They bought stock in a very risky, yet very profitable company.
BP actually averages a little over $5 billion profit PER QUARTER. Stockholders have enjoyed insane profits for the last 10 years. But they also chose a company with 50 to 100 times the safety violations of other, less profitable oil firms. Remember John Stewart demonstrating the $ of BP safety violations? It dwarfed all the other companies combined.
BP plays it fast and loose, and everyone got rich for a long time. Now, they did screw up, they did make a big mess. Obama isn't talking about locking people up. Rather, he wants them to donate $20 bil - or ONE YEAR OF PROFITS - toward cleaning up the mess and helping those people who lost their jobs due to the oil. And, with only 1% of the oil making landfall so far, this mess might be HUGE.
BP had the $20 bil sitting there in a slush fund already, so it's not like they're giong to the poorhouse.
So if you buy stock in a risky company, and one year, you don't make profits because you're cleaning up a mess you made... what is wrong with that picture? I think people would be MORE mad if BP sitll made billions in profits, they paid out all the dividends, and they told the fisherman to fck off...
Where do you stand?