Princeton, U.S.A. — A recent ORC International survey of American adults has found that awareness of the Occupy Wall Street movement is unchanged since the intense media coverage of the movement’s events through fall and winter of 2011 but that support for the movement has declined.

ORC International updated a series of questions about Occupy Wall Street asked in late 2011 and found that seventy-one percent of Americans remain aware of the movement, even while media coverage has significantly declined. Protesters have largely dispersed from the parks and fronts steps of the world’s financial capitals.

The continued awareness is in part to the ongoing social dialogue that continues by both supporters and protesters of the movement. According to ORC’s social analytics product, Social Buzz, Occupy Wall Street conversations continue to steadily appear with an average of 156,000 posts daily in the social universe since mid-December. This is mostly driven by specifically timed events including the six month anniversary to re-occupy Zuccotti Park in New York City on March 17-18, mass arrests on March 22, and a May Day Protest.

Overall agreement with the movement’s position regarding the financial inequities continues to hold steady at thirty percent since the fall, however, those who disagree has risen seven percentage points to twenty-eight percent over the past six months.

While levels of coverage in both social media and traditional media have varied, the combination has continued to keep this movement in front of the American public. Long-term sustainability of the movement, however, remains a question.

The poll was conducted using ORC International’s CARAVAN service from June 9-11, 2012. The poll interviewed 1005 US Adults by telephone.

ORC International is a leading global research firm with offices across the U.S.A., Europe and Asia Pacific. The company has been a partner of CNN on the CNN/ORC International poll since 2006 and is a founding member of the CASRO.

Image Courtesy of  Atomische • Tom Giebel

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A new poll suggests that over a third of Americans support the Occupy Wall Street protests while 58 per cent are enraged by the protests. In Albuquerque, a 48-year old man was arrested for throwing a knife at protesters near the University of New Mexico on Friday 21. The attack was directly related to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The poll, conducted by Associated Press-GFK, revealed that 37 per cent of Americans support that the protests have spread from New York to numerous cities across the country and globe. Occupy Wall Street which originally began as a lower manhattan protest consisting of a few hundred marchers, has rapidly expanded across the nation and soon all over the globe.

Influenced by ‘Occupy Wall Street’, protesters have taken a stand in nearly 30 cities in the U.S as well as parts of Asia and Europe. Over five thousand people marched through the streets of Los Angeles and congregated peacefully outside City Hall on October 15. Marchers also travelled from Wall Street to the West Village and settled in Times Square on October 15.

Times Square is a notorious tourist spot and having these marchers crowd the streets affected store owners, businesses, tourists and shoppers. A tourist travelling from south Florida with his family, Mark Bryan, said “This is really unfair of those who came all the way to New York to see the city.

It is intimidating and my children are scared of the marchers. I don’t understand why the can’t protest outside governmental buildings instead.” The protesters chanted, “We got sold out, banks got bailed out” and “All day, all week, occupy Wall Street.” The protest continued last weekend and took place on the Upper West Side and travelled to Columbus Circle Friday 21.

The marchers were joined once again by a celebrity in favour of the protests; this time Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie. Seeger, 92, is a famous and hugely popular American folk singer marched and sang and performed with the protesters all night. The protesters, who come from all walks of life, are settled in Zuccotti Park, Manhattan.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has told protesters to leave the park as tourists who do not want to pay for hotel rooms, may camp in the park as an alternative. He also claimed they were damaging the park with their trash. School teacher, Shawn Johns, responded to this statement saying “We are not causing an damage to this park.

Each person cleans up after themselves and we have volunteers who are circling the park with trash bags to ensure the park is not left in an undesirable way.” The clean up after the weekends protest has taken place all this week in Manhattan, amongst other cities and although the damage may be at large, so was the message prevailed.

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Rage against the politicians and capitalists who have driven the global financial system into the ground is being aired today from one end of the world to the other in a massive coordination of support protests to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Under the banner #GlobalChange, today has seen people from Sydney to Manila, to Rome and London, take to the streets to claim justice in their financial and political system.

In London, UK, up to 300 people gathered in front of St Paul’s Cathedral for the Occupy the London Stock Exchange. Organizers had garnered support through social media sites and were hoping to occupy Paternoster Square in a tribute to the original Occupy movement which is occupying Zuccotti Park in New York City.

The demonstration walked peacefully to the square where they chanted “We are the 99%,” according to Lisa O’Carroll from The Guardian, who was at the scene. The 99% refers to the so-called percentage of society who had to suffer for the profit of the last 1%. The 1% represents the wealthiest people who benefitted, and still do, from the financial crash and bailout of the banks.

