NEW YORK – As other protesters chanted vigorously around her, Nancy Pi-Sunyer stood off to the side at the Occupy Wall Street rally, clutching her sign, looking a little like a new teacher on the first day of school.

In a way, she was: At 66, this retired teacher was joining a protest for the first time in her life.

“I was too young for the civil rights movement,” Pi-Sunyer said earlier this week as she joined thousands of protesters marching in lower Manhattan. “And during the Vietnam War, I was too serious a student. Now, I just want to stand up and have my voice be heard.”

As the protests have expanded and gained support from new sources, what began three weeks ago as a group of mostly young people camping out on the streets has morphed into something different: an umbrella movement for people of varying ages, life situations and grievances, some of them first-time protesters.

There are a few common denominators among the protesters: their position on the left of the political spectrum, and the view that the majority in America — the “99 percent,” in their words — isn’t getting a fair shake.

Beyond that, though, there’s a diversity of age, gender and race — in part due to the recent injection of labor union support, and fueled by social networks — that is striking to some who study social protests.

“Most people think this is a bunch of idealistic young kids,” said Heather Gautney, a sociology professor at Fordham University and an analyst of social protests. “But the wider movement is remarkably more diverse than it’s been portrayed. I’ve seen a lot of first-time protesters, nurses, librarians. At one protest, the younger element seemed actually to be in the minority.”

Pi-Sunyer, who lives in Montclair, N.J., was drawn into the fray on Wednesday the same way many were — via social networks. She saw a post from a friend on Facebook and realized it was time to join.

“I just decided to get off the couch and be in control,” she said, holding a hand-lettered sign that read: “Wise OWLS Seek Economic Justice 4 All.” (OWLS was a play on the initials for Occupy Wall Street — with an “l” for little people.) “I was oblivious before. I can’t be oblivious now.”

Nearby, a speaker in lower Manhattan’s Foley Square yelled into a microphone: “I’m tired of sticking my hand in my pocket, and only getting my leg!” The so-called “Granny Brigade” pulled out guitars and played a song. The crowd milled, bearing an endless variety of signs:

“Make Banks Pay!” “Corporate Greed is Not Patriotic!” “Give My Professor Health Insurance, Please!” “Food is A Basic Human Right!” “Bernanke Burnout!” An optimistic one: “This Is The First Time I’ve Felt Hopeful In a Long Time!” And a pessimistic one: “Even My Union is Corrupt!”

Cherie Walters wasn’t carrying a sign — she WAS a sign. Both the front and back of her shirt were covered in scrawled slogans.

“I came here from MICHIGAN because the top 20 percent are waging class warfare against the rest of the U.S.,” it read in part. Walters, 58, also a former teacher, had driven all the way from Michigan with her husband, Rich.

Her biggest gripe: credit card swipe fees, which she said were killing smaller businesses. She also was concerned about unemployment in her home state. “I’m very angry at how poverty is degrading our people,” she said. As she spoke, a much younger protester interrupted her to hand her a leaflet on health care reform.

The couple, who’d been following the protests all week, getting updates via Facebook and Twitter (and posting their own video on YouTube), complained that protesters had been described by others as unruly mobs or young troublemakers. Did she look like a young troublemaker, Walters asked? (At least there was a silver lining, she quipped: It was flattering to be described as young.)

Both Cherie and Rich Walters had protested during the Vietnam War, as students at Central Michigan University. Compared with those anti-war protests, she said, this one was way more diverse — “different ages, colors, even languages,” she said. Legal Aid lawyer Steve Wasserman, 63, who joined Wednesday’s march with his union and remembered his Vietnam protesting days, agreed. “The old left was very male-dominated,” he said.

Such diversity is what organizers were hoping for, said Patrick Bruner, spokesman for Occupy Wall Street. Since launching the protests in mid-September with a group of mostly young activists, “we’ve made a concerted effort to diversify our group,” he said, with an outreach committee and caucus groups for people of color, for example, or for women. “We’ve gradually seen our message resonate with different groups of people.”

Organizers also have been encouraging people to tell their stories in a virtual protest on tumblr, the social network, spotlighting people of different backgrounds, each tale of economic hardship ending with: “I am the 99 percent.”

Experts say the role of social networks in building and organizing these protests, like in the recent revolt in Egypt, can’t be overstated. “I’ve been studying and attending protests for a decade, and Facebook is the most effective organizing tool I have ever encountered,” said Michael Heaney, a professor at the University of Michigan.

What the movement doesn’t have right now, these experts note, are the same concrete goals of some past social movements — a lack that many demonstrators seem to be embracing, at least for the moment.

“We’re a broad range — everyone’s affected in a different way,” said John Crisano, 27, who’d answered a call for college students to attend Wednesday’s protest. “But we’re all here because we’re upset at the way the government is being run.”

Karen Livecchia, 49, agreed. “For now, it’s a lot like the Internet — leaderless, spaceless,” she said as she collected signatures at the march, spurred to action by an email from the liberal group MoveOn.org. “It’s hard to tell what it will lead to. But I’m not concerned that we don’t have specific demands — that will come.”

Livecchia, a Harvard grad with a master’s from New York University, was laid off 21 months ago from her publishing job, and for her, too, this was the first protest of her life. Her anger was palpable.

“I did everything I was supposed to do,” she said. “I have two fancy degrees. I’m from a union home, raised to believe in the system. But you know what? The system doesn’t work! It’s too polluted with corporate money.”

“If it’s like this for me,” she added, “how about the waiters, and the truck drivers?

