The huge corporate scandals in the US, Enron, Worldcom and a growing list of household names have rocked the world's biggest and most powerful economy, and resulted in the loss of the life savings and pensions of 10s of thousands. Most of them were public sector workers who had little idea of where there savings were held, and many of them were employees who had themselves been persuaded by their corrupt bosses that the company they worked for was a sound investment. In the aftermath, George Bush promised that "corporate crime will no longer pay."

But Enron, Worldcom and now AOL are only the tip of the iceberg. Corporate crime has economic and social costs which tower over the crimes that the police spend their time investigating. Although corporate crime is very rarely counted properly, even the limited evidence we have clearly demonstrates that crimes which involve fraud and theft from consumers dwarf the total cost of known robberies and burglaries. We also know that many more times as many people are killed at work as a result of safety laws being broken by companies - a criminal offence - than those who are murdered in the street or in their homes (in the UK we know that at least 10,000 - 15,000 people per year are killed at work compared with 800 - 900 murders).

Although it is not exactly public knowledge, most people reading this will have been affected by, or will know someone who has been affected by, the big financial crimes which plagued this country in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, the list of large scale financial scandals is continuing, with Equitable Life, the dot.com boom and blind trusts amongst the most prominent of those we know about. A whole series of major consumer thefts have been encouraged by the financial deregulation policies, similar to those favoured by Bush (both jnr and snr), introduced by the Tories in the 1980s. Perhaps the largest, the pensions fraud, has so far, according to government estimates, involved at least a million and a half compensation cases. The damage caused by this crime was compounded by the government's review which allowed the companies to organise and pay out the compensation for victims themselves. Of course, most of them didn't - and in just one year (1997/98) the regulator, the Personal Investment Authority, was forced to fine 150 firms a total of almost £5m for failing to compensate their customers. Countless hundreds of thousands remain uncompensated, many left without their life savings, and nobody - not one single company or company director - has been in court for this mass fraud.

The costs of clearing up the endowments scandal may have cost the industry a paltry £100 million, despite estimates that the cost of proper compensation would be more close to £5 billion. Last month, the chief of the FSA, Howard Davies - who also just happens to be the former head of the Confederation of British Industry - refused to launch an inquiry because he thinks it would cost the government and the companies too much! Now thanks to Davies and the Blair government's sympathy for this crooked industry, we have no chance of finding out exactly how many people were defrauded, or how much of our savings were thieved as the building societies lied and cheated their way to huge profits. It seems now that this particular gang of corporate villains will get off the hook and will continue to be trusted to police their own nefarious activities.

Following the same crackpot logic of allowing a bunch of rapacious, greedy crooks to police themselves, the recent earth summit in Johannesburg agreed a framework which encourages governments to take a back seat and proposes new rules to allow the companies that cause the most environmental damage to 'self-regulate'. In VIP seats with the government's delegation were some of Blair's best mates: high-octane executives representing Thames Water, Anglo American and Rio Tinto mining. All of these companies also have criminal records as long as your arm. Thames Water have featured in the Environment Agency's league table of Britain's worst pollution offenders' for the past 3 years. Indeed, they topped the table in both 1999 and 2000. Rio Tinto have a fearful reputation for environmental damage and have an atrocious human rights record. They were recently put on trial by the People's Permanent Tribunal for colluding with the Indonesian government in the systematic abuse of local communities and workers in West Papau. Anglo American, with its bases in South Africa and Britain, was by far the single largest corporate backer of the Apartheid regime. In the late 1980s it controlled 85% of the companies quoted on the Johannesburg stock exchange, and throughout the 1980s conspired to undermine the international trade embargo against Apartheid. Its massive investments in diamond and gold mines all over Africa have been sustained by its dodgy links to a rogues gallery of warlords and mercenary outfits.

In the meantime, our prisons are being filled up by people whose crimes fade into insignificance by comparison (for one, television licence convictions rose by 75% last year). So the next time Blunkett and Blair start jumping up and down demanding jail sentences for irresponsible parents, shoplifters and playground mobile phone thieves and new CCTV systems to protect high street retailers, remember that we have a much bigger chance of being victimised by the illegal activities of New Labour's very closest mates. Instead of handing out the corporate dinners and international junkets at our expense, its time to start dealing out some proper justice to corporate villains, before our whole social fabric is ripped apart by those most violent, parasitical, and dangerous of all criminals.