A financial institution has the task of taking risks, and if it's a well run institution - say, Goldman Sachs - it tries to cover the potential losses to itself, but only to itself.
I have known people who are working class or craftsmen, who happen to be more intellectual than professors.
If humans were totally unstructured creatures, they would be... a tool which can properly be shaped by outside forces.
The truth is, I have absolutely no professional credentials - literally, which is why I'm teaching at MIT.
It cannot be too often stressed that Israel had no credible pretext for its 2008-9 attack on Gaza, with full U.S. support and illegally using U.S. weapons.
The crimes against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and elsewhere, particularly Lebanon, are so shocking that the only emotionally valid reaction is rage and a call for extreme actions. But that does not help the victims. And, in fact, it's likely to harm them.
I've been interested in Japan since the 1930s, when I read about Japan's vicious crimes in Manchuria and China.
An individual's refusal to carry out the criminal acts of his government sets the stage, in the most effective way possible, for the attempt to demonstrate the criminal nature of these acts.
What happened in the missile crisis in October 1962 has been prettified to make it look as if acts of courage and thoughtfulness abounded. The truth is that the whole episode was almost insane.
The Latin American debt that reached crisis levels from 1982 would have been sharply reduced by return of flight capital - in some cases, overcome, though all figures are dubious for these secret and often illegal operations.
Everyone who is critical of Israeli policy is deluged by crazed messages intended to flood their email system or, more insidiously, passwords are accessed and messages sent out under their name! I'm sure it's illegal. It's also an effort to undermine free speech.
People who criticize power in the Jewish community are regarded the way Ahab treated Elijah: You're a traitor.
After the first International Days of Protest in October, 1965, Senator Mansfield criticized the 'sense of utter irresponsibility' shown by the demonstrators.
American imperialism is often traced to the takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii in 1898.
The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.
For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.
The Great Seal was an early proclamation of 'humanitarian intervention,' to use the currently fashionable phrase.
Free institutions certainly exist, but a tradition of passivity and conformism restricts their use - a cynic might say that this is why they continue to exist.
The deceit and distortion surrounding the American invasion of Vietnam is by now so familiar that it has lost its power to shock.
When a politician uses the word 'folks,' we should brace ourselves for the deceit, or worse, that is coming.