Who Are The 99 Percent?

We now know what they want, what social networks and online tools they use and who doesn’t like them. But just who are the Occupy Wall Street protesters?

They define themselves as just plain people; the 99 percent who are getting screwed by the 1 percent. It might be why 99% of the cops are so cheerful and accommodating in so many cities where the Occupy Movement has taken hold.

It is a movement whose time has come, as evidenced by its incredible growth in the last month. As if a lot of folks were waiting for something to start, and when it did, they joined.

OWS and the entire Occupy Together movement has been called unfocused, loud, a mob, unwashed, and far worse by those who feel threatened by something outside of their sphere if influence.

Yes, the 99 percent are angry that the banks got bailed out and the rest of America got sold out. they’re angry that long-term unemployed people are being vilified as lazy, that people who die because they don’t have insurance are seen as people who made “bad choices,” that unions are seen as groups of thugs, that people can work 40 hours a week and not be able to live on what they make, that the CEOs of the companies they work for make 560 times what they earn, that people’s homes are being taken away by the very banks our tax money bailed out three years ago, that our immigration policy allows mother and fathers to be torn from their children and deported, that children go hungry, that we can’t seem to stop the rape of our environment by big oil, gas and coal companies, that we’re engaged in so many wars and overseas adventures, that unmanned drones kill more innocent civilians than they do combatants …

There’s a lot wrong with America right now, and the 99 percent, want to change they can believe in - for real this time.

A couple of demographic surveys of the Occupy movement activists and supporters are now available. The first survey, the results of which appear in an academic paper written by Héctor Codero-Guzmán, PhD, a sociology professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), used visitors to the Occupy Wall Street movement’s website as its sample size. The paper was published online on the Occupy Wall Street website on Wednesday.

Among the findings, Codero-Guzmán discovered that 70 percent of the survey’s 1,619 respondents self-identified as Independents, compared to 27.3% Democrats and 2.4% self-identified Republicans.

64.2% of respondents were younger than 34 years of age, but one in three respondents was over 35 and one in five was 45 or older. 15.4% reported earning annual household income between $50,000 and $74,999. Another 13% earns over $75,000 , and 2% said they made over $150,000 annually, putting them in the top 10 percent of all American earners. 47.5% of the sample said they earn less than $24,999 dollars a year and another quarter (24%) reported earning between $25,000 and $49,999 per year. 71.5% earn less than $50,000 per year. 92.1% have attended college, earned a college degree, or a graduate degree. 50.4% are employed full-time, and 20.4% are employed part-time.

The other demographic survey of the movement was an in-person questionnaire of some 198 protesters on the ground in Zuccotti Square, conducted by Fox News analyst Douglas Schoen’s polling organization on October 10th and 11th.