"Don't skew us with that communist dude."
McMonigle and the young men he was standing with outside the church said they were not sure how they would change the economic and political systems, though they agree that socialism and communism had been tried in other countries and were not the answer.
McMonigle, an unemployed Fishtown resident, expressed common ground for his group, which comprised a paralegal student stressed about the debt he is taking on to get a degree and a job, a business consultant who said he had seen firsthand the traps financial companies set for the poor, and a retail manager.
"Whatever is happening in the world is not working for the majority of people," McMonigle said.
In that, the would-be occupiers of Philadelphia, mostly in their 20s, sounded much like many 60-something businessmen who are terrified of the future and convinced that the "dysfunction of our political system," in the words of former Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, has stacked the economy against them.
The Philadelphia group aims to capture the spirit of Occupy Wall Street, which was inspired by Adbusters, a Canadian activist magazine hoping to spark street demonstrations of the kind that toppled Arab regimes in the spring. Protesters began occupying a park near Wall Street in Manhattan's Financial District on Sept. 17.
Dozens of such groups have since formed across the United States, spurred by anger at the power of giant corporations, frustration at joblessness, and exasperation with politicians who refuse to increase taxes on the richest 1 percent of Americans while slashing programs for the poor.
