Martha shouldnt be talking about reform. She needs to reform first by not doing the stuff she did to put herself behind bars. Two years ago she wouldnt of talked about prison reform cause she was not in it. She is talking now because she is in Prison. What did she think when she did the stock sale??

Resistance (/m13) you seem to paint with a wide brush there.
Misandric rants are no more fun to read than misogynic ones.

The media, the Department of Justice, Jay Leno and the rest of the yuk yukers are stirring up a hornet's nest they will wish they hadn't in their mocking persecution of Martha Stewart because you guys made the mistake of giving us the vote.

Okay, guys, so you think homemaking is stupid, worthy of ridicule, that it's "artificial," and silly. Fine. You all have showed that for years -- when you hung out with your buddies at the bars, left your wives and kids at home while you did more important things. You bring your Playboy mags into your homes, seek out porn on the internet, and treat your wives like Martha Stewart is being treated now.

You make jokes about your wives, ridicule her in front of your friends and family -- just like our big macho men are doing to Martha Stewart now.

When your wives show you that they have more brains and sense than you have, you treat them even worse -- just like the macho men in the government and media are doing to Martha
Stewart now.

You send young women off to war to be tortured and killed so you can have the right to smoke your pot and read your pornography and God knows what else you do. You seduce everything in skirts that you can find.

You fight for the right to kill helpless unborn babies and for the right for men to orgy with other men and then you give them special rights and privileges for having committed such wickedness.

Most of you men who run our government, who make the laws and enforce them, hate women anyway.

You take old people and women, handcuff them with their hands behind their backs, shackle them, parade them before the cameras.

You PC men have no honor or courage or chivalry. You are uncivil, unseemly, uncivilized.

You modern men are barbarians, unworthy of the loyalty or respect or love of any woman or child at all.

RC, if it were a random small investor, I'd be inclined to agree with you. I'm not sure what I personally would do, especially about the investments of others (family and friends) I care about. But in this case, a better analogy would be if you were a retired cop, and you hustled your possesions out of a storage facility about to be torched without first dialing 9-1-1 or pulling a fire alarm.

Remeber, Martha's not just an uber-housefrau. She's a former stockbroker herself, which means she's supposed to know a bit more about investment law than the average schmoe.

And Waksal, as CEO, had a specific responsibility to put his shareholders' interests at least even to his own. Kind of like expecting the captain to be the last one off a sinking ship, rather than the first.

Amelie, keep in mind that lots of average folks are affected by white-collar crime, too. For example, lots of people have 401-k's or union pension plans invested in the stock market. For that matter, there are cases of municipalities going bankrupt due to investments going sour. Yeah, the individuals who lost the largest (numerical) amounts are rich, that doesn't mean that people with smaller amounts to lose aren't hurt.

"By the way, I just learned that your biggest stock is gonna take a serious dive tomorrow. I know, because the CEO and CFO and COO are all dumping theirs, since the company is losing the lawsuit. So, expect your $80 a share portfolio to end up at $0.71 by weeks' end."

OK - what would YOU do, given that information? Sit idly by and watch yourself lose hundreds of thousands of dollars? Or sell, and hope no one notices or arrests you? You didn't go looking for that insider info - it just happened your way. Quite a dilemma, if you ask me. . .

For me, a comparable situation is this. I'm sitting in my apartment with my family one night when the phone rings. It's an acquaintance of mine, working as an arsonist, moments away from torching our building for the apartment owner, and he just wanted to let us know before we all perish. I hustle my family and a few belongings down the stairs outside, and scream up at the building for everyone to get out, but it's too late: the building bursts into flames. Everybody else in the apartment dies. Perhaps, out of fairness to my fellow tenants, I should have stayed in the apartment? Or called the police first, awaiting their instructions?

Martha Stewart starring in Jackson County Jail!
Martha Stewart showing us how to make a shiv out of a spoon!
Martha Stewart giving us techniques for making fun projects with a license plate stamping machine.

I can't wait to see the next episode of "Doing Time with Martha Stewart"!

eh. That's about what I figured the scenario was. Media tends to overblow everything. And in the grand scheme of things, who really cares about all these rich jerks anyway? if one of them comes out way ahead on some deal, it ain't like the rest of them are hurting. much. is it crime?
It really doesn't matter. funny that she resigned, though.

what jleader said.

remember, we live in a country in which many states have mandatory sentences of real prison time for shit like stealing a car radio or having an ounce of pot in your pocket. investment crime hurts a lot more people than that. these folks deserve prison, martha included.

Sam *Waskal*? Was dat a fweudian swip?

I'm betting this is going to be front page news for weeks and weeks. I bet the coverage is going to be heavier than on Enron and Kenneth Lay.

Um. Do people even remember Enron and Kenneth Lay? This government
doesn't even have to wag the dog, the media does it for them. Martha news is going to push more important stories into back pages.

Sorry, but that Capitalism Mag. link in /m3 bugs me a little. The argument that "Waksal's insider trading didn't hurt anyone" is like saying that a bank robber who drops the money on the way out of the bank shouldn't be sent to prison. The crime Waksal is accused of is using his inside knowledge of the company's situation to try to get an advantage (for himself or his friends/family/associates) over other investors. Even if he failed to gain any advantage, he still made the attempt, knowing it was illegal.

And I doubt that anyone who's been through the process of taking a company public would be ignorant of insider trading regulations. I don't know how big Imclone was, but I've worked at a start-up with a few hundred employees, and management was very clear about who was assumed to have insider knowledge, and what steps those people would have to take to avoid even the appearance of insider trading.

I agree that there are much bigger fish to go after, and I'm inclined to believe Dvorak's ideas about how Ms. Stewart's ego may have manuevered her into more trouble than she deserves. But that doesn't mean Waksal's some naive innocent.

Her interview with Rem Koolhaas in Wired reveals that she is pretty clued in to a lot of interesting stuff.

read this

http://capmag.com/article.asp?id=2130

I'm not a big Martha Stewart fan. Don't hate her, don't like her. If she was gone, the biggest difference in my life is that my sister would have a different home-decor magazine in her bathroom reading material rack.

That said, this case annoys the hell out of me. There are FAR bigger, albeit more obscure, fish to fry out there: Corrupt brokerage firms, kleptocratic CEOs and CFOs, and so on.

I find that plausible, as they say, pride cometh before the fall.