Redemption

Speaker Jose de Venecia Jr. should seize the moment and make a clean break from the administration.

He should prove his skeptics wrong and show that his call for a moral revolution goes beyond rhetoric. How? By not allowing his post as Speaker to get in the way of efforts to unearth the truth about the national broadband corruption scandal that was bared by his son Joey.

Yesterday De Venecia and other Lakas-CMD stalwarts including former President Fidel Ramos had lunch with President Arroyo at Malacañang. But the word must be out: the rats are starting to abandon the Lakas ship.

The President’s son, Congressman Mikey of Pampanga, gives a more accurate and candid picture of what their family thinks of the Speaker. The President is said to be furious not just at JDV but also at his wife Gina.

JDV reportedly said Joey has a mind of his own and the father could not keep the son’s mouth shut on the ZTE broadband deal. That’s what the President is now saying about her son.

De Venecia may yet emerge victorious from his showdown today at the House with his challenger Prospero Nograles. The Speaker has survived similar Palace-backed challenges in the recent past.

Last week the President’s own party, the Kabalikat ng Malayang Pilipino, sent word that it had the numbers to unseat JDV. Kampi came up short.

Perhaps the ire of Mikey Arroyo could work miracles. De Venecia faces the greatest challenge to his post.

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De Venecia should dispel perceptions that his son has backed off from testifying on the broadband scandal so Dad can keep his post as Speaker.

For JDV, is there so much to lose? Even if he loses the speakership, he will still be a congressman, and 2010 will be upon us sooner than we think.

The opposition has said it is ready to welcome him. If JDV retains leadership of Lakas, he should lead the party, for its own survival, farther away from this administration as 2010 approaches.

Joey is merely returning to the Senate to corroborate the testimony of missing witness Rodolfo Lozada Jr. The details that Lozada can provide may never come to light except at the Senate, because when Malacañang insists that the broadband scam should just be brought to the Office of the Ombudsman, people remember what happened to the cases against Benjamin Abalos and Hernando Perez.

JDV should remember that in adversity there can be opportunity and redemption. Or, as Khaled Hosseini wrote in his lovely novel, The Kite Runner, there is a way to be good again.

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Nu Scam: And speaking of scams, Congress and the Department of Trade and Industry should put a stop to multi-level marketing and pyramiding scams.

One ploy involves teenage students, a number of them from the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City.

Unless you want your kids to have “skin product sales agent” in their resumé, better warn them about how Nu Skin Enterprises has found a nifty way to sell its products and even recruit sales agents in this country. There must be a child labor law somewhere that’s being broken, and if there isn’t, there ought to be one.

One UP student got a call from a guy named Celso Cambri, who seemed to know a lot about her personal background and academic achievements. That alone should have raised alarm bells, but instead the girl was impressed. Sad to say, my alma mater teaches academic excellence but not street smarts.

The student was told that she was one of a lucky few who had been selected for a leadership training program complete with a stipend sponsored by “NSE Inc.”

Other UP students had also shown interest. The girl ended up listening for hours about what increasingly sounded to her like a seminar on buy-and-sell (she wasn’t a complete naïf), but the “NSE Inc.” folks kept insisting it was a purely academic program.

The leadership program required a reservation fee of P12,600. The girl paid up and was made to sign a contract. When she asked for more time to read the fine print, she was told to skip several parts that did not concern her and to sign ASAP.

She was told that in addition to the P12,600, and before she could qualify for a stipend, she had to submit 300 names to NSE, which was probably how they latched on to her in the first place. Her high school yearbook bore even her contact numbers.

Cambri’s boss Ariel Luther Presbitero gave the student a pack containing brochures as well as Nu Skin products, which he reportedly started opening ostensibly so she could smell the stuff that she had never heard of and never dreamed of buying.

That’s when it dawned on the student that she had been lured into a marketing scheme for Nu Skin Enterprises – NSE. Later, when she tried getting a refund and returning the products, she was told that since the stuff had already been opened, the policy was no return, no exchange.

I guess there’s one born every minute, and the easiest to con are impressionable teenagers. And I guess there are students who would work their butts off even in the middle of exam season to come up with 300 names for NSE to contact and dump its products.

But the kids should at least be told exactly what they’re getting themselves into. The questions should be simple and straightforward: Do you want to be a sales agent for Nu Skin? Do you want to buy Nu Skin products?

I don’t know where deception fits into a leadership program, but then this is the Philippines.

At least you’ve been warned: any company that has to employ deception to get people to buy – and sell – its products has to be a lemon. How can you trust its skin products? You’ll just end up with cooties.