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span class="inline inline-center">The 99%: Pat Palermo, a painter from Brooklyn, created a poster and brought it to Zuccoti Park to join the protests. The land of plenty, the birthplace of the revered Forbes list of richest men in the world, is having its American Dream questioned by thousands of protesters occupying public spaces in several American cities.

“The American Dream is a corporate scheme,” they say. “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take this anymore,” one message read. “We’re the 99%. Eat the rich. Lost a job, found an occupation.”

The protest, now expanding to more cities, began modestly online and sporadically offline in early August. Then, the pioneers of the movement decided to occupy a small square in the Wall Street area of downtown Manhattan called Zuccotti Park to coincide with the United Nations General Assembly meeting in mid-September at the UN headquarters in New York.

Entering its fourth week, the protest grew even larger and become a channel for people, mostly the young and groups Americans call “leftist”, to vent their anger about various issues from social injustice and the economic downturn to discrimination against the poor in the prison system and environmental degradation.

Ellis Roberts came from Allentown, Pennsylvania, to Manhattan the first week of the protest and has been camping in the park ever since. “I have been here two weeks,” he said. He used to work as a trucker but the company closed and he has not found a new job. In addition, the steel company that had been providing jobs in Allentown closed and was replaced by a casino. It offered 1,500 jobs, but Roberts was among thousands of people who applied but did not get a job offer.

Pat Palermo is a painter who has a job that pays for his healthcare. But that does not mean he likes the current situation in the US. He came to the park one weekend carrying a poster saying “99% — too big to fail”.

Standing alone in the crowd holding his poster, Palermo said he was there because he did not like the system that gave disproportionate power to corporations to control the government. “My country is falling apart and nobody is doing anything about it.”

He said US President Barack Obama and the Democrats were not doing anything while the Republican strategy was the exact opposite of what the country should be doing.

Clearly, the US is facing serious issues. Last month, the US Census Bureau released a report showing that last year the country saw 2.6 million new poor, making the number of people living below the official poverty line 46.2 million, or 15.1 percent, the highest level since 1993. In 2009, the rate was 14.3 percent.

The median household income last year, US$49,445, also declined by 2.3 percent compared to 2009.

Committed: Having ready camped in Zucotti Park for two weeks, Ellis Roberts from Pennsylvania says he plans to continue to stay and protest. Since the recession in 2007, the American middle class has experienced declining welfare while learning that bankers and tycoons, or “the top 1%”, enjoy astronomical bonuses and dividends each year at the expense of ordinary Americans who work hard to pay their mortgages and mounting bills.

The politics in Washington, DC, worsened the public’s negative sentiment about social justice in the US with the Obama administration bickering with Congress about budget cuts, healthcare and Obama’s jobs proposal.

Many Wall Street protesters believe Obama and the Democrats are not fighting hard enough to regulate Wall Street and make policies in favor of “the 99%”. Many protesters also believe politicians and bankers were in greedy collusion, profiting from the credit bubble, causing the recession and giving no sign that they would stop their business as usual anytime soon.

Skeptics, however, questioned whether Occupy Wall Street would change anything. They said it lacked a clear message and offered no solutions.

But the New York Times in an editorial on Oct. 8 defended Occupy Wall Street, saying the “protest is the message … the protesters, most of them young, are giving voice to a generation of lost opportunity.”

“The country needs a shift in the emphasis of public policy from protecting the banks to fostering full employment, including public spending for job creation and development of a strong, long-term strategy to increase domestic manufacturing,” the Times said.

The newspaper called the occupation “the first line of defense against a return to the Wall Street ways that plunged the nation into an economic crisis from which it has yet to emerge.”

Charles Helms, a labor activist and retired telephone company worker, said he was not at the protest for himself. “It’s for my grandchildren,” the grandfather of four said. He carried a two-sided poster with a lot of pleas. Among his words, “Corporate America is stealing the American Dream from your children and grandchildren.”

Mary Strain, who came to Zucotti Park with her two children, said she believed that the American Dream was still alive and well but she wanted to see all Americans enjoying prosperity. She said she did not hate bankers but was concerned about increasing selfishness among the rich.

Staying on message: Union activist Charles Helms came from New Jersey to New York to join the protests. The Occupy Wall Street movement, however, has yet to gain significant attention from the government aside from the police, who sprayed protesters with pepper spray and arrested hundreds in New York and Boston.

On Wednesday, New York Mayor Bloomberg made a surprise visit to the park, local media reported, to inspect the sanitation conditions in response to complaints lodged by residents living nearby. He later ordered protesters to vacate the park “temporarily” to clean it up. The protesters, however, saw it as an eviction order and planned to defy it.

“I plan to stay here a long time,” Roberts said, “until the police kick us out.”

— Photos by Evi Mariani