Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, whose anti-greed message spread worldwide during an eight-week encampment in Lower Manhattan last year, plan marches across the globe tomorrow calling attention to what they say are abuses of power and wealth.

Organizers say they hope the coordinated events will mark a spring resurgence of the movement after a quiet winter. Calls for a general strike with no work, no school, no banking and no shopping have sprung up on websites in Toronto, Barcelona, London, Kuala Lumpur andSydney, among hundreds of cities in North America, Europe and Asia.

CONTINUED at Bloomberg.

The world’s biggest banks are working with one another and police to gather intelligence as protesters try to rejuvenate the Occupy Wall Street movement with May demonstrations, industry security consultants said.

Among 99 protest targets in midtown Manhattan on Tuesday are JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America offices, said Marisa Holmes, a member of Occupy’s May Day planning committee.

Events are scheduled in more than 115 cities, including an effort to shut down the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, where Wells Fargo investors relied on police to get past protests at their annual meeting this week.

“Our goal is to kick off the spring offensive and go directly to where the financial elite play and plan,” she said.

After evictions and arrests from Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park to London that began last year, the movement against income inequality and corporate abuse will regain strength, said Brian McNary, director of global risk at Pinkerton Consulting & Investigations.

CONTINUED at The San Francisco Chronicle.

New York City police are investigating death threats made against staff through the phone and on twitter. This after officers forcibly arrested more than 70 people during an Occupy Wall Street protest. Since the start of the movement, nationwide protests have faced numerous cases of police brutality with batons and tear gas often used to disperse crowds. As the movement continues, so too does Washington’s desire to silence the American public, as RT’s Marina Portnaya explains.

Protesters are back in New York’s Zuccotti Park – the symbolic birthplace of the Anti-Wall street movement where it all started almost four months ago. Barricades have been in place since mid-November when the occupiers were evicted in a night raid by police. But now that the barriers are gone the protesters are determined to stay – as RT’s Anastasia Churkina reports.

From a rational perspective, joining a protest rally is like voting: a complete waste of time. The odds that your voice or your protest sign will make a difference are no better than the odds that your vote will change an election. Yet people do join protests, and people do vote. They do these things not to advance their rational self-interest but to express moral passions and moral identities.

In Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, home base of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a noisy, festive crowd of hundreds was doing just that when I stopped by on October 8. In an attempt to make sense of the goals and motivations of the protesters there, I brought along a small camera and Moral Foundations Theory, which I developed with psychologists at the University of California at Irvine (Pete Ditto), the University of Chicago (Craig Joseph), and the University of Southern California (Jesse Graham, Ravi Iyer, and Sena Koleva). This theory, which is based on ideas from the anthropologist Richard Shweder, outlines six clusters of moral concerns—care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation—upon which, we argue, all political cultures and movements base their moral appeals.

The foundations are like the taste receptors on the tongue: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory. Each culinary culture creates its own unique cuisine using some combination of these tastes, including elements that lack immediate appeal on their own, such as bitterness. Similarly, each political movement bases its claims on a particular configuration of moral foundations. It would be awfully hard to rally people to your cause without making any reference to care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, or sanctity.

My colleagues and I found that political liberals tend to rely primarily on the moral foundation of care/harm, followed by fairness/cheating and liberty/oppression. They are very concerned about victims of oppression, but they rarely make moral appeals based on loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, or sanctity/degradation. Social conservatives, in contrast, use all six foundations. They are less concerned than liberals about harm but much more concerned about the moral foundations that bind groups and nations together, i.e., loyalty (patriotism), authority (law and order, traditional families), and sanctity (the Bible, God, the flag as a sacred object). Libertarians, true to their name, value liberty more than anyone else, and they value it far more than any other foundation. (You can read our complete research findings at www.MoralFoundations.org.)

So what is the mix of moral foundations at Occupy Wall Street (OWS)? In my visit to Zuccotti Park, it was clear that the main moral foundation of OWS is fairness, followed by care and liberty. Loyalty, authority, and sanctity, by contrast, were very little in evidence.

Fairness/cheating

The psychological meaning of fairness is proportionality. Human beings have been engaging in cooperative enterprises for hundreds of thousands of years, and we are now vigilant for signs that anyone is taking out more than he is putting in. We really hate cheaters, slackers, and exploiters. By far the most common message I saw at OWS was that the rich (“the 1 percent”) got rich by taking without giving. They cheated and exploited their way to the top. As if that were not bad enough, we the taxpayers then had to bail them out after they crashed the economy, and so now they really owe us for saving their necks. It’s high time they started paying what they owe (see photos 1 and 2).

CONTINUED at Reason. Written by Jonathan Haidt. Lots more pics of signs at link.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters were allowed to remain in New York’s Zuccotti Park for two months, against the will of its private owners. They were clearly trespassers, indeed, much worse than garden variety trespassers, who almost always quickly leave. They were there prepared to stay indefinitely. In effect, they were literally attempting to steal the park from its lawful owners.

