Times shared with Pagcor’s top lady

THE determined crackdown on illegal online gaming being undertaken by the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. (Pagcor) interests me as much for the nature of the targeted culprits as for the person of the lady wielding the whip: Pagcor Chairman Andrea Domingo.

Andrea is no stranger to me. It was she who, to begin with, initiated me into the mainstream of the “national democratic revolution” of the 1970s, appointing me to the staff of the education department (ED) of the party group of the Communist Party of the Philippines in the Katipunan ng mga Samahan ng mga Manggagawa, umbrella of the labor sector in the revolutionary struggle; she was the ED head. When, in the course of events, she was moved to another assignment in the revolution, I was elevated to the post she had left, and that’s how I got channeled deeper and deeper into the muddle-headed protracted people’s war of Jose Maria Sison. In a sense, you have Andrea to blame for that. But this is diverting a bit too far from the topic.

It is said that there are shenanigans going on in the online gaming sector, the Philippine offshore gaming operators (POGOs), but this is a matter that I have long accepted as endemic in the country’s faulty political system. So long as that system remains uncured, corruption in the bureaucracy stays. Isn’t this, in fact, what Andrea and I and the rest of us in the activist 1970s were shouting: “Down with bureaucrat capitalism!” Which means that with Andrea at the helm of the crackdown against illegal POGOs, the campaign can produce positive results.

True enough, I distinctly recall that in his latest State of the Nation Address,

Tough then as now: Pagcor Chairman Andrea Domingo President Duterte singled out Pagcor as topping the list of government agencies that have delivered money to the national coffers, and for that he lauded Andrea, to the thunderous applause of the gallery.

Domingo sounds even modest when she discloses how much Pagcor will earn this year: “I think we’re going to end the year with a really good performance. We will be breaching the 100-billion