Understanding the 1%: An Interview with Willie Baptist

Willie Baptist is a Poverty Initiative Scholar-in-Residence at Union Theological Seminary and the coordinator of the Poverty Scholars Program. He is a former shop steward and organizer for the United Steelworkers’ Union, organizer for the National Union of the Homeless and 10-years education director of Kensington Welfare Rights Union. He co-authored the recent book, Pedagogy of the Poor.
 
Willie, you’ve done a lot of studying of the 1% in your 40+ years of organizing. Why should we learn more about them?
 
It’s inaccurate to reduce the 1% to “greedy individuals who gave themselves obscene bonuses.” We have to ask who and what does the 1% represent? How did they become the 1%? It didn’t happen simply because they're greedy. They became the 1% because they're part of a structure, an economic system that has a built-in inequality and allows them to concentrate and accumulate wealth at the expense of the 99%.
 
The 1%, which includes the billionaires, is quite organized. They’re in power, which means they command the highest and most dominant forms of organization, that is, the major political levers of society―such as the police, the prison system, the army, the civic bureaucracy at every level of government―as well as the commanding heights of the economy. This is Wall Street.
 
Wall Street represents a very formidable economic and political force. They pay billions of dollars for the best political strategists, analysts and theologians to push their program to figure out how to contain, control and misdirect us.
 
This is who we are up against. Unless we know that, we end up being manipulated as pawns in a greater power game of which we are completely unaware. And the whole point of this stuff is to win, to solve the problem of unnecessary poverty, misery, and deaths.
 
Has Occupy surprised the 1%? Do they have any idea how to handle the movement? The powers that be, for reasons of economics and politics, are having to look at the Occupy protests and see how they can make use of them.
 
These guys are no joke. They have a networked army of highly paid analysts and strategists working overtime in think tanks figuring out their latest moves and maneuvers. From their perspective, they have the responsibility for the running of this country and running of the world. They are studying and learning from all these domestic and global outbreaks, so unless we're studying their efforts and considering the lessons learned a major part of our actions and organizing, then we lose. Being angry is not enough. Morality is not strategy, man. Ethics is not tactics.

 
You’re saying the 1% are organized, that they’re not just individuals. Then why don’t they have a unified response? How are they divided?
 
Reading a number of their elite publications I see debate over policy and tactics. Even with the slogan, “tax the rich” you've got people like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates who are saying "tax the rich" as well. They do this for their own agenda reasons. Among other things, they see the need for a fiscally stable U.S. government to ensure their definition of domestic and global stability.**
 
Of course, it is the richest people who are most prepared to pay a higher tax rate because this puts them in a better competitive position.
 
Has this happened at other points in history?
 
That's what 'Big Steel' did during the 30's—it negotiated a major contract with the coal miners’ union, but on the condition that they would organize all the rest of the steel companies. This put 'Little Steel' at a total disadvantage, because ‘Big Steel’ could easily afford the costs of strikes, negotiations and contracts. Ultimately U.S. international finance won out. Little Steel, the little fish, had to give in and be eaten up by the big fish.
 
That was also the consequence of the New Deal. International finance was able to reform the banking system and shake out smaller banks in that period. You had big companies arguing for reform that was to the disadvantage of smaller companies.
 
Small business fought back. They funded movements, but ultimately, big companies won through the use of the militant Roosevelt coalition. So in history, this has been the behavior of Capitalism.
 
Do you think that Occupy is the solution to the problem of poverty in the U.S.?
 
The Occupy Wall Street movement has contributed greatly to a change in narrative. The challenge is how do we take advantage of the moment to raise the political consciousness of the masses of the American people, so that the leaders of these various struggles actually come together?
 
To me, it means bringing to the table the many newly emerging leaders of Occupy with leaders that have been in trenches for years, battling around issues of life and death against the same economic structure that Wall Street represents.
 
What are the challenges to doing that?
 
First, how do we bring the leaders of these different fronts of struggle into the same room to talk about a common strategy to counter the political strategy of Wall Street.
 
The 1% uses an age-old strategy for controlling people: emphasizing the differences of the 99% and hiding what they have in common. If we educate and unite the newly emerging leaders and more experienced organizers of many struggles, we can unite and organize the masses of people who are being and have been dispossessed, laid-off and evicted. In this way the unity of the poor and dispossessed, especially across color lines and around their common pains becomes a force to be reckoned with.
 
