99%

With their sophisticated electronic gadgetry, they probably all belong to the highest income quartile — although they claim to speak for 99 percent of the people.

This newfangled movement caught the fancy of the world. It is simply called We Are the Other 99 percent, a virtual organization that draws its constituents through the social media.

A couple of weeks ago, this social media-based movement took material form in the streets of New York when it launched the Occupy Wall Street protest action. It was a call for people to mass and literally occupy New York’s famous financial district. Real people physically turned up to march and occupy the parks and intersections of the city.

The campaign went on for days. Supporters from all over the world ordered food and flowers from nearby shops online and paid with credit cards. All the logistical needs of this faceless, leaderless campaign flowed in from equally faceless supporters from all over. A street party with a cause blossomed.

There were intermittent clashes with the police, who tried to keep the streets clear and the business establishments safe. Several hundred protesters were arrested. Otherwise, the street party cum protest action went on peacefully. Perhaps also pointlessly.

Over the past week, the social media-driven protest actions in New York were mimicked in many places around the globe. Protestors began camping out peacefully in central London. A well-attended protest march in Rome, however, was overrun by anarchist groups who began an orgy of looting and destruction of property, provoking a violent clash with anti-riot police.

A similar protest action was attempted here in the vicinity of the Makati Stock Exchange. It was, however, organized by groups identified with the Old Left and thus failed to attract spontaneous support. That copycat protest action fizzled out quickly.

 Occupy Wall Street is a protest movement born in the womb of post-2008 policy debates in the US. The anger is rooted in Washington’s decision to bail out the big investment banks after one failed and sparked a financial meltdown. A large section of the American public felt that it was Main Street rather than Wall Street that better deserved government stimulus spending. They thought government favored the richest one percent of Americans and neglected the other 99 percent.

As unemployment climbed and the domestic economy stagnated, the anger simmered. The internet-based movement behind the Occupy Wall Street campaign tapped into that deep well of public disappointment.

Although the public disappointment it has managed to mobilize into an actual protest movement is real, We Are the Other 99 percent fails to offer a clear policy alternative to the way the protracted economic crisis has been handled by policymakers. It is easy to rally populist sentiment against the large financial institutions blamed for causing the financial volatility. It is extremely difficult to imagine modern economies without the financial services industry.

Several years ago, protesters from all over the world gathered in Seattle to mount protests against the summit meeting of the World Trade Organization. That resulted in the dramatic street confrontations dubbed the Battle for Seattle. Those protesting in the streets opposed globalization but offered no vision of the world without trade.

The protests now going on in New York suffers from the same disability: the absence of any viable alternative to the way the modern world operates. Like the protests against globalization years before, this street party with a cause is likely doomed to be a passing fad.

Unwarranted

No wonder the much-touted Public-Private Partnership program is dead in the water. Investors are wary over the propensity of this administration’s officials to indulge in witch-hunting and subjecting their private sector partners to trial-by-publicity.

The latest victim of this self-defeating propensity is Stradcom Corporation, government’s long-standing partner in the program to computerize operations in several agencies, including the LTO and the Land Registration Authority.

Last week, the major news organizations carried a report, supposedly emanating from the DOTC, that government was suing Stradcom in the staggering amount of P2 billion for the alleged “unauthorized exploitation” of the LTO database. The report appears to have been a weapon launched by corporate rivals out to discredit Stradcom in time for the renegotiation of its service contract with the LTO.

Stradcom executives had to scramble to clarify that all interconnectivity projects the company had undertaken were covered by DOTC department orders and LTO memorandum circulars. Notwithstanding, the smear campaign continued unabated.

The day after the news broke, DOTC secretary Mar Roxas felt constrained to go on radio to deny the story.

Roxas clarified that the COA report that could possibly be the basis for such a suit was not even completed. He mentioned that one of his undersecretaries is coordinating with the COA for that report and studying the legal situation.

Roxas should be commended for speaking the truth that pierces through the fog of misinformation generated by those who seek to try by publicity and convert the public into a kangaroo court. However, since the misleading media report supposedly emanated from the department he heads, he should do more than just clarify the issue. He must ferret out the source of disinformation and penalize any underling responsible for using the department’s name to smear private sector partners.

There is so much casual and unwarranted defamation going on that one might rightly call this an orgy. Mar Roxas is in a good position to set the bounds for decency in an administration that seems to have taken too lightly the protection of reputations of people they choose to target.