Round up the usual suspects!

If you’re of a certain age you probably know and love the following scene from “Casablanca.” The Nazis, humiliated that a resistance leader led the public singing of the French national anthem, demand that Rick’s Café Americain be shut down. The corrupt yet charming police chief shrugs, blows his whistle, and announces the place is to be shut down immediately. Rick, the corrupt cop’s good friend, indignantly asks, “On what grounds?” Striking a heroic pose, the police chief says, “I’m shocked, shocked, that gambling is going on in here!” At which point the croupier goes up to the police chief and, handing him a big wad of cash, murmurs, “Your winnings, sir.” “Thank you very much,” says the police chief, pocketing the money as he goes through the motions of directing the raid.

I was reminded of this scene as the Batasang Pambansa roared its approval when the President declared that the era of Philippine offshore gaming operators (Pogos) is over. My personal view is that the whole issue has featured a lot of humbug even on the part of those sincerely outraged by the gangland violence, abductions, and outright slavery, and the list goes on and on, associated with those businesses. That humbug has to do with the continuing refusal of too many, to recognize that the Pogos are themselves viewed as organized crime by the government of the People’s Republic of China. Instead, too few seem capable of resisting the temptation to lump anyone of Chinese ethnicity together, as a kind of combined Yellow Peril taking dictation from Beijing. Pogos are to Chinese citizens and businesses abroad as Alibaba’s disgraced founder Jack Ma came to be: too successful, wealthy, and well-connected to be tolerated any further by a rejuvenated Chinese Communist Party anxious about retaining its paramount status. So both had to be destroyed.

In Cambodia, which had the good sense to return to the medieval era where local kings all paid tribute to the emperor in Beijing, when the Chinese government demanded a crackdown on Pogos, they were ruthlessly stamped out. In the Philippines where we like to blame all our bad habits on the West, the Spanish principle of “Obedezco pero no cumplo” (English: I obey but I do not comply, meaning bowing to royal authority but using judgment of local conditions half a world away from Madrid to ignore it) has prevailed. A number of times during the Duterte administration, the Chinese ambassador stamped his foot and seemed surprised Manila did little else but kowtow—because all politics is local, and in so many localities, from the plushest Makati enclaves to the lower-middle-class gated mini-villages of Laguna and beyond, Filipino property owners from the upper to all levels of the middle class were profiting handsomely from the Pogos.

As were Filipinos from all walks of life from drivers to shopkeepers and other providers of every conceivable service—not to mention bureaucrats and the police, local and national elected officials, and every other kind of professionals. But like all mass hypocrisies, this can only continue so long as things aren’t too brazen—and things got too brazen.

But how to convince a thoroughly implicated business, professional, political, managerial, bureaucratic, class, to act against its own self-interest?

In the wake of his break with Rome, Henry VIII of England dissolved the monasteries and nunneries of his realm, seizing not just the abbeys and churches but their contents and associated properties: the plunder massively enriched the coffers of the state and loyal nobles obtained vast estates for a song, using abbeys as quarries or simply letting them fall into ruin. It was a religious and political revolution but also one of the biggest transfers of wealth in the kingdom’s history.

For the totally unscrupulous, or simply avaricious, or shrewdly opportunistic, or all three, what has been verbally decreed will take time to roll out. Between the President’s pronouncement and the official yearend deadline, the Pogos will as likely find former friends turned foes as they will find friends remaining loyal to the end. The same upper and middle classes that gleefully rented out everything from warehouses to mansions to farms, rubbing their hands over the rent paid not only in cash but months, even years, ahead, those who gave them papers, and protection, can now express their shock, shock, that gambling (and much worse!) is going on here, and participate in the great cleansing of the nation from the Pogo curse. And a blanket of racism will be laid over the crime scene.

Email: [email protected]; Twitter: @mlq3