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.
In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit...