Occupy Oregon

After you've made a fool of yourself on the street of Wall and found out most people think you're nuts, if you're a young man, you go West;

DW: Two years ago this week you were launching the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York to end the greed and corruption of the richest 1 percent of the population and start a global revolution. Now, two years later, you live in rural Oregon and Occupy Wall Street has all but vanished and according to the latest data the income gap between the 99 and the 1 percent last year reached a new record. What went wrong?

Micah White: I don't think that anything went wrong. The whole world basically had an uprising in 2011 and 2012 that revealed some fatal assumptions that the left had about political change. And one of those assumptions that we had in America was that if you build a social protest movement that had the majority of people on its side and that petitioned the government with a demand that it understood and that it was fair and just and that the government would respond with that and that it would change. But we kind of miscalculated. They weren't willing to respond to that critique. So we see that the government is more intransigent to change. We realized that protests alone won't be sufficient to correct the kind of systemic problems that we have in America. And so I think we are looking to other kinds of ways.

Have we learned anything?

You have relocated to rural Oregon, but still describe yourself as activist. What are you doing these days?

I am the founder of a boutique activist consultancy and we are trying to create the tools and tactics of the next social uprising. America has been too centered on its urban culture and what is going on in New York City, Los Angeles and these financial hubs like Seattle. But there is this much larger, rural America, the America that is really suffering under the economic situation. Where I live is one of the poorest areas in Oregon and what we are going to do is build a social movement that takes power back from this corrupt government and returns it to the people - these people being the poor and hard-working people of America. 

Maybe rural areas are poorer because they don't have enough capital?