Nevertheless, they were allowed to remain, in the belief that to eject them would somehow constitute a violation of their freedom of speech. They had seized the park in order to denounce capitalism. Ejecting them, would have ended their use of the park for that purpose and thus, according to virtually everyone with a public voice, from New York’s Mayor to the lowliest media reporter, would have violated their freedom of speech.

A major lesson to be learned from the occupation is that hardly anyone nowadays understands the meaning of freedom of speech. Contrary to the prevailing view, freedom of speech is not the ability to say anything, anywhere, at any time. Actual freedom of speech is consistent withrespect for property rights. It presupposes that the speaker has the consent of the owners of any property he uses in speaking, such as the land, sound system, or lecture hall or radio or television studio that he uses.

Had the owners of Zuccotti Park invited the protesters to camp on their land and propound their ideas, and then the police had ejected them, the protesters’ freedom of speech would in fact have been violated. But that was not the case. The only actual violation of freedom present was the protesters’ violation of the freedom of the owners of Zuccotti park to use their property for their own purposes. The protesters did not violate specifically the freedom of speech of the owners, but they certainly did violate their freedom in general with respect to the use of Zuccotti Park. Had the owners wanted to invite some other person or group for the purpose of speaking, then the protesters would have violated the freedom of speech specifically, by means of their presence and their activities.

Nevertheless, by the logic of the prevailing view of freedom of speech, protesters in the future will be able to storm into lecture halls and/or seize radio and television stations in order to deliver their message and then claim that their freedom of speech is violated when the police come to eject them, even though the police in such cases would in fact be acting precisely in order to uphold the freedom of speech. Indeed, since the days of the so-called Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, back in the 1960s, disruptions of speeches delivered by invited guests have occurred repeatedly on college campuses, in the name of the alleged freedom of speech of the disrupters. No attention has been paid to the actual violation of the freedom of speech of the invited speakers.

The prevailing view of freedom of speech is a major threat to freedom of speech. Not only does it provide justification for actual violations of freedom of speech of the kinds just mentioned, but it also makes freedom of speech appear to be a fundamental enemy of rational communication. Speakers cannot address audiences, professors cannot lecture to students if disrupters are permitted to drown them out and then hide behind the claim that they do so in the name of freedom of speech. If the prevailing view of freedom of speech were correct, the ability of speakers to speak and professors to lecture would require accepting the principle of the need to violate freedom of speech.

Of course, the prevailing view is totally incorrect. Actual freedom of speech, based on respect for property owners’ rights to use their own property as they see fit, is the guarantor of rational communication. If the property rights of the owners of parks, lecture halls, and radio and television stations are respected, the disrupters will be ejected and very soon will no longer even bother to appear. Rational communication will then proceed without incident.

Upholding freedom of speech and rational communication requires a policy of no tolerance for the occupation of property against the will of its owners. Any such occupation is in violation of the owners’ freedom, including their freedom of speech. Protester-occupiers are enemies of freedom, including, above all, freedom of speech.

Source: the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Written by George Reisman.

Violent arrests are taking place in New York where a huge anti-Wall Street rally is underway. RT’s Marina Portnaya reports that hundreds of activists are marching across the city, pledging to occupy streets, bridges, the subway in protest against economic inequality.

*Taken from NY Daily News.

The lockdown in Zuccotti Park appears to be over after the situation got chaotic and violent on Thursday afternoon. Occupy Wall Street protesters were penned in by the NYPD, who did not appear to let anyone in or out of the area, but they now seem to be flooding back in.

Over 100 protesters have been arrested today in standoffs with the police around the New York Stock Exchange and in Zuccotti Park.

CONTINUED..

My Two Cents: If you preach that you are “free people” you shouldn’t obstruct other “free people” from going about their business. Otherwise you are a tyrant and a hypocrite and no better than the phantoms you claim to be fighting. In any event, are you morons even aware of the ramifications if your plan is successful and you shut down the financial district for a day? You think shit’s bad now? And that’s the problem, these angry emotional zombies haven’t thought any of this through. Now it is just about agenda-less escalation. End Two Cents.

*Taken from NY Post.

The occupation at Zuccotti Park may be over, but wary city officials are bracing for trouble tomorrow when a mob of that could number in the “tens of thousands” is expected to answer Occupy Wall Street’s call to shut down the Financial District.

“Everything that we have seen and heard suggests that we may have tens of thousands of people tomorrow protesting.

The protesters are calling for a massive event aimed at disrupting major parts of the city,” Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson told reporters this afternoon.

Wolfson and Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway said all city agencies are on notice and extra cops will be on hand for the massive demonstrations – which could disrupt the morning commute and be among the largest in city history.

CONTINUED..