“BP deserves the corporate death penalty,” Green Change co-founder Gary Ruskin told Corporate Crime Reporter last week. “ BP America Inc. does not have a God given right to perpetually violate our laws with near impunity.”

Imagine being charged with a crime, but an imaginary friend takes the rap for you.

"Until now, corporate interests had to rely on campaign contributions and influence-peddling to achieve their goals in Washington," the candidate, who was unavailable for an interview, said in a statement. "But thanks to an enlightened Supreme Court, now we can eliminate the middle-man and run for office ourselves."

[W]hat can be done to limit or reverse the effect of the Court's decision? Here are 10 ideas:

The Supreme Court has handed a new weapon to lobbyists. If you vote wrong, a lobbyist can now tell any elected official that my company, labor union or interest group will spend unlimited sums explicitly advertising against your re-election.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has been leading a high-priced campaign against health care legislation, shelled out $123 million for federal lobbying in 2009, almost double what the business group spent the previous year.

The Supreme Court today overturned a century-old restriction on corporations using their money to sway federal elections and ruled that companies have a free-speech right to spend as much as they wish to persuade voters to elect or defeat candidates for Congress and the White House.

Can things get still worse in Washington? Yes, they can. And they will, if the Supreme Court decides for corporations and against real human beings and their democracy in a case the Court will be hearing today, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

Consumer affairs columnist George Gombossy has worked for the Hartford Courant since 1969—longer than most Consumerist readers have been alive. Yesterday was his last day at the paper, but he wasn't caught up in one of the rounds of buyouts and layoffs hitting the newspaper industry. Gombossy claims that he was "was fired for doing [his] job," after his last column exposed the bedbug-infested mattresses sold by a major Courant advertiser.

Once upon a time early in the 19th century, corporations came into existence by state legislatures approving charters, which were granted for a limited period of time and for limited purposes.

The very essence of populism is its unrelenting focus on breaking the iron grip that big corporations have on our country--including on our economy, government, media, and environment.

In surprisingly blunt criticism of both the government and his colleagues, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City chief Thomas Hoenig argued that “insolvent firms must be allowed to fail regardless of their size, market position or the complexity of operations.”

Soon after the passage in 1999 of the Clinton-Rubin-Summers-P. Graham deregulation of the financial industry, I boarded a US Air flight to Boston and discovered none other than then-Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers a few seats away.

A federal jury has cleared Chevron Corp. of responsibility for any human rights abuses during a violent protest on a company oil platform in Nigeria a decade ago.

The word "corporation" or "company," or the words "political party," do not appear anywhere in the U.S. Constitution. How then can these two excluded corporate institutions have such power over Americans who, as "real people," are the only "persons" protected and given rights under our Constitution?

Our oligarchic class is incompetent at governing, managing the economy, coping with natural disasters, educating our young, handling foreign affairs, providing basic services like health care and safeguarding individual rights. That it is still in power, and will remain in power after this election, is a testament to our inability to separate illusion from reality.

The Justice Department Thursday formally barred prosecutors from pressuring companies and individuals under investigation to waive legal protections...

It’s wrong to use deferred prosecution agreements to settle corporate crime cases. That’s the take of David Uhlmann. For seven years, Uhlmann was head of the Environmental Crimes Section at the Justice Department.

While the Patriot Act has raised fears about government spying on ordinary citizens, the growing threat to civil liberties posed by corporate spying has received much less attention.

The chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Deborah Platt Majoras, is leaving her job. She's going to become vice president and general counsel for Procter & Gamble (P&G).

The story so far: With the acquiescence of federal regulators, Wall Street went hog wild, earned gobs of money and, in the process, created a whopping mess that the federal government now has to clean up.

When companies are sued for selling unsafe consumer products or creating environmental hazards, the cases too often end with court orders that keep vital health and safety dangers secret.

Industries from agriculture to power are pressing for the Bush administration to act on a slew of pending regulations, betting they will do worse no matter who wins the White House in the fall.

The net of regulations and inspections that is supposed to ensure food safety is fraying to the point of breaking.

