 While you and your family are getting hit by sky-high prices at the gas pump, big oil is raking it in. So how can we help everyday Americans weather higher prices while holding big oil accountable for its price gouging? Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has a bill that will do just that. Senator, why is this tax, a windfall profits tax, different from any other tax? It's actually probably a bit of a misnomer to even call it a tax, because taxes usually take the revenues and fund the government. This doesn't fund the government. This is a clawback of excess profits that these companies are grabbing from Americans, and it goes back into Americans' pockets in the nature of quarterly dividend, the way a shareholder might get a quarterly dividend. This gives regular working Americans a quarterly dividend. It sounds very much like the Alaska dividend that Alaskans get from oil extraction in Alaska. It's applied differently, obviously. It's coming from oil companies' excessive profits. But getting dividends out of oil is not a brand new idea. It's just this one is going after the oil companies. Yeah, going after the excess profits and sharing them with the American people. No funds for government all back into people's pockets. It's such an obvious idea. It's so important, and it ought to be every member of the Senate and maybe even some Republicans ought to be jumping on board this, because it's popular. I mean, oil companies are making a huge amount of money right now. Their profits are extraordinary, and they are raising their prices on top of their profits. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a racket, because the cost at the wellhead in Texas hasn't changed significantly, which changed significantly is the global oil price, which is set first by an international cartel of countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and then speculators who jumped in to move markets around when Putin attacked Ukraine. So you have this world price that has soared, and it's completely disconnected from the cost of actually pumping oil. And that's why you end up with $200 billion in fossil fuel profits. And that's a lot of money. And I think we ought to give some of it back to the American people. And they are profiting. I mean, why? The reason we call this profiteering is they're taking these profits and they are buying back their shares of stock. They're not giving it to their workers. They're not investing in new production. They're not doing, they're not moving from fossil fuels into renewable energy sources. What they're doing is basically taking all of this extra money that consumers are spending at the pump and they are pumping it into the pockets of shareholders, very wealthy people. And as you know, also into the pockets of CEOs, because when you do stock buybacks, it runs up the share price and usually the compensation package is affected by that. So the CEOs make out like bandits at the same time. Which is probably why CEOs not only want to respond to their shareholders by buying back shares of stock, but also want to respond to their own, should we call it even greed, by buying back shares of stock. You have pointed this out. There is a relationship between the timing of when these stock buybacks happen and when these CEOs actually get these big, rich stock option plans. And when it's $200 billion, you could do a lot of investment in renewables. You could do a lot of investment in clean carbon capture technology. There are so many better things to be done right now in the energy sector. There's a massive transition coming at these oil companies. Instead of spending this money to prepare for it, they're just blindly lining their pockets and their shareholders' pockets and not paying any attention to the outer environment of the transition that's coming. So what you're saying is essentially, why not put a windfall profits tax on these companies and return this excess money, if they're not going to put it into renewables, of return the excess money to consumers who are paying for the nose? Again, why would anybody be opposed to this? I assume every one of your Republican colleagues in the Senate has joined on. Unfortunately, in Congress, the Republican Party is essentially the political wing of the fossil fuel industry. So they tend to follow fossil fuel industry direction. And for the reasons that we've just discussed, the fossil fuel industry loves share buybacks and the extra income for CEOs. The Republican Party just follows in lockstep with what the fossil fuel industry tells it. Well, how can the Republican Party be penalized at the polls? I'm talking about the midterms. Why would average working people who are paying through the nose right now for gas and the Republican Party are shills for major oil companies, why would anybody vote Republican in the midterms? Well, they have a very, very powerful narrative machine. You don't run a industry as massive as the oil and gas industry with a $600 billion annual subsidy for your polluting product according to the International Monetary Fund without having lots of money to spend on controlling the narrative, putting out your propaganda, and trying to convince everybody that the solution to every problem is to pump more oil and gas. So they are very good at cranking out a phony narrative and we're just beginning to catch up. But I hope having this actual bill in place that will actually put money in people's pockets is a way to make an alternative to that fossil fuel narrative real. So if I can just restate, the oil companies who are hugely profitable already, they are raising their price to get even more profits. Average working people are paying huge amounts of money at the pump and what are they doing with this extra money? They are not putting it into renewables. They are buying back shares of stock that gives CEOs and major investors a lot of extra money and they're also putting it into propaganda that tells people that oil is great or that we've got to drill more or that the future is in oil instead of in renewables. So this is a, this when for profits tax that you have introduced is critically important on all of these levels. And here are two words that you will never hear, climate change. The whole narrative writes out the problem of climate change like those old Soviet pictures used to write out functionaries, the apparatchiks once Stalin had killed them off, they'd go back and edit out the photographs. This is sort of the policy version of that. We're just going to erase climate change out of the conversation. Well, presumably, Senator, the other thing that's being erased from the conversation is corporate power because the power of these oil companies, not only to shape the narrative, but also to charge the money that they are charging on top of humongous profits comes from their control over the market. And their control over Congress. And their control over Congress. The Republican Party, I assume you're talking about, and maybe one or possibly two Democratic senators, although I'm not going to ask you to name them. You know, the funny thing about this is that if you look at Republican theory, they're supposedly big originalists. You know, they want to go and understand the original meaning of the Constitution. Well, one thing that anybody who reads the Constitution knows is that there's no corporate role in American politics at all in the Constitution. None. Zero. Not discussed in the Federalist Papers. Not discussed in the Philadelphia debates. None. And yet, they've carefully built an ever more powerful role for corporations in American politics. And like the frog in the pot, we've let them do it until now the pot's starting to boil. And we can't get things done like a climate bill, like pharmaceutical prices coming down because of the amount of corporate power and control that we gave up. Well, I couldn't agree with you more. And there is a direct connection between what you're doing right now with regard to this kind of windfall profit stocks on oil companies and also the ridiculous, absurd degree of power oil companies and other corporations have over American politics and the secret money that is going into politics from these giant companies. You're working on both ends of this and it is very, very important. So Senator, I want to thank you for everything you're doing and thank you, Secretary. And those of us out here on the hustings, we will do everything we possibly can to support you. Much appreciated. Let's get this bill passed and get money into working Americans' pockets.