Social Justice Magazine
Associate Professor of History, California State University, Sacramento. Professor Palermo is the author of the forthcoming book, The Eighties (Pearson), which will be available in February 2012. He has also written two books on Robert Kennedy: In His Own Right: The Political Odyssey of Senator Robert F. Kennedy (Columbia University Press, 2001); and Robert F. Kennedy and the Death of American Idealism (Pearson Longman, 2008). Before earning a Master's degree and Doctorate in History from Cornell University, Professor Palermo completed a double major Bachelor's degree in Sociology and Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz; and a Master's degree in History from San Jose State University. His expertise includes the 1980s; political history; presidential politics and war powers; social movements of the 20th century; social movements of the 1960s; and the history of American foreign policy. Professor Palermo has also written articles for anthologies on the life of Father Daniel Berrigan, S.J. in The Human Tradition in America Since 1945 (Scholarly Resources Press, 2003); and on the Watergate scandal in Watergate and the Resignation of Richard Nixon (CQ Press, 2004).
ince the financial train wreck of September 2008, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, has fought tooth and nail against any new federal regulations of Wall Street.Now with his bank's recent loss of $2 billion (and counting) involving the same credit default swaps (CDSs) that played a key role in bringing down the financial system, Mr. Dimon apparently wants us all to forgive and forget … [Read more...]
he most famous dog story in American politics came from then vice-presidential candidate Richard Milhous Nixon (who was also the Republican Senator from the great state of California). Known ever since simply as the “Checkers speech,” the dog yarn that Nixon deployed on national TV that evening in the heat of the 1952 campaign was a desperate attempt to rescue his candidacy from an insipient … [Read more...]
s the student loan debt in the United States surpasses $1 trillion for the first time in the nation’s history thirteen courageous students from six California State University campuses will be engaging in civil disobedience in the form of a hunger strike until university leaders agree to freeze tuition, roll back excessive executive salaries, and make a genuine effort to ensure the quality of … [Read more...]
The California Faculty Association, which represents the faculty of the nation's largest public university system, released a report today titled: "For-Profit Higher Education and the California State University, A Cautionary Tale." In it, the CFA presents a devastating critique of the "for-profit" direction that Chancellor Charles Reed and the Board of Trustees have taken the CSU system. … [Read more...]
“It makes me ill how callously people still talk about ripping off clients,” the Goldman Sachs whistleblower, Greg Smith, wrote in his March 14th public resignation letter. The 33-year-old executive who quit the company’s London office where he ran its derivatives shop reinforces the public perception of Goldman Sachs less as a venerable Wall Street banking firm and more as an old-school … [Read more...]
Cultural insensitivity of the kind illustrated by the recent Koran burnings at Bagram Air Base might be an understandable lapse in the first months of a military occupation, but after ten years? It wasn’t long ago when General David Petraeus asked a good Reverend in Florida intent on holding a “Koran Burning Day” to cancel the event because it would make life more difficult for his … [Read more...]
The Republicans Used a Base Strategy in 2004 and 2010; Can It Work in 2012?The same corporate media pundits who assured us back in 2000 that George W. Bush, given the contested presidential election, would have to “move to the center” are today telling us that the Republican candidates’ stoking of the culture war is “toxic” to independent voters and will kill them in the general … [Read more...]
In his latest column David Brooks argues against what he calls “economic determinism” in analyzing the underlying causes of poverty in America. After telling his readers he isn’t going to blame the poor for being poor because of their bad behavior he plows right ahead and blames the poor for being poor because of their bad behavior. Brooks’s blend of snarky elitism and grand … [Read more...]
Stephen Colbert’s SuperPAC exposes the corporate news media’s incapability to express what would be in normal life circumstances a totally justified sense of righteous outrage. Why do people become upset with the notion of anonymous corporate donors filling the coffers of SuperPACS and corporations being considered “people?” It must offend a sense of propriety somewhere.The TV … [Read more...]
Going into the 2012 elections people on the progressive end of the political spectrum need to ask the simple question: How will the first post-Citizens United presidential election affect the outcomes for those desperately seeking social change?The most likely result, unfortunately, is that after the mountains of anonymous campaign money come crashing down in a deafening avalanche of … [Read more...]
Despite the redeployment of U.S. troops out of Iraq, during this dismal period of “austerity” the public isn’t likely to see any discernible difference in the government’s misplaced priorities. Our representatives in Washington recently passed a “bipartisan” military budget of $662 billion. That level of “defense” spending, about $7 trillion over 10 years, Congress has … [Read more...]
The Wall Street “veteran” Leon Cooperman has written an“Open Letter to President Obama” that provides us with a glimpse into the mindset of our 21st century corporate overlords. He’s upset not with President Obama’s Treasury Department or his Securities and Exchange Commission, or even his Department of Justice or the IRS. No, what’s put a bee in Mr. Cooperman’s bonnet is the … [Read more...]
Those loud right-wing voices in our political discourse that are trying to make Occupy Wall Street look like something “foreign” to American culture are barking up the wrong tree. When David Crosby and Graham Nash recently showed up at Zuccotti Park for an impromptu sing-along with the protesters they linked OWS with the long American tradition of resistance to oligarchic rule. Crosby’s … [Read more...]
When MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow recently asked the journalist and commentator Frank Rich on her show if he believed the “physical manifestation of discontent” was imperative to the Occupy Wall Street movement’s cause, Rich replied that it was “not always that important” since the movement was polling well among Americans.I disagree. The ideas that inform the direction of the … [Read more...]
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Ross Douthat’s Hit Job on JFK
Appearing in the New York Times’ “Sunday Review” on the first Sunday following the 48th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the conservative commentator Ross Douthat’s take on the former president. Right-wing pundits usually make poor amateur historians and Douthat’s short hit piece, dripping with contempt, is fresh evidence for this conclusion. He sets out … [Read more...]