After years of an all-out campaign, at the heart of which was relentless media propaganda, judicial selection and legislation, the courthouse doors are rapidly being closed to average citizens, who will be shunted off into a lucrative private legal system presided over by retired judges employed by alternative dispute-resolution providers.

In Australia, Sweden, Britain and the Netherlands, shareholders vote each year on whether a company's executive compensation is acceptable.

In McCain's case, the fact that lobbyists are essentially running his presidential campaign -- most of them as volunteers -- seems to some people to be at odds with his anti-lobbying rhetoric.

Politicians and regulators have been slow to wake up to the destructive impact of banks on the rest of society.

In recent weeks, the federal Forest Service awarded a British company the right to explore for uranium on 39 separate sites on national forest land just outside Grand Canyon National Park, less than three miles from a popular lookout over the canyon’s southern rim.

Even though predatory lending was becoming a national problem, the Bush administration looked the other way and did nothing to protect American homeowners. In fact, the government chose instead to align itself with the banks that were victimizing consumers.

The lavish fetes that lobbyists and special-interest groups stage at political conventions to honor members of Congress were supposed to be a thing of the past.

Buoyed by soaring crude oil prices, Exxon Mobil announced yesterday that it set new records for U.S. quarterly and annual corporate profits in 2007, and Chevron, the nation's second-largest oil company, also reported big gains in earnings.

David Cay Johnston is a Pulitizer-prize winning business reporter at the New York Times.

Federal regulators have allowed mine operators to avoid fines for thousands of health and safety citations, despite a federal law that requires monetary penalties for such violations, government officials have confirmed.

President Bush will ask skeptical legislators not to spurn free trade, urging passage of a pact with Colombia in a State of the Union address expected to stress keeping the U.S. engaged in the highly competitive global economy.

The White House is considering a scientist who has frequently testified and written on behalf of the energy, pesticide and tobacco industries to chair the nation's chief product-safety regulator.

For Bill and Hillary Clinton, the ultimate American dream is eight more years.

Sen. Hillary Clinton is on the defensive for another vote aligned with President Bush early in her legislative career: this one for a measure to make it more difficult to erase personal debts through bankruptcy.

Congress, in the wake of a Supreme Court decision this week, should step in to ensure that companies that help other companies perpetrate fraud do not go unpunished.

The U.S. public holds Big Business in shockingly low regard.

U.S. officials trumpeted an end to farm trade restrictions under NAFTA, the controversial North American trade deal, on Friday, while Mexican farmers vowed to take to the streets to protest liberalization they fear will run them into the ground.

Lawmakers have been jumping to K Street at a dizzying pace, sometimes even before their terms are up. The reason: No matter who wins in November, and regardless of the victor's view of "special interests," demand for lobbyists will be huge.

It's easy enough to recount what went wrong in 2007. But it wasn't all bad. Not only did grassroots movements and citizen campaigns -- and sometimes governments responsive to public demands -- defeat and resist countless corporate power grabs, they won some vitally important, affirmative victories.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) took a break from the presidential campaign trail in March to fly to a posh Utah ski resort, where he mingled with hundreds of top corporate executives assembled by J.P. Morgan Chase for its annual leadership conference.

John Edwards vowed Saturday that corporate lobbyists would not be allowed to work in his administration, if elected.

The California Supreme Court ruled Monday that privately owned shopping malls cannot stop protesters from demonstrating there to urge a boycott of one of the tenants.

For all the lamenting about gridlock on Capitol Hill this year, Congress's tortured year did create some winners: the companies and industries that avoided tax increases and subsidy cuts as legislation was blocked or narrowed.

Senate and House Democrats attacked the Republican-led National Labor Relations Board at a Congressional hearing on Thursday, saying its recent decisions had favored employers over workers.

This August marks the 60th anniversary of the Taft-Hartley Act, one of the great blows to American democracy, going into effect.

Neoliberalism, if unchecked, will catalyse crisis after crisis, all of which can be solved only by greater intervention on the part of the state.