“It only stopped for about a week. Now all the gambling joints and jueteng are back in operation.” This was the observation of a taxi driver in Baguio City. So is the President backtracking on his announced crackdown on illegal gambling?
If so, then it is very unfortunate. Illegal gambling is squeezing out whatever little resources the poor in our midst have. Instead of buying a kilo of rice or medicines with their last P50.00, some people instead give it to the local bookie as their jueteng bet.
The worst effect of gambling and other games of chance is the reliance on chance to make some money instead of on one’s industry or hard work. So many economically sufficient families ended up bankrupt due to the addiction to gambling of the parents.
Stories are rife of couples from the Mountain Trail who tasted the joys of the roll of the dice or heard the nice clunk of the slot machine just before the avalanche of coins follow at the Poro Point Casino in San Fernando La Union which got them going back again and again. With their big money whenever they hit it big from their farms when the prices of highland vegetables go sky high, they are treated like VIPs at the Casino. “Well, who will not treat as VIP anybody who comes around to lose his big money in your place?” It doesn’t matter how he looks and how he smells. It still remains that the smell of money is always good.
Such couples or individuals always lose in the end, losing their businesses and houses and lots, if not their minds. Just like drugs and other vice feeding goods, gambling is a terrible thing to be foisting on people. Anyone doing this is not being a leader. He is being a leader in reverse, sending his constituents to the abyss of hardship.
So what is the deal on why this administration appears to be going back on its announced crackdown on illegal gambling? Is it because the police are surviving on a shoestring budget that it needs the gambling payola to finance its war on illegal drugs?
A wrong must not be financed by another wrong. There could be other sources of funds such as by going after the big time tax evaders. We are talking of the taipans or the richest families in the Philippines. We are very sure that an honest-to-goodness audit of their operations will yield billions of unpaid dues to the government.**