Thursday, April 28, 2011

How "Fr." Pfleger Pushed Up The Price of Ghetto Booze

Pfleger with Nation of Islam
Leader Louis Farrakhan

News today that Chicago's Catholic Cardinal Francis George finally decided to grow a pair and tell ostensible priest, Michael Pfleger, to take a hike.

It's worth taking this occasion to recall how the St. Sabina's self-promoter drove up the price of booze for people in all of Chicago's black neighborhoods.

In 1990, in while trying to conjure up another way of grabbing the glare of Chicago's compliant TV news cameras, Pfleger came up with the idea of going after booze.

Taking a page from Carrie Nation and the little old ladies of the abolitionist movement of the 1920s, he figured that booze was the bane of the black man.

He began mobilizing his prohibitionists to start defacing liquor billboards. He demanded that Walgreen's, one of the few chain stores left in what black activists call a "grocery store desert," stop selling beer, wine and liquor in black neighborhoods.

Walgreens caved in and ceased liquor sales in its West side and South side stores.

But the exploitative, price gouging corner stores there went right on ahead selling Mad Dog 20/20, high-alcohol Ice Beer and Thunderbird fortified wine by the carload.



Business as usual in the booze trade there. Except then, Pfleger's black folks no longer enjoyed Walgreen's economies of scale and ended up paying up to 50% more for the same things from their corner market profiteers.

Back then, I even met an older Jewish fellow who lived in West Rogers Park, but operated one of the ghetto, corner store fleece markets in Pfleger's area. This guy would regularly buy cases of sale item booze from the Walgreen's liquor department at Howard and Western.

Then he'd truck it down to the South Side and sell it to thirsty black folks there (after tacking on a hefty mark-up.)

A great victory for the moralistic, media-hound, Michael Pfleger.

For the thirsty black folks, not so much.

Good to see that the Liberation Theology, Bolshevik-in-black, Michael Pfleger, finally got his walking papers from the Chicago Cardinal.



2 comments:

  1. I was really surprised to hear he'd been "ousted." I wonder where he'll end up next.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Actually, as of today, he's been stripped of all parishional duties and another priest (a black ex-cop) has been assigned to his place. He sounds like he wants to leave the church and implied at much on the Travis Smiley PBS show. That's what really pissed off the Cardinal. After 30+ years at the same parish, he seemed intent on setting up his own little cult there, featuring himself as the messiah.

    ReplyDelete

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