Sheldon Whitehouse: “One of the ways in which I try to discuss what is going on in this country--when people are horrified, anxious…”

“One of the ways in which I try to discuss what is going on in this country--when people are horrified, anxious, astonished, whatever--is to describe it as the rule of the looters and the polluters. The looters are the creepy billionaires coming to government, trying to figure out how to get even more for themselves. It used to be that people thought that there was a thing: too rich to steal. That doesn't seem to be a thing for these creepy billionaires. They are more than happy to wreck Social Security so that they can send in their tech bros and their private equity folks to put right what they have broken. And the looting goes on across the entire face of government--scarred and disfigured by Musk and his little Muskrats, I like to call them. And then, of course, you have the polluters, who are doing a similar thing, which is to steal from the public. Only instead of stealing from government, they are stealing by dumping their pollution into our common air, into our common climate future, into our waters, into our lands, and defending, through political influence and clout and power and dark money in this building, their privilege to pollute for free.…”