Like other Americans, I've reconciled myself to the idea that an animal's life has been sacrificed to bring me a meal of pork or chicken. However, industrial meat production - which subjects animals to a life of torture - has escalated the karmic costs beyond reconciliation.

The technologies for the alternative energy sources exists today. The economics are compelling. The public health is compelling. Why would we maintain a focus on a 17th-century technology, when there are 21st-century alternatives that are both necessary and available? And the answer is the subversion of democracy.

I don't even consider myself an environmentalist anymore. I'm a free-marketer. I go out into the marketplace and I catch the polluters who are cheating the free market.

One out of every six American women has so much mercury in her womb that her children are at risk for a grim inventory of diseases, including autism, blindness, mental retardation and heart, liver and kidney disease.

There is nothing wrong with corporations. Corporations are a good thing. But corporations should not be running our government. Corporations are good because they drive our economy, they encourage people to assemble wealth and to risk it and then create jobs.

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.

Some corporations don't want free markets, and they don't want democracy. They want profits. And they use our campaign finance system to loot our commons, to steal from our treasury, and the other shared resources of our community - the air, the water, the public lands, the wildlife, the things that belong to all of us that are held in trust for future generations. Corporations cannot act philanthropically in America.