MSNBC "Hardball with Chris Matthews" - Transcript

Interview

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MATTHEWS: We start with the case against BP. Democratic congressman Ed Markey of Massachusetts covers--chairs the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. Congressman, thank you so much for joining us tonight. There"s a lot of buzz out there, as you know, a lot of chit-chat that BP may be planning to skip town, declare bankruptcy and not pay all those victims down there in the gulf. What do you hear?
REP. ED MARKEY (D-MA), NATURAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE: Well, the reality is that BP just can"t declare bankruptcy. You just can"t throw your arms up and say, I don"t want to meet all of my obligations. You have to go to a court. You have to have a judge accept that. I personally would file an amicus brief and get as many of my colleagues as I could to deny BP being able to gain the relief of a bankruptcy court.
And if they did, in fact, go to bankruptcy court successfully, then I would argue that the shareholders and the bondholders should lose everything and that only the victims of this incredibly catastrophic accident should be the beneficiaries.
This is not like Lehman Brothers, where all they had was paper and a building that they worked in. This is a company with oil assets, with rigs, with real things that have real value, and we just can"t allow them to run to bankruptcy court to protect them for their shareholders. We"re going to have to track them all the way to the bank to make sure that BP stands for "bills paid."
MATTHEWS: Congressman, what do you make of BP"s CEO, Tony Hayward? He"s been making some odd statements. Here he is in today"s "Wall Street Journal," quote, "There is no objective justification for this share price movement"--that"s the drop in their stock value. "BP faces this situation as a strong company. We have significant capacity and flexibility in dealing with the cost of responding to the incident, the environmental remediation and the payment of legitimate claims."
He"s acting--is this just false bravery? They keep putting out these statements. We"re going to have some more to show you in a minute. But BP keeps making these statements that fly in the face of reality. Of course, we understand, don"t we all, why their share price might be going down?
MARKEY: Well, yes. The share price is going down because, actually, the market responds to the story of the day, which is why so many people watch CNBC all day long. But the reality is--coming back over to MSNBC - - is that this company has a strong revenue flow. It"s made on average $20 billion a year, every single year going back for a decade. It has real assets, and they should be tapped before any dividends are given out to shareholders or bondholders in order to make sure that the people in the gulf are made whole.
MATTHEWS: What"s your reaction when you watch--it"s probably not fair to have you. You"re one of the guys fighting this thing. But we"re showing now on split screen, like everybody does on television, a picture of yourself alongside that live picture of the oil and the gas coming out of that hole down in the gulf. What"s the reaction to America and to yourself when you see that every minute of the day endlessly?
MARKEY: Well, I insisted that BP put up that picture. They didn"t want to do it, but I insisted that they do so. And I"ve also insisted that they put up the HD version of it, which is even more graphic, more horrifying. The point of it is, is that the more people see it, is they connect the dots between that spillcam and the--and all of the animals, all of the birds coated in oil.
That is the connection of the dots which is now horrifying Americans and demanding that not just those animals and birds and fish but all of the human beings down there in the gulf who are exposed to these chemicals and their livelihoods be made whole. And ultimately, I think it"s the spillcam which has drawn the attention of the American people and their ire to this issue.
MATTHEWS: Let"s take a look at BP"s record in the last couple of days and what they"ve been saying. Two years ago, they said they were prepared to handle an oil spill 10 times larger than this one when they got their permit. They initially claimed only 1,000 barrels of oil a day were leaking. The company"s CEO, Tony Hayward, recently denied the existence of underwater plumes of oil. He also said the environmental impact would be very, very modest. And last month, he said, I don"t hear anyone faulting us in our response.
These statements by the CEO and by that corporation, again, Congressman, don"t seem to bear any connection to the reality we"re looking at in that live shot, to the reality of the birds and the people and the wetlands, the horror of this, probably the worst environmental catastrophe we"ve ever seen. And they keep talking like everything"s cool.
MARKEY: Not one of those things is, in fact, true. And by the way, BP either knew it or they are grossly incompetent or lying. There is no other option. And going right back to the very beginning, when they said there was 1,000 barrels a day, we now know because I obtained the document that within the first week, they actually had a document saying it was 1,000 to 14,000 barrels per day. They hid that document.
But if you really want to know what the problem is, you"ve got to go back to the beginning. When they were actually filing for an application to drill, there was a probabilistic risk assessment done. That means doing a determination of what are the chances of a catastrophic accident. You know what they came up with as a conclusion? Zero risk. And the same thing was unfortunately accepted by the MMS.
Well, if there"s zero risk of a catastrophic accident, you don"t have to really build in the extra safety procedures. You really don"t have to put in place the boom or the other mechanisms needed to respond. And so that probabilistic risk assessment, the chance of an accident at zero, is at the heart of the problem. They"re not ready. BP really does not stand for "be prepared." They, in fact, are making it up on a daily basis, not interested in the livability of the gulf, but their own liability as a corporation. And that"s why the bankruptcy court should not be allowed to protect them and their assets from making whole again all of those people in the gulf.
MATTHEWS: Thank you very much, Congressman Markey. Next Tuesday, he"s going to be hearing from the leaders of the oil industry, especially BP. What a day of hearings that"s going to be. Congressman Markey, Mr. Chairman, thanks for joining us.
MARKEY: Thank you, Chris.

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