The law in the United States, in every jurisdiction until about 1876, was that if a factory put smoke into the air, even one day a year, and it got onto a neighbor's property, the neighbor had the right to enjoin to close down the factory, and the courts had no choice but to do that.

The best measure of how a democracy is functioning is how it allocates the goods of the land, the public trust assets.

Twenty-two percent of Americans say their primary news source is Fox News. It's divided our country in a way that we haven't been divided probably since the Civil War, and its empowered large corporations to get certain kinds of politicians and ideologues who are in the United State Congress elected -- the Tea Party ideologues who control the Republican Party.

Large-scale hog producers are a greater threat to the United States and U.S. democracy than Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network.

We do not have free market capitalism in America; we have crony capitalism. There is a huge difference between free market capitalism that democratizes a country and makes us more efficient and prosperous and corporate crony capitalism.

Investigative journalism has been relegated to a very, very tiny space in America. We don't really have much investigative journalism left. And the last refuge for it is documentary filmmaking.

American democracy is supposed to be the paradigm for the rest of the world.