Maybe it's time to clear some of the air around here.
From my personal point of view it really does not matter what the OWS folks are protesting or what they want to accomplish by their protest. What matters to me is how they are going about their protest.
Everyone seems to be trying to tell me that the OWS crowd either has a constitutional right to do whatever they are doing or that they are engaging in civil disobedience - but mostly it seems that everybody is trying to tell me that both are taking place simultaneously. Well, I've got a news flash for you - the two are mutually exclusive.
The constitutional right to peaceably seek redress of grievances against the government requires that you obey all the existing laws, and all the lawful orders of the constituted government authorities, regardless of how bad or onerous those laws and orders are. That would include orders to leave the place where you are currently located in your attempt to seek redress of grievances against the government. (Or to take down your tents, or to get out of the middle of the street, etc.)
Civil disobedience is the calculated and purposeful disobedience of the specific law/rule/regulation you are unhappy with, while making every effort possible to avoid violating other laws or damaging property in ways that are not directly related to disobeying the law you are protesting. For example, Ghandi and his followers marched to the sea and made salt in diirect opposition to a law forbidding them to do so. They avoided trespassing on private property, or looting/pillaging along the way, and refrained from assaulting each other during their journey. They also maintained general sanitation (at least for the 3rd world culture). When they blocked the British government offices they refrained from assaulting the workers who enforced the very laws they were protesting against - they just made it so that the workers would literally have to trample on the Indian people in order to get into their offices to administer laws that were tranpling on the Indian people. The American civil rights movement was one long series of civil disobedience ranging from sitting in seats that were legally forbidden to them to refusing to ride busses in order to bankrupt the transportation system - all without physically damaging the lunch counters and busses. The plan of the Indian Uprising and the civil rights movement was for the government whose actions were being protested against to be the side that resorted to force and violence. And right on cue the government used force and violence to enforce laws that were being protested against. In other words, a central tenent of the protest was non-violence - not the open advocating of killing a cop trying to arrest you.
OWS veers away from the legacies of the civil disobedience concept in many ways, but most importantly it does so by having almost no focus on seeking redress of grievances against the government's action - at best it wants the government to impose onerous (by current standards) regulation on private enterprise and private citizens to "cure" alleged defects in private contracts (taking the student loan issue for the example). The folks at UCD were not protesting against government acts, which is the only right of protest guaranteed by the Constitution. You cannot call the government's refusal to interfere in a private contract a government action, as the government has no basic business attempting to modify private contracts by fiat unless you want to have a government operating along the lines of the fascist philosophy. But I hear that OWS and the liberals and the conservatives all consider fascism to be bad.
In an attempt to bring this to some sort of closure -
It is apparent from their own pronouncements that OWS is seeking redress of grievances against private enterprise rather than government. It is apparent from theor own pronouncements and behavior that OWS wants the government to interfere by fiat in private contracts. It is apparent by their own pronouncements and behavior that OWS does not follow the precepts of non-violence as a means of demonstrating the overbearing/crushing/evil behavior of those they claim are oppressing them.
And finally, it is apparent that OWS is not willing to suffer the logical consequences of their acts. If they believe that the laws that say they cannot "occupy" are unconstitutional they "should" be willing to go to jail as a consequence of violating those laws in order to demonstrate/prove the unconstitutionality of the laws, or to generate support for a change of the laws regardless of constitutionality. OWS appears to do everything to avoid being arrested, and resists when the arm of the law actually takes hold of them.
stay safe.
