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.
The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...