Around 2PM GMT, the mood of the protest, which had been conducted fairly cheerful and calm, changed and The Guardian could report that apparently Julian Assange had joined the proceedings in London. The international day of action, October 15, was marked in other cities through marches and gatherings.

In Manila, the Philippines, demonstrators held up outside the U.S. embassy with banners, denouncing “U.S.-led wars and aggression,” according to the Associated Press and Reuters. Hundreds of people gathered in the main street of Auckland, New Zealand, banging drums and chanting against corporate greed.

Around 2000 protesters gathered outside the central Reserve Bank of Australia in Sydney and a spokesman for OccupyMelbourne.Org told Reuters about the Melbourne event: “I think people want real democracy.” In Tokyo, Japan, the demonstration included anti-nuclear protesters.

Both Greece and Italy also joined in the global rally, with students in Milan opening up early for pandora’s box on Friday, vandalizing Goldman Sachs’ offices and headquarters of the bank UniCredit. In Rome, organizers were expecting the biggest show-up of around 100,000 people.

One participant told Reuters “At the global level, we can’t carry on any more with public debt that wasn’t created by us but by thieving governments, corrupt banks and speculators who don’t give a damn about us.” Back in London, the Metropolitan Police informed the media that they’ve only made one arrest today.

The demonstration failed to occupy Paternoster Square and have moved back to St Paul’s Cathedral. The sudden arrival of the notorious Wikileaks founder brought a bit of grassroots celebrity star power to the event. Mark Townsend of The Guardian said that Assange made his way to the crowd and “began attacking a greedy and corrupt system that had united individuals from Cairo to London.”

He also argued that the movement is about the construction of law and not its destruction. As participants hit the streets in cities around the US, the movement will see the circle completed this October 15. Click here to watch pictures from the events around the world.

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More than 700 people were arrested from the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City. Demonstrators were arrested when they spread to the Brooklyn Bridge, closing down the traffic for several hours. The occupy Wall Street group had camped in a plaza in Manhattan’s financial district for the last 2 weeks.

Several hundreds of protesters are still camped not very far from Wall Street at Zuccotti Park. The group has staged various demonstrations for the last 2 weeks against the finance industry. Protestors are driven by the wobbly economy and corporate greed.

Occupy Wall Street is a series of ongoing protests in America, originally called for by Canadian Activist group Adbusters Media Foundation, best known for its advertisement-free anti consumerist magazine called Adbusters.

A thick line of people carrying placards were assembled at the police plaza, the head quarters of the New York Police, near Zuccotti Park. According to the groups’ declaration, they are not against the police but aim to express a feeling of mass injustice. According to the group the injustices included are foreclosures, work place discrimination and student loan debt, among others.

The protest blasted-off on September 17, initially with a hand-full of agitated participants who pitched their tents in front of the New York Stock Exchange. In less than 20 days, the  scale and reach of these protests expanded in a massive fashion, reaching Chicago, Boston, St Louis, Kansas City and Los Angeles.

Police arrested around 700 people with charges of disorderly conduct and blocking the public street near the Brooklyn Bridge. Tim Flannelly spokesperson of the FBI said, “At this point we don’t anticipate wider unrest,” but expressed concern in mild tones. FBI and NYPD will deploy and any all resources necessary to control any developments.

The Grievances or the list of demands for what they are staging a motion in America are numerous and varied. First they call for the smashing of the iconic bull at Wall Street, second, they raise their voice for the establishment of a universal care center, and third they want congress to pass the Tobin tax, and  for political transparency.

They have other peripheral demands such as free college education, living wage income, billions in spending on infrastructure with immediate effect, and a racial and gender equal right amendment.

Protests to some extent represent, in much broader terminology, that much has to be done to eliminate abrupt feelings of insecurity and lack of confidence in the system; even so, there needs to be some logic used, and a number of discontented people is necessary at this stage, especially where peoples attitudes’ towards the Obama Administration is key to his survival in the coming elections in 2012.

If we consider some radical and some less-radical changes, as proposed by the Occupy Wall Street Group, time is still left for the Obama administration to act, if it believes in doing so. There is less than a year to win over the hearts of this society that has been wounded by economic calamity and to regain solidarity with the people’s beliefs that might save the ship from sinking.

Critics to this motion or event particularly doubt about how  pervasively these demonstrations can move forward. Most of them say a leaderless movement will end soon, and even the presence of stars in the event might not potentially blow a whistle in ears of the administration.

Nevertheless demonstrations on a mammoth scale in different parts of the nation might well do the trick to at least move the stone, if not shift it completely.

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