Americans Angry, Obama Frustrated With BP
The devastating oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has made Americans angry at British Petroleum. But at the same time most of the Americans do not associate the spillover tragedy with its British origins and don’t want the accident to hurt the close US-UK ties. This was reported by a leading US-based news agency.
The report comes amid rising anxiety in the UK over the White House getting strict against BP. Some of the British business leaders, politicians and media organizations feared that their country was being attacked in guise of action against ruptured well in Gulf.
Most of the Americans said that they were surprised to learn that BP stood for British Petroleum. "I thought it was American. Wow," said Latonya Cox, 46, a hospital analyst from Toledo, Ohio, visiting New York's Times Square. Many Americans said that the spillover should dent the bilateral ties between the US and Britain.
"They should just be fixing it. It doesn't matter to me if it's British, American or Canadian," said Lori Tonizzo, 32, a print company project manager from Toronto. "It's about a company, it's not about a country." Seth Gold, 50, a headhunter, from Astoria in the New York City borough of Queens, said that the company should be "tarred and feathered," but the oil spill "could have happened to an American company." "I don't think it will affect ties between Britain and America, but certainly as a consumer I don't currently buy fuel from BP," said Arthur Giacopelli, 45, who works for Morgan Stanley and is from the New York City's Staten Island borough.
BP has suffered loss of tens of billion of dollars from its market value after the Gulf spill over. The oil giant is under immense pressure from the US lawmakers and Gulf states to pay compensations for the total damage.
"I don't think it's a British company. We live in a global economy and everybody's pointing the finger at BP, but we're all victims of this and were all responsible," said Raymond Ayala, 48, a sales manager from Staten Island. Friends Barbara Zarret, 63, from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and Diane Rodman, 64, from Long Island, said the government should take care that the spillover didn’t upset the cordial relation between the two states. "We're running out of allies," said Zarret. "I think we ought to keep this one."
