Occupy Wall Street Protest: What do They Want?

“Occupy Wall Street” is a U.S. movement to occupy Wall Street and surrounding areas in Lower Manhattan.

The movement calls for 20,000 people to “flood” the area and “set up beds, kitchens, [and] peaceful barricades” for “a few months” starting on Sept. 17.

So far, about 1,000 people participated on Sept. 17 and about 400 people participated on Sept. 16, according to Bloomberg News.

The movement is inspired by the protests and revolutions seen around the world in 2011. In the Middle East, the revolutions were against oppressive regimes. In Europe, the protests were against austerity measures.

In the U.S., the main theme (being a decentralized movement, it has multiple themes) of “Occupy Wall Street” is taking out the corrupting influence of money from politics.

The AdBusters post that spawned the movement called Wall Street “the greatest corrupter of our democracy” and “the financial Gomorrah of America.”

As such, it demanded that President Barack Obama “ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington.”

The AdBusters post called protesters to “incessantly repeat [this] one simple demand in a plurality of voices.”

Occupywallstreet.org posted that the goal of the movement is to generally “restore democracy in America” against the corrupting influence of the ultra-rich.

“We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%... We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent,” posted the Web site.

Below are photos of the protest and the principles of the movement, courtesy of occupywallstreet.org.