Electric prosecutor acid test...

Electric prosecutor acid test...  That's the Wall Street Journal's clever title for an excellent op-ed piece about a positive scary governmental development: selective prosecutions of corporations for behavior that was legal (and sometimes even mandated) when taken, but which is illegal now.  FERC, the government agency involved, is behaving like some of the more perverse government behavior in 1984 – and is being lauded and rewarded for it. Here's an excerpt:

The larger context is the political appetite for medieval justice in U.S. finance, never mind the merits. Mr. Bay has extracted settlements in 18 of his 23 public market-manipulation cases so far and the agreements tend to invoke the ghost of Enron. But in only one case did the target admit wrongdoing.

That caught the notice of Massachusetts Democrats Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, and their exchange gives a flavor of the Bay method. In a July 2013 letter the Senators told Mr. Wellinghoff that, "We commend you for ... the largest civil penalty and settlement in FERC's history"—the $410 million Mr. Bay squeezed out of J.P. Morgan—but mused that the punishment wasn't harsh enough.

Warren and Markey are progressive heroes who seem to derive great pleasure from destroying profit-making corporations.  This stance is entirely consistent with other actions they've taken – and that's the part that scares me the most...