You said we need to bring together leaders. In the Occupy movement, there seems to have been a shift from saying “we have no leaders” to “We are all leaders.” Is that shift important?
 
No matter what you call them, we gotta have people who are in fact leaders. We just gotta make sure that they're proven and accountable, you know?
 
Leaders aren't necessarily the most colorful people or celebrities. They're the people who ‘stick and stay’ and are the most clear about the problem we face and its solution. The longer the struggle lasts, it challenges our commitment and clarity. People that have been deeply involved with a strong sense of integrity, they're not going to just sit back and say "well you just came on the scene, you're gonna tell us what to do." They demand of everyone a certain commitment and clarity about what we’re fighting for and what we’re up against.
 
Leaders are the first to wake up. They begin to ask deeper questions about the root causes and are not concerned with only the leaves and branches of the problem. They are, therefore, the teachers and organizers. And it’s so important that those leaders come together with the other leaders arising throughout this country and then go about waking up the rest of the sleeping giant—that is, the 99% of 300 million Americans.
 
Some might not use the term leaders, but they are becoming leaders I admire and respect. It's just the reality of the situation.
 
How can we engage more of the American people?
 
I’m not saying you should be proselytizing or nothing like that, but you should at least know and respect who you're dealing with. The 99% are not atheists. They are basically Judeo-Christian and this shapes their core values and views. If you don't understand that, you're not gonna be able to move the people in terms of dealing with their potential strength in numbers.
 
When we study our history we see that American slavery was justified by an interpretation of the Bible that says "God has ordained slavery." It took a message based on a countering Biblical interpretation to begin to defeat that powerful justification, because that's the terms in which the American people think. Consider, for example, Harriet Tubman, an organizer of the Underground Railroad and a leader of the abolition of slavery movement. She was famously called the “Moses” of her people, which expressed a diametrically opposed interpretation of the Bible, a whole theology counter to the prevailing theology that justified the slavocracy, the 1% of those days.
 
Can you tell us about your recent book, Pedagogy of the Poor?
 
The prevailing notions of scholarship are built from ‘pedagogies of the rich’—from the point of view of the 1%. This has to be countered by a new scholarship, one that is engaged. It is fostered by an education or pedagogy developed and disseminated from the point of view of the needs and demands of the poor and dispossessed. In present times of plenty not scarcity, it seeks and leads the struggle for a world where everyone has dignity and no one has to be poor.
 
That's why we put together this book Pedagogy of the Poor. It's a counterpoint to the prevailing pedagogies of the rich that produce pretentious scholars and false prophets whose intellectualism amounts to basically “fiddling while Rome is burning.”
 
Thanks Willie. Can you end by describing the purpose of the Poverty Scholars Program?
 
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr once pointed out, “The prescription for the cure rests with the accurate diagnosis of the disease." A Poverty Scholar is an honored title adopted by the Poverty Initiative at Union Theological Seminary, given to anyone who has committed to developing an accurate diagnosis of the problem faced by our society and is thereby able to fight for an accurate solution. Poverty scholars are committed to being foremost fighters in the struggles for the well-being and dignity of every human being.
 
Poverty today is not like the poverty of yesterday. Colonial agrarian poverty or the poverty of the slaves is not the same as today’s poverty. The industrial pauperism of the 1930's, 50's and 60's and 70s'—this is not the poverty that we're dealing with in the present historical period.
 
The present poverty is a product of the most rapid, comprehensive technological revolution in human history. It is a poverty that comes from the greatest concentration of wealth. The poor are being formed from every element of society, and have been hurled down into its ranks by chronic economic crises. This position gives the poor today the capability of pushing everything and everyone else forward towards a better way of life.
 
Unless we appreciate this fact, then we're not going to understand the defining problem of our times and therefore not be able to put forth the appropriate solution.
 
 
** Here are some of the 1% who are talking tax-the-rich or other ideas based on stability:
Interview of Jeffrey Sachs
Jeffrey Sachs' recent talk
Interview of Warren Buffet
Zbigniew Brzezinski: Middle Class Civil Unrest to Flare Up in USA
 
Also check out PA from Below's interview with Carmen Cuadrado, "Uniting the 99%"