"Occupy Wall Street" is a protest movement which began on the 17th of September, 2011, and has a focus on several issues, including the influence of money in politics, economic disparity, and a general discontent with the current consumption-based, corporate capitalist dynamic. These protests were first called for by the Canadian culture-jamming group Adbusters, which distributed an image of a flyer calling for people to "Occupy Wall Street" and to "bring a tent." This did occur, and resulted in the occupation of Zuccotti Park in New York on the 17th. Soon after, people in cities around the world set up Occupy encampments of their own, with locations ranging from Los Angeles, Vancouver, London, Melbourne, and beyond. To date, the website http://www.meetup.com/occupytogether/ lists over 2700 different Occupy groups in various cities.
Some of the defining characteristics of the Occupy protests include a horizontal leadership structure, in which no one person is an official leader of the protest, the implementation of direct democracy through general assemblies, in which everyone at the protest can present proposals and give input on proposed agenda items, and the usage of the "People's Mic", a technique used to ensure the message of a speaker is conveyed to all the people at the protest when electronic amplification is prohibited, via the repetition of the words of the speaker.