What led Abdullah Pollard to the protests, just months after he became a U.S. citizen, was no less than the dashing of his American dream.

Pollard, 58, came to the United States from Trinidad in 1996, and became a citizen in June. “I didn’t feel empowered as an immigrant,” he said at Wednesday’s march, where he volunteered as a marshal. “Now I am a citizen, and I want to stand up for the downtrodden.”

A father of three adult kids, Pollard was laid off in April from his job in telecommunications. He’s looking for work again but said it’s hard at his age. He feels let down by a country where, he said, “both political parties march to the same drummer — the powerful corporations.”

“You leave your own country and you expect things to be better in America, a step or two up from what you left back home,” he said. “And then there’s this rude awakening.

“America is just not what it used to be.”

___

Online:

http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/page/2

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Large blue chips, including some consumer-oriented companies, will have to show they can counter sluggish developed economies by leveraging growth in emerging markets and technology — if Wall Street is to maintain earnings momentum next week.

Companies like Microsoft (MSFT.O), PepsiCo (PEP.N), and Coca-Cola (KO.N), unloved on Wall Street, could turn out to be good buys if they can show they justify higher valuations than investors are now willing to give them.

“If you see these Cokes and Pepsis and these kinds of multinational consumer names post good results, I think it is going to give the perception that the equity market can overcome a lot of these domestic issues,” said Nick Kalivas, an analyst at MF Global in Chicago.

Before the recession, the consumer and financial sectors benefited from huge credit expansion. Not so any more.

Growth is now concentrated in industrial, materials and energy stocks that benefit from strong demand in emerging markets, as well as a technology sector boosted by robust demand from businesses.

Average earnings growth across those sectors amounts to almost 33 percent in the first quarter over a year ago, according to Thomson Reuters data. That is more than double the estimated growth for the S&P 500 and towers over the 5 percent growth in a financial sector burdened by a weak housing market.

Investors will also want to see at least stable performance in developed markets as they gear up for a press conference by U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke next week. Tough questions will be asked about what monetary policy will look like after the Fed’s easy money policies come to a close at the end of June.

EMBRACING THE UNLOVED

Growth is scarce and it is driving up valuations in sectors where it is concentrated.

During the week, investors chased a host of relatively expensive technology names like Apple (AAPL.O) and VMware (VMW.N). Some valuations look extreme: Cloud computing company Saleforce.com (CRM.N) is priced at nearly 300 times current earnings.

The trailing price-to-earnings ratio in the S&P’s materials sector is more than 20 times current earnings compared with 16.3 for the whole market, according to data from Thomson Reuters’ StarMine.

For investors like Whitney Tilson, a hedge fund manager at T2 Partners in New York, that is creating opportunities in unloved blue chips, where he is focusing his attention instead.

“There are a lot of big-cap blue-chip companies that are trading at moderate prices,” he said.

“At a time when everyone is getting enamored with high- growth darlings and commodities, that is precisely the time when we look to play defense and own boring companies that we think have a lot of growth.”

One of those less favored companies set to report next week is Microsoft. The company suffers from a reputation for slow growth and its price at nearly 11 times current earnings clearly reflects that.

Comparing Microsoft to Apple, Tilson says that the former is an inherently better business as it is focused on software with marginal incremental production costs compared to Apple’s consumer hardware business.

Apple is “a fabulous business, but I’m simply pointing out that you can own a better business, albeit one that is not growing as quickly — but still growing nicely — for half the price in terms of price-to-earnings multiple,” Tilson said.

Blowout earnings from Apple and exceptionally strong results from other big tech and industrial companies drove the three major U.S. stock indexes higher for the week. The blue-chip Dow Jones industrial average (.DJI) ended the holiday-shortened week on Thursday at 12,505.99, its highest close for the year and its best closing level since June 5, 2008. For the week, the Dow and the benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500 Index (.SPX) each gained 1.3 percent, while the Nasdaq Composite Index (.IXIC) climbed 2 percent.

U.S. financial markets were closed for Good Friday.

EARNINGS FRENZY, TALKING FED

Next week, 180 of the S&P 500 companies are set to report earnings. Of companies that have reported to date, 75 percent beat analysts’ expectations. That is just above the average over the last four quarters, but well above the average of 62 percent since 1994, Thomson Reuters data showed.

“As people are lowering GDP (estimated) numbers seemingly weekly, the companies are still maintaining some pretty solid revenue growth and margins are staying intact,” said Jerome Heppelmann, portfolio manager and chief investment officer of Old Mutual Focused Fund in Berwyn, Pennsylvania.

“I see it more as a broad-based continuation of the economic recovery,” he said. “In some cases, the technology names are going to be more exposed and more levered to it.”

While earnings are driving ahead at full force, investors will also focus on the first of the Federal Reserve’s press conferences. The press briefing on Wednesday is scheduled to start after the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee wraps up its two-day meeting. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, intends to give four press briefings a year.

There will likely be questions raised about the type of monetary policy the Fed will pursue when its $600 billion bond-buying program, known as quantitative easing, or QE2 on Wall Street, draws to a close at the end of the June.

One school of thought says that QE2 drove the rally in stocks and commodities by underwriting the government’s budget deficit and forcing money that would have gone into Treasury bonds into equity and commodity markets instead.

“What happens when QE2 ends and the government starts to withdraw some of that liquidity?” Tilson asked. “How much of this is just artificial, deficit-driven, money-printing stimulus? And how much of it is really genuine? I don’t know the answer to that, but I worry.”

(Reporting by Edward Krudy; Editing by Jan Paschal)