Wall Street sit-in goes global Saturday

From Reuters:

LONDON (Reuters) - For an October revolution, dress warm. That's the word going out - politely - on the Web to rally street protests on Saturday around the globe from New Zealand to Alaska via London, Frankfurt, Washington and, of course, New York, where the past month's Occupy Wall Street movement has inspired a worldwide yell of anger at banks and financiers.

How many will show up, let alone stay to camp out to disrupt city centers for days, or months, to come, is anyone's guess. The hundreds at Manhattan's Zuccotti Park were calling for back-up on Friday, fearing imminent eviction. Rome expects tens of thousands at a national protest of more traditional stamp.

Few other police forces expect more than a few thousand to turn out on the day for what is billed as an exercise in social media-spread, Arab Spring-inspired, grassroots democracy with an emphasis on peaceful, homespun debate, as seen among Madrid's "indignados" in June or at the current Wall Street park sit-in.

Blogs and Facebook pages devoted to "October 15" - #O15 on Twitter - abound with exhortations to keep the peace, bring an open mind, a sleeping bag, food and warm clothing; in Britain, "Occupy London Stock Exchange" is at pains to stress it does not plan to actually, well, occupy the stock exchange.

That may turn off those with a taste for the kind of anarchic violence seen in London in August, at anti-capitalism protests of the past decade and at some rallies against spending cuts in Europe this year. But, as Karlin Younger of consultancy Control Risks said: "When there's a protest by an organization that's very grassroots, you can't be sure who will show up."

Concrete demands are few from those who proclaim "We are the 99 percent," other than a general sense that the other 1 percent - the "greedy and corrupt" rich, and especially banks - should pay more, and that elected governments are not listening.

Spyro, a 28-year-old graduate who has a well-paid job and did not want his family name published, summed up the main target of the global protests as "the financial system."

Angry at taxpayer bailouts of banks since crisis hit in 2008 and at big bonuses still paid to some who work in them while unemployment blights the lives of many young Britons, he said: "People all over the world, we are saying 'Enough is enough'."

Here's an argument that took place on a OWS website last night:

Dear OWS Folks: From One Of Their Own

You've people got it backwards. Capitalism calls for insolvent banks to fail. Socialism calls for them to be bailed out. submitted 11 hours ago by r3compile
Edit: Some more complete thoughts:
The free market gets rid of risky, unstable businesses. Capitalism means if you don't have a viable product, you go away. People vote with their own money.
In Socialism, you vote with other people's money. You keep throwing good money after bad because you like the idea of a stable bank and you don't want to admit that it needs to go bankrupt.
All a businessman can do is try to sell you something that you think is worth the money.
But a government can take your wealth by force, and allocate it to an area that has no viable market, purely for the benefit of catering to voters and trying to get re-elected.
As long as we have a big government trying to run every aspect of the economy, it will be taken advantage of by some minority to the detriment of the majority.
I sympathize with the message of OWS thanks banks get special favors from government. But the answer isn't to give more special favors to labor unions and employees. The answer is to get the government out of the way and let the market flush out all these bad banks so a viable economy can rise.
Bring on the downvotes.

And brought they were. This gem was buried furiously by the lefty brethen of a certain site we will not name, but its initials are REDDIT.

What follows is a long and furious discussion of Socialism vs. Capitalism, and some of it is pretty damn interesting, and some of it is pretty damn funny, if you're into watching lefties argue amongst themselves.
One thing strikes me: a lot of these lefties? Not actually so very far to the left as they think they are.