In hundreds of big cities and small communities across America, people have been coming together spontaneously to form occupation protest groups, camping out under the stars even as the air of autumn grows colder. They’re refusing to end their protests until their demands are heard.

Has Congress heard those demands? Most U.S. representatives and senators are remaining silent, pretending that the protests aren’t happening and that the occupation movement does not exist.

Citizen Stan Clark has a message for those in Congress who are hoping that the protests will go away: “People are pissed because it makes you feel as though this Administration and Congress are looking the other way, because they’re all involved.”

Clark, a man from Redondo Beach interviewed by Irregular Times on this eve of the beginning of the Freedom Plaza occupation in New York City, hasn’t seen any of the occupation protests in person, and is relying only on what he’s glimpsed on a TV screen, but he ssems to have gained a clear vision of what the protests are about. He suggests that the occupation demonstrators have a message specifically for members of Congress.

“I think they’re trying to make a point to Congress that we need something done, that we insist something be done,” he says. “It has to be done. It’s, I think, a wakeup call for citizens to say this isn’t the America we want.”

What does Clark want Congress to do? It’s nothing at all like what the Wall Street allies on Capitol Hill have proposed. “First of all,” Clark suggests, “I would like to see them prosecute many of the people on Wall Street that were behind this. I know it goes a long ways through a lot of different financial industry, and everyone took part in it, including the home buyers. I feel that fraud was done and I’d like to see the prosecution go forward for some of the people who were responsible for it, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, all of the financial institutions who were doing what they were doing and knowing that they were doing it.”

The financial legislation that’s being given the most attention in congress at this moment is designed to do the exact opposite of what Stan Clark suggests – it aims to reduce regulation of Wall Street, allowing more risky investment of the sort that got the economy in trouble in the first place. With occupation protests changing the direction of the conversation about the economy, the deregulation philosophy seems unlikely to lead to electoral success next year.