised if they are trying to get a 15% or 20% "tax" from the new guy (filthy pigs)
(2) the only building that can legally sell alcohol in my county is a 5 star hotel that recently opened but is hemorrhaging money so I think the hotel operators are working with police to shut down competition in an attempt to bring revenues up
it's an interesting case to study.... of course as a homebrewer and homedistiller (for personal consumption only) I am pretty insulated from what goes on in the rest of the city , but seeing the games the police play with the market and media & trying to understand what is actually going on from the outside is a fun challenge.
I have my own map of alcohol sellers in the city that I was able to piece together pretty easily after living here for a few years and making friends with drinkers. and it's pretty easy to see the difference in the kinds of sellers that are getting hit by the media/police/radical islamic youth trifecta: smaller alcohol sellers that largely peddle in lower-quality drinks, OR the nicer restaurants and hotels, with no one in between. shitty restaurants selling shitty beer have not been busted yet. the underground liquor stores selling the better stuff are also not making it into the news at all
