Occupy Wall Street in the context of "Consensus decision-making"

Financial services are economic services tied to finance provided by financial institutions. Financial services encompass a broad range of service sector activities, especially as concerns financial management and consumer finance.

The terms finance industry and financial services industry in their most common sense concern commercial banks that provide market liquidity, risk instruments, and brokerage for large public companies and multinational corporations at a macroeconomic scale that impacts domestic politics and foreign relations. The extragovernmental power and scale of the finance industry remains an ongoing controversy in many industrialized Western economies, as seen in the American Occupy Wall Street civil protest movement of 2011.

Murray Bookchin (/ˈbʊktʃɪn/; January 14, 1921 – July 30, 2006) was an American social theorist, author, orator, historian, and political philosopher. Influenced by G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and Peter Kropotkin, he was a pioneer in the environmental movement. Bookchin formulated and developed the theory of social ecology and urban planning within anarchist, libertarian socialist, and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books covering topics in politics, philosophy, history, urban affairs, and social ecology. Among the most important were Our Synthetic Environment (1962), Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), The Ecology of Freedom (1982), and Urbanization Without Cities (1987). In the late 1990s, he became disenchanted with what he saw as an increasingly apolitical "lifestylism" of the contemporary anarchist movement, stopped referring to himself as an anarchist, and founded his own libertarian socialist ideology called "communalism", which seeks to reconcile and expand Marxist, syndicalist, and anarchist thought.

Bookchin was a prominent anti-capitalist, anti-fascist and advocate of social decentralization along ecological and democratic lines. His ideas have influenced social movements since the 1960s, including the New Left, the anti-nuclear movement, the anti-globalization movement, Occupy Wall Street, and the democratic confederalism of the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. He was a central figure in the American green movement. An autodidact who never attended college, he is considered to be one of the most important left theorists of the twentieth century.

Left-wing populism, also called social populism, is a political ideology that combines left-wing politics with populist rhetoric and themes. Its rhetoric often includes elements of anti-elitism, opposition to the Establishment, and speaking for the common people. Recurring themes for left-wing populists include economic democracy, social justice, and skepticism of globalization. Socialist theory plays a lesser role than in traditional left-wing ideologies.

Criticism of capitalism and globalization is linked to unpopular United States military operations, especially those in the Middle East. It is considered that the populist left does not exclude others horizontally and relies on egalitarian ideals. Some scholars also speak of nationalist left-wing populist movements, a feature exhibited by the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua or the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. Unlike right-wing populism, left-wing populist parties tend to be supportive of minority rights, as well as to an idea of nationality that is not delimited by cultural or ethnic particularisms. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, self-described democratic socialists, are examples of modern left-wing populist politicians in the United States. With the rise of Syriza and Podemos during the European debt crisis, there has been increased debate on new left-wing populism in Europe.

The Occupy movement was an international populist socio-political movement that expressed opposition to social and economic inequality and to the perceived lack of authentic democracy around the world. It aimed primarily to advance social and economic justice and different forms of democracy. The movement has had many different scopes, since local groups often had different focuses, but its prime concerns included how large corporations and the global financial system control the world in a way that disproportionately benefits a minority, undermines democracy and causes instability.

The first Occupy protest to receive widespread attention, Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park, Lower Manhattan, began on 17 September 2011. By 9 October, Occupy protests had taken place or were ongoing in over 951 cities across 82 countries, and in over 600 communities in the United States. Although the movement became most active in the United States, by October 2011 Occupy protests and occupations had started in dozens of other countries across every widely inhabited continent. For the first month, overt police repression remained minimal, but this began to change by 25 October 2011, when police first attempted to forcibly remove Occupy Oakland. By the end of 2011 authorities had cleared most of the major camps, with the last remaining high-profile sites – in Washington, D.C., and in London – evicted by February 2012.

As an act of protest, occupation is a strategy often used by social movements and other forms of collective social action in order to squat and hold public and symbolic spaces, buildings, critical infrastructure such as entrances to train stations, shopping centers, university buildings, squares, and parks. Occupation attempts to use space as an instrument in order to achieve political and economic change, and to construct counter-spaces in which protesters express their desire to participate in the production and re-imagination of urban space. Often, this is connected to the right to the city, which is the right to inhabit and be in the city as well as to redefine the city in ways that challenge the demands of capitalist accumulation. That is to make public spaces more valuable to the citizens in contrast to favoring the interests of corporate and financial capital.

Unlike other forms of protest like demonstrations, marches and rallies, occupation is defined by an extended temporality and is usually located in specific places. In many cases local governments declare occupations illegal because protesters seek to control space over a prolonged time. As such, occupations are often in conflict with political authorities and forces of established order, especially the police. These confrontations in particular attract media attention.