Money Clash Divides Occupy Protesters

Occupy Wall Street seems to have its own 1%: Over the past few days, a fracture has opened between leaders of the movement who control its cash and tent-dwellers who are feeling rather frosty and forgotten, MSNBC reports. The divide led to yelling and jockeying at a general assembly meeting yesterday about financial transparency. “I’ve seen this coming for a while, the occupier versus non-occupier,” one protester told a crowd in the camp.

By that description, "occupiers" are outsiders who speak up at Occupy money meetings; "non-occupiers" are the disenfranchised protesters who see little money being spent to keep them clean and happy on cold November nights. "We need direct access to monetary funds … to metro cards, to laundry money,” says one. For now, an Occupy PR man says the airing of grievances is a good thing: “It’s a valuable lesson in how crucial working together and consensus is.” (More Occupy Wall Street stories.)