SHELL $ 3.5 million penalties. It's a start!

Royal Dutch Shell PLC (RDSA, RDSA.LN) has agreed to pay $3.5 million in penalties and spend an estimated $6 million to install pollution-reduction equipments at three U.S. refineries to reduce harmful air emissions.

The equipment is intended to cut output of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides by more than 1,450 tons a year at the facilities in Louisiana, Alabama and Puerto Rico.

Assistant Attorney General Ignacia Moreno said the settlement is an example of businesses' effort to comply with government environmental regulations. "We will continue to work with industry to achieve compliance under the Clean Air Act to remove harmful pollution from the air we breathe," she added.

Corporate Democracy

On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations, having the status of a legal person, are entitled to the ‘human right’ (first amendment – freedom of speech) by the U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run government.

The court overruled two existing Supreme Court decisions. In Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, the Court held that the government can limit for-profit corporations to the use of PACs to fund express electoral advocacy. McConnell v. FEC applied that principle to uphold the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold law’s restrictions on “electioneering communications,” that is, corporate funding of election-eve broadcasts that mention candidates and convey unmistakable electoral messages. Striking down these decisions unleashes unlimited corporate and union spending in candidate campaigns, and dooms the 1907 Tillman Act, which also prohibits corporate contributions to candidates.

Corporations have long shown a willingness to spend and contribute hundreds of millions of dollars each election through loopholes in the law. Now that the Court has invalidated restrictions on corporate political spending, expect a flood of new money into the 2010 congressional campaigns, state candidate campaigns, judicial elections, and the 2012 presidential election.