Photographs: Saisuresh Sivaswamy Yoshita Singh in New York
Large scale protests against corporate America spread across the country with demonstrations being held outside federal banks and financial districts from Los Angeles to Boston.
The Occupy Wall Street protests entered their third week in New York with protesters dressed up as "corporate zombies" marching through Wall Street, the city's financial hub.
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Anti-Wall Street protests spread across America
Photographs: Saisuresh Sivaswamy
People used social networking sites Facebook and Twitter to spread their message and garner support for their cause.
Support groups like 'Occupy Boston', 'Occupy Philadelphia', 'Occupy Chicago' were also created online.
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Anti-Wall Street protests spread across America
Photographs: Saisuresh Sivaswamy
Protesters, who are mostly young, carried banners supporting a range of other issues, including healthcare reform, an end to US wars and the scrapping of the death penalty.
The participants said they are defending 99 per cent of the US population against the wealthiest one per cent.
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Anti-Wall Street protests spread across America
Photographs: Saisuresh Sivaswamy
According to the organisers, the Occupy Wall Street protests are inspired by the Spring 2011 Tahrir Square protests in Egypt.
But while the Egyptian protests were clear in their scope - to get rid of Egypt's former president Hosni Mubarak and overhaul the massive inequality of the Egyptian political and social system - the Occupy Wall Street protest is much more vague in what it hopes to achieve, both in the eyes of the protesters themselves, and onlookers.
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Anti-Wall Street protests spread across America
Photographs: Brendan McDermid/Reuters
Among the complaints: bank executives received "exorbitant" bonuses not long after receiving taxpayer bailouts and companies have "poisoned the food supply through negligence" and "continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate better pay and safer working conditions."
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Anti-Wall Street protests spread across America
Photographs: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters
In a radio interview, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the protests should not target Wall Street officials, "who make $40,000 or $50,000 a year and are struggling to make ends meet. That is the bottom line. Those are the people who work on Wall Street or in the finance sector."
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Anti-Wall Street protests spread across America
Photographs: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters
In Manhattan, hundreds of people responded to calls from organisers and came dressed up as zombies, walking around the financial institutions clutching fake money.
They held up signs that read 'Down with the World Bank', 'How to fix the deficit: End the war, tax the rich,' 'End corporate personhood,' and 'Say no to corporate America.'
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Anti-Wall Street protests spread across America
Photographs: Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters
People have camped out on the streets, sleeping on sidewalks. Some supporters of the protests have distributed blankets, sleeping bags and food items to demonstrators.
In Chicago, people gathered outside the Federal Reserve Bank while protesters camped out near City Hall in Los Angeles.
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Anti-Wall Street protests spread across America
Photographs: Mike Segar/Reuters
Similar marches against corporate America, greed on the Wall Street and government bailouts to financial giants during the economic crisis were held in downtown Boston.
The protests, which began with a handful of people camping in front of the New York Stock Exchange on September 17, got a fillip and nationwide attention after over 700 protestors were arrested over the weekend by the police as they tried to cross the Brooklyn Bridge.
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Anti-Wall Street protests spread across America
Photographs: Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters
Similar rallies are being planned in places like St Louis, Kansas City, Hawaii, Tennessee, Minneapolis and Baltimore, according to 'Occupy Together', the unofficial hub for all events springing up across the country in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement.
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