Phil Mattera, DC Report @ Raw Story

When it comes to dealing with egregious corporate polluters, we tend to think first about what Environment and Justice officials are doing to address the problem. Yet there is another way in which environmental miscreants can be called to account: private litigation.

For the past half-century, a series of major lawsuits have served as the means by which large corporations have been compelled to change many of their worst environmental practices and compensate victims of those abuses.

Some of these cases have become legendary and have inspired Hollywood movies:...

Hilcorp Energy, a privately held oil and gas producer based in Texas, shows up in Violation Tracker with only $2 million in regulatory penalties compared with more than $1.5 billion for petroleum giant Exxon Mobil.

Yet according to a detailed new report published by Ceres and the Clean Air Task Force, Hilcorp dwarfs Exxon when it comes to climate-ruining emissions of methane gas.

Hilcorp is one of a group of lesser-known energy producers which turn out to be responsible for a remarkable portion of greenhouse-gas emissions. The findings of the Ceres report, which outed the companies using data from the EPA's Greenhouse Gas Reporting Project, were surprising enough to merit a front-page article in The New York Times....

Boston-based State Street Corp. traces its history back to 1792 and now manages more than $3 trillion in assets, yet it has always maintained a lower profile than the goliaths of Wall Street. Recently, the company was in the spotlight, though not in a good way.

The U.S. Attorney's Office for Massachusetts announced that State Street would pay a $115 million criminal penalty to resolve charges that it engaged in a scheme to defraud a number of its clients by secretly overcharging for expenses related to the bank's custody of client assets.

"State Street defrauded its own clients of hundreds of millions of dollars over decades in a most pedestrian way," said Acting U.S. Attorney Nathaniel Mendell. "They tacked on hidden markups to routine charges for out-of-pocket expenses."...

The U.S. Supreme Court has given a boost to crooked corporations in a ruling that restricts the powers of one of the federal government's oldest regulatory agencies, the Federal Trade Commission.

The FTC has been operating since 1914.

Justices ruled unanimously that the FTC does not have the authority to go to court and win redress for unfair and deceptive business conduct. It must first go through a cumbersome administrative process....

Republicans are having limited success turning the public against the Biden administration's $2 trillion infrastructure plan by claiming the proposal is too wide-ranging.

A new NPR poll shows solid support not only for the provisions relating to roads and bridges but also for spending on modernizing the electric grid, achieving universal broadband coverage and even expanding long-term health care.

Given the sweeping scope of the proposal, it is not possible for pollsters to ask about every component. I suspect there also would be high support for a portion of the plan that has received little attention....