Some insight into who the protesters are and what they want

About a thousand of the folks in NY have posted their profiles on We Are the 99 Percent , and blogger Mike Konczal from Rortybomb was able to extract the most common words being used. The top 10:

--job
--debt
--work
--college
--pay
--student
--loan(s)
--afford
--school
--insurance

All of which would make perfect sense considering that the median age of the folks who posted profiles is 26 (although there is a big spike at around the 20-year-old mark). For these people, many of who are looking for a job, the inability to pay off student loans seems to be their primary gripe. Now, let's consider some of the words that don't rank high on Konczal's list:

--Wall Street
--bonuses
--bailouts
--CEO pay

The New Yorker's John Cassidy thinks he knows why:

They aren't sleeping under tarpaulins to support a financial-transactions tax, a return to Glass-Stegall, or a nationwide write-down in student loans, although some of them would support these proposals, to be sure. They are out there creating a ruckus because they think that things in this country are seriously out of whack, and have been for a number of years, with the politics and policies of both parties slanted scandalously towards the rich and powerful. In this sense, the Occupy Wall Street movement is a left-wing version of the Tea Party: an inchoate and self-generated movement, which emerged from outside of, and in opposition to, the ossified political system.

I'm guessing you can make much the same argument for the protesters in L.A. and other cities.