FINALLY!!!!

I was starting to think I was the only one who thought it was BS....

Still 10 months longer than Clinton got for 'giving "intentionally false" testimony.'

(ref: http://www.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/05/22/clinton.disbarred/)

What happened to the 5th Amendment?

First thing we do, lets kill all the lawyers.

I used to loathe Martha for her treatment of subordinates and some of her business practices. Now I want to shout from the rooftops about how she got screwed.

The lesson here: The Feds are now as evil as they were always portrayed being in old school movies oftentimes (ya know, where the Sherrif hates their busybody nature and power tripping, and solves the case-type plotlines).

I think it mayhap be time to start referring again to THESE United States, and not THE United States any longer, as has been the post-Civil War practice.

Don't talk to the Feds any longer, remember, Martha didn't sign a depostition, she wasn't under oath, and she was convicted of lying about a crime that NO ONE HAS BEEN CONVICTED OF THAT MAY NOT EVEN HAVE HAPPENED.

ANYTHING you say CAN and WILL be used against you!

Martha Stewart screwed herself. She didn't need any help from anyone else. You can be sure that her $500+/hour lawyers told her not to talk to the government. In her supreme arrogance, believing she is smarter than anyone else, she ignored the advice and fed the government a line of bullshit about her trading. You don't pay any price for taking Five, but you pay a big price for lying.

The underlying conduct was at the margins of insider trading: an argument could be made either way that it was illegal. How many times, however, has a prominent person turned a marginal offense into a criminal one by perjuring themselves; Exhibit A--pantsless Bill. (In Martha's case, I'm not sure she was under oath, but making a false statement to a federal law enforcement official is functionally equivalent.)

The article Stephen links to in Reason is a view shared by some: that insider trading laws are ill-considered because insider trading promotes an efficient marketplace. It's ok for company officers, their friends, and associates to routinely betray their trusts and trade on such information because that's how the market processes the information. The counter argument to this, however, is that the national interest is strongly promoted by having a wide ownership of public companies by professionals, the middle class and even the working class rather than just the elites. They're unlikely to want to participate if they consider the game to be completely corrupt.

The amount of sympathy expended on Martha Stewart is bizarre. By all accounts, she has as much empathy and consideration for other people as Leona Helmsley. She saw how close to the line she could get, found herself on the wrong side of it, and managed to turn it into a criminal offense. If watching her travails doesn't justify schadenfreude, what does?

For a thoughtful defense of Martha's sentence, check out
http://www.nationalreview.com/mccarthy/mccarthy200407161637.asp. McCarthy makes the excellent point that her trial lawyers did her a real service by preventing her from perjuring herself at the trial, which would have greatly increased her sentence.

I have not followed the Stewart case closely, but my impression is that it's a fair rap.

I was an officer at a public company, and our financial guys DRILLED IT INTO OUR HEADS that you don't trifle with the SEC. No matter how big or small the trade, no matter whether you made money or lost money, a dodgy trade WILL get found, and WILL get you and your company in big trouble ... So be scrupulously careful, they advised us all.

I walked away from a lot of money because I was scrupulously careful in my trading, and of course it galls me to see my peers playing fast-and-loose. Especially since she was a broker, Martha doesn't get much of my sympathy. And this line about "she's a target because she's a successful woman" is insulting BS. Behavior like Martha's hurts capitalism.