So we have known for a while that the richest 1% consume most of the global resources. We have also known for a while that the richest 1% use loopholes in legal processes to exploit financial rules and regulations to aggrandize wealth; having known this though, one of the questions that often strikes me is what structures and processes do the richest 1% utilize in order to carry out their injustices, illegal activities, and acts of corruption that facilitate the accumulation of wealth. The example of the tax havens I posted on earlier depicts the active and catalyzing role played by the middle classes, by a battery of executives and lawyers who are paid by the richest 1% to carry out the illegal activities by figuring out the legal loopholes in global policy structures and by configuring ways in which legal processes can be manipulated to serve the interests of the rich. In figuring out the loopholes and in manipulating them, the petty bourgeoisie are trained through management programs, policy programs, and law schools in the ways in which knowledge can be strategically manipulated to "legalize" illegal action. Typically, all of this is configured under the umbrella of corporate practices and corporate strategy so that the fundamental theft and corruption in these illegal activities is given a legal facelift. Therefore, in imagining and articulating spaces of social change, public pedagogy needs to be focused on disrupting the monolithic narratives of greed that occupy our professional programs. Questions of ethics need to take centerstage in discussions of corporate practices. The praxis of social change needs to be precisely directed at the social science and management-based disciplines of economics, law, policy and management, working toward continually disrupting the hegemony of academic disciplines that serve as the manipulative tools of the richest 1%. Global regulations ultimately are the very sites through which illegal corporate practices can be monitored and controlled.
March 15, 2019. It was a day of terror. Unleashed by a white supremacist far-right terrorist. Driven by hate for brown people. Driven by Islamophobic hate. Earlier in the day, I had come across a hate-based hit piece targeting me, alongside other academics, the University of Auckland academic Professor Nicholas Rowe , Professor Richard Jackson at Otago University, Professor Kevin P Clements at Otago University, Dr. Rose Martin from University of Auckland and Dr. Nigel Parsons at Massey University. Titled, "More extremists in New Zealand Universities," the article threw in the labels "terror sympathisers" and "extremist views." Written by one David Cumin and hosted on the website of the Israel Institute of New Zealand, the article sought to create outrage that academics critical of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid are actually employed by universities in New Zealand. Figure 1: The web post written by David Cumin on the site of Israel Institute