Fw: Martha Stewart: Punishing the Innocent, Excusing the Guilty

[Guest guest]

good points....NG

-

Jim

N

Friday, July 23, 2004 11:49 PM

Martha Stewart: Punishing the Innocent, Excusing the Guilty

 

 

Martha Stewart: Punishing the Innocent, Excusing the Guilty

by Paul Craig Roberts

by Paul Craig Roberts

 

 

 

Martha Stewart has been sentenced to 5 months in prison and two years of

supervised release for not telling the truth about a legal stock tip. The only

thing she has been found guilty of is lying about a noncrime.

 

Mrs. Stewart was neither charged with, nor found guilty of, insider trading.

Neither she nor her broker had inside information that ImClone's anti-cancer

drug was turned down by federal regulators. They only knew that ImClone's

founder was selling stock.

 

Savvy investors often sell when executives sell, because they see stock sales by

a company's management as signs of management's lack of confidence in the

company's future. If the company's founder didn't want ImClone's stock, Martha

Stewart didn't want it herself. She sold.

 

Neither Mrs. Stewart nor her broker knew ImClone's founder was selling on the

basis of inside information. When news of an investigation came to light, Mrs.

Stewart and her broker were unsure of how her sale would be interpreted by

prosecutors. The Securities and Exchange Commission has refused to define

" insider trading " on the grounds that a vague offense surrounded by uncertainty

makes it easier to convict defendants who are accused.

 

Faced with the possibility of being accused of a vague and undefined crime, Mrs.

Stewart and her broker stated that they had an agreement to sell when an agreed

price was reached. The statement was not made under oath and if false does not

constitute perjury.

 

Prosecutors claim the statement was a stratagem to cover up a stock tip, the

legality of which was unclear to Stewart and her broker, and constituted a false

statement that " obstructed " the investigation. Thus, even though prosecutors

uncovered no evidence that Mrs. Stewart had committed a crime, they indicted her

for " obstructing justice " by not telling them what they say is the truth about

the stock sale - even though what the prosecutors say is the truth about the

sale does not constitute a crime.

 

No one knows whether Martha Stewart and her broker told the truth or not, but

jurors naïvely believed the prosecutors. No one - not jury, judge, nor

prosecutor - had enough sense or decency to know that it made no difference one

way or the other. No one can be guilty of covering up a noncrime.

 

Meanwhile the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has released its report,

which states that the information used by President Bush, Vice President Cheney,

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Powell to justify the

invasion of Iraq was incorrect. Everything Powell told the UN and Bush told the

American people was wrong. A war with tens of thousands of casualties was

started, if not on the basis of massive outright lies, on the basis of massive

orchestrated misinformation.

 

The deception was so successful that 45% of Americans purport to still believe

that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and links to Osama bin

Laden.

 

The senators say the invasion was unjustified, but no person is to blame - only

" the process. " The intelligence information was not correctly collected,

analyzed, processed, or reported. Thus, everything got fuddled up and our

incompetent government confused myth with reality.

 

The buck stops nowhere. No one is to be held accountable for a disastrous

blunder that has destroyed tens of thousands of people and a half century of US

foreign policy, wasted $200 billion dollars, and made Americans unsafe for

decades to come.

 

If we apply the " process is guilty " standard to Mrs. Stewart that is applied to

our government leaders, even if she told a lie the fault lies in the vagueness

of the insider trading offense. Not knowing what the offense is, people try to

defend against being accused of it. Mrs. Stewart is not guilty. The process of

the law is guilty for not defining the offense known as insider trading. Judges

and jurors are guilty for allowing prosecutors to use vague laws and regulations

to indict people.

 

Meanwhile, the Bush administration refuses to allow contracts that it handed out

to cronies to be audited, while imprisoning corporate executives for far less

accounting sins.

 

Meanwhile, the Bush administration has ordered Japan to detain and extradite

former world chess champion Bobby Fischer for playing in a 1992 chess match in

Yugoslavia. By playing a chess match, the US government claims that Mr. Fischer

violated UN sanctions against Yugoslavia, a country charged with provoking

warfare because it tried to prevent secession just as Abe Lincoln did.

 

Are the American people going to reelect a government that prosecutes citizens

for noncrimes while excusing itself of war crimes?

 

July 17, 2004

 

Dr. Roberts [send him mail] is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for

Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a

former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and a former assistant

secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good

Intentions.

 

2004 Creators Syndicate

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

Where are there good points in this? What am I missing? I see nothing but

fallacies, twisted truths, and warped logic.

 

The Bush administration did not persecute poor Martha. They make up the

executive branch of government. The only power the president (Bush) had in

this was that of speaking his opinion, which publically he professed to be

that he supported the law being upheld (in line with his oath of office),

and he supported the prosecution of corporate crime. What is wrong with

that?

 

It was the judicial branch that " prosecuted " this poor woman. That is how

our constitution set things up to work with a division of power. They do not

write the laws, they are not suppose to pick and chose which to enforce and

to which economic or social class of people to apply them to. In her case,

they did the right thing in keeping with the job we pay them to do. What is

wrong with that?

 

The judicial branch can only prosecute based on the laws written by the

legislative branch - the Senate and House of Representatives, or state

legislative bodies - our chosen representatitves. If the author of this

piece disagrees with the laws, then the critisism belongs to those

legislatures who wrote them. If he disagrees with the process, then it

would follow he must disagree with the ideals of democracy and

representative government. Does he know of a better or more perfect system?

I don't.

 

And so Martha was judged by a jury of her peers - in a process that WE ALL

must go through if allegations come against us of breaking our laws. And

those laws say it is a crime to lie to federal investigators. They don't

say lieing is okay or justified FