If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does, he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees.

The Internet is an élite organization; most of the population of the world has never even made a phone call.

There's an interesting book about that called The Third Reich and the Ivory Tower, written by Stephen H. Norwood. It has a long discussion about Harvard, and indeed the school's president, James Conant, did block Jewish faculty. He was the one who prevented European Jews from being admitted to the chemistry department - his field - and also had pretty good relations with the Nazis.

I don't really think there have been transitional periods to socialism. There have been efforts, but they have usually been destroyed by a combination of external force and internal corruption.

The House of Representatives, which was closer to the population, had much less power. The executive was more or less an administrator, not an emperor like today.

The leading, the most respected Vietnam historian, military historian Bernard Fall -he was a hawk incidentally, but he cared for the Vietnamese - he said it wasn't clear to him whether Vietnam could survive as a historical and cultural entity under the most massive attack that any region that size had ever suffered. He was talking about South Vietnam, incidentally.

My own feeling is that a corporation has no right to have a political or social influence.