What are you going to do about it, Mr President?

This morning WSJ has an excellent editorial on President Obama's response to ISIS's beheading of American journalist James Foley:

[President Obama] said that Foley's killers in the jihadist Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, "have rampaged across cities and villages, killing innocent, unarmed civilians in cowardly acts of violence. They abduct women and children, and subject them to torture and rape and slavery. They have murdered Muslims—both Sunni and Shia—by the thousands. They target Christians and religious minorities, driving them from their homes, murdering them when they can for no other reason than they practice a different religion." All of this is horribly true. It was also true a year ago. The question now—what the world wants to know now, Mr. President—is what are you going to do about it?

Kovacevich on BofA "settlement"

This morning on CNBC, Dick Kovacevich, former Chairman and CEO of Wells Fargo, gave an excellent summary of Bank of America's "settlement" with the US government:

Kovacevich: "[The settlement is] definitely politics. It has nothing to do with justice or restitution to the innocent victims. In fact, more of the money is going to the coffers of the states and various departments than the victims. ...
Interviewer: How do you describe a $17B fine? Is there any metric that gets you there?
Kovacevich: No. It just happens to be a lot of money that people can agree to. ... Interviewer: Dick, do you call this extortion?
Kovacevich: Yes. That's what it is.
Interviewer: Elaborate on that. You believe that the government is extorting the banks?
Kovacevich: Yes. Because they can.

We have entered an age where Democrats and their trial lawyer backers view large corporations, like BP or Bank of America, as ATM's they can plunder at whim. The fact that many Americans are not outraged by this kind of legalized theft is yet another sign of how far down the road to perdition our country has traveled.

Update: Even the Economist now editorializes:

Who runs the world’s most lucrative shakedown operation? The Sicilian mafia? The People’s Liberation Army in China? The kleptocracy in the Kremlin? If you are a big business, all these are less grasping than America’s regulatory system. The formula is simple: find a large company that may (or may not) have done something wrong; threaten its managers with commercial ruin, preferably with criminal charges; force them to use their shareholders’ money to pay an enormous fine to drop the charges in a secret settlement (so nobody can check the details). Then repeat with another large company.

The amounts are mind-boggling. So far this year, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and other banks have coughed up close to $50 billion for supposedly misleading investors in mortgage-backed bonds. BNP Paribas is paying $9 billion over breaches of American sanctions against Sudan and Iran. Credit Suisse, UBS, Barclays and others have settled for billions more, over various accusations. And that is just the financial institutions. Add BP’s $13 billion in settlements since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Toyota’s $1.2 billion settlement over alleged faults in some cars, and many more. ...

What is new is the way that regulators and prosecutors are in effect conducting closed-door trials. For all the talk of public-spiritedness, the agencies that pocket the fines have become profit centres: Rhode Island’s bureaucrats have been on a spending spree courtesy of a $500m payout by Google, while New York’s governor and attorney-general have squabbled over a $613m settlement from JPMorgan. And their power far exceeds that of trial lawyers. Not only are regulators in effect judge and jury as well as plaintiff in the cases they bring; they can also use the threat of the criminal law.