MSNBC Hardball with Chris Matthews - Transcript
MSNBC Hardball with Chris Matthews - Transcript
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SHUSTER: Whether or not the president is responsible for the high price of gasoline, he is still harmed by the perception that he's an oil man and that his vice president is an energy guy. Together they've brought their people in to oversee the industry. Still, the president's speech is at least helping him in the short term because today, oil prices dropped. I'm David Shuster for HARDBALL in Washington.
GREGORY: Thanks very much David Shuster. I'm joined now by Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington state. Senator, welcome.
SEN. MARIA CANTWELL (D), WASHINGTON: Welcome David, thank you.
GREGORY: Is this what you wanted to hear from President Bush today?
CANTWELL: Well at least it's a start. But I think if you look at where the American public is right now, they don't want to hear just talk. They want to see results. And when gas prices are this high, they want something done immediately. And that's why we need a federal bill to make price gouging illegal.
GREGORY: Where is there evidence to your mind of price gouging? Do you see it in your state?
CANTWELL: Well the interesting thing, we've heard these reports about how ethanol and the switch over from MTBE is causing these increases. Washington state isn't using MTBE, we never had that problem in this crossover. And yet we have some of the highest gasoline prices. So that's not what's causing the prices in the western states.
GREGORY: But as you know, the oil industry says rather strongly this is a supply and demand issue. There are market forces at work, you know them well. It's heavy demand issues from India and China, all of which playing a big role here.
CANTWELL: I think you're right. There is supply issues. And what needs to be investigated is whether supply is being artificially manipulated, whether it's being suppressed or shipped overseas for lower profits, only to have higher profits at home because there's less supply. And until we have good transparency in these oil markets, we're not going to be able to give consumers the confidence that prices aren't being manipulated.
GREGORY: As you know, an investigation has been underway by the Federal Trade Commission really since last year. The energy bill was passed calling for that. The president said that is being extended now to look at whatever may be causing this short term run-up. But again, any evidence that you have seen over the past year that points to you and says, "Ah ha, the oil companies are doing something wrong."
CANTWELL: Well first of all, time is of the essence. The American economy is being impacted today. If you look at what's happened to airlines and their bankruptcies. We're talking about a 295 percent increase in fuel costs over five years. So urgency is important.
Just as in the Enron cases, and we're hearing about Enron every day in these Texas courts, that somehow they said, "Well, no, no, no, it's about supply. And we just don't have enough supply." When we got to the bottom of it, we found out that they were manipulating supply, that they were creating schemes to artificially decrease the amount of availability at their own will, as opposed to what they could really produce at capacity.
So what we want to do, and we've had 57 senators agree to legislation to make price gouging a federal crime. So if the president wants to get serious about this, he should help us pass this legislation, demand that it be on his desk, and give the consumers confidence that there really is a strong federal statute and he's going to take every step in his power to make sure they're protected.
GREGORY: As you well know, Democrats have called on the president before to tap the nation's oil reserve. He's been reluctant to do so. The administration did it after Hurricane Katrina. Now the president is saying, "Look, we've got enough in the reserves. We won't make anymore deposits this summer. That's going to put some more oil into the market." Will that have an impact?
CANTWELL: Well as the previous story said, that's going to have very little impact in the short term. What you really want to do is to give consumers confidence that the Department of Justice and the FTC are going to do their jobs. We've had the FTC chairman say that she didn't believe in price gouging legislation. And it's clear, David, as A.G.'s across the country have tried to address this problem, they have found that they have to use the current law, which is about collusion of prices.
So no one is making a claim that somehow Shell and Exxon and everybody is getting together and setting a price. The issue, as attorney generals across America have found out, is that somehow these inventories of supply may be being manipulated. That is that this new system of just-in-time inventory, which took 30 days of supply that used to be there, and put it down now to five days of paper trading, has given a lot more flexibility for people to maybe shadow what they're doing as far as supply.
GREGORY: Is it your charge, Senator Cantwell, that the FTC has deliberately overlooked information that would point to wrongdoing by the oil companies of some kind of manipulation in this investigation that's gone on for a year?
CANTWELL: Two things. The FTC is not being aggressive enough and secondly, I think that they need more tools to prove this. And if you pass a federal law that says two things: one, in an emergency situation that the president can declare, then you can look at excessively unconscionable pricing as a violation of law.
This is what 23 states already have on the books. And some of them used it post Katrina. So in my mind, there's no reason why the federal government shouldn't have that same ability.
GREGORY: Senator, are you for a series of measures that would mandate changes for consumers in terms of how they power their automobiles, not just suggestions or encouraging conservation or alternative fuel services but actual mandates?
CANTWELL: You are going to hear from many of my colleagues, including myself, on a proposal that says, let's accelerate the flex fuel market with mandates this year. Now whether we are going to get that passed through the Senate...
GREGORY: ... What would that mean? Just spell out quickly what that would mean.
CANTWELL: Well I think the Brazil experience shows us that a country can make a transition to flex fuel cars. They went from about three percent of their marketplace to about 70 percent of their marketplace.
GREGORY: You're talking about hybrids, in other words?
CANTWELL: A car that can run either on fossil fuel or on alternative biofuel. And they made that shift in a very, very short period of time. And they did itmost Americans found surprising by having a lot of American cars down there. G.M., being the principle.
So if the United States would be aggressive about setting a time frame for flex fuel cars and then be aggressive about the alternative fuel market, we might actually have some competitive pricing for fossil fuel. And that's what we need to get to.
GREGORY: Senator Maria Cantwell, we're going to have to leave it there. A lot more discussion ahead obviously as gas prices continue to go up over the summer, as the president warned. Thank you for being with us.
And when we return, two hot issues: soaring gas prices and illegal immigration NOW being debated on Capitol Hill. We'll talk to the governors of Pennsylvania and Connecticut. And later, the former head of covert operations in Europe for the CIA. He says that before the war in Iraq, an Iraqi source told the CIA Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction. He claims the White House ignored that information. He'll be here to defend that charge. You're watching HARDBALL only on MSNBC.
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