This does not mean that the protest will align with the Obamacrats. Al Jazeera spoke with Katie Davison, one of the activists who explained their way of looking at the world.
"A candidate is sort of the old way of doing things," she said. "We're looking for a new way of doing things that is more participatory and more meaningful. What that looks like we're still figuring out."
David Graeber, anthropologist, writer and protest organizer, told Al Jazeera why he thinks young people in the US have reached an especially frustrating point.
"In making a demand, you're essentially recognizing the authority of the people who are going to carry it out," he said.
"Our message is that the system that we have is broken. It doesn't work. People aren't even discussing the real problems Americans face."
So far, Wall Street firms have not commented on the protests but their condescension and arrogance is clear to anyone at the Park when employees at the big firms on "The Street" drop in at lunchtime as if they are going to a Zoo. (Police block the protesters from marching on Wall Street.)
Even as this movement swells nationally to over l000 cities, and even internationally, the media picks away at it with a combination of sarcasm leavened with growing respect. New York Times op-ed columnists and even the editorialists have been increasingly positive.
So far, the movement has not tried to directly impact on policy even though its marches are driven by signs and chants mounting a frontal assault on economic inequality, wars, phony bailouts, and the many ways they say the "1%" oppresses the 99%
Simplistic or not this view has built a hard charging movement with its own newspaper, and scores of work groups and committees that provide opportunities for individuals to get involved in the nitty-gritty effort at building their structures and running a complicated but democratic community within a larger society dominated by top-down politics.
The energy and idealism is evident to anyone with the patience to look,
Not everyone has that patience. As some kind of fortune would have it, I sat next to a talkative Wall Street veteran at a dinner Saturday night to break the fast of the Jewish Yom Kippur New Year.
From his life behind a terminal, selling financial products, or, in his words, "making up stories that his customers like to hear," the protests are a world away, unlikely to stop his life's work of endlessly making money from money.
His view on the surface was upbeat. This past week marked, in his view, the end of Europe's banking crisis. He seemed to be gloating about a new TARP style bailout there that would fix everything.
For him life is about the "spreads" between what you buy and what you sell.
To him, the TARP bailout "saved the United States of America." He backed McCain in the last election but praised Obama for backing it.
He blames Democrats like former House Finance chairman, Henry Gonzalez and Barney Frank (who he acknowledges were and are sincere), for screwing up the financial system.
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