This year is starting to look more and more like 1968. It is good that we live in a Democracy. Warren Buffett and Ron Paul need to run as third party candidates in 2012 and allow folks to express their outrage at the country's crony capital culture.
As part of the Wall Street establishment, the LAST thing we want to do is get the protesters angrier. Even if we could somehow ask Bloomberg for martial law, we don't want it. Despite what some may think, we have the same fundamental sense of human rights as everyone else and don't want to silence the protests. Everyone knows that escalating this is a lose-lose.
Wall Street is not going to fire the first shot. I suspect the police won't either. We may quietly pray for cold weather and for the media to find something else to focus on.
If this turns into Greece, obviously security will be hired to protect capital assets from arson and looting as any good owner would do, but we have too strong of a sense of first and fourth amendment rights in this country for the pols to step in and impose martial law. The pols here know that the response could be much more swift and violent than even that in Libya or Syria and do not want to risk it, especially as elected officials who were expecting limited terms anyways.
A libertarian democracy is a much less complicated and much more versatile thing than an authoritarian state or even a socialist country. Some people may go hungry, some stuff may get stolen, but the US will be ok and things will not get that much worse than what we saw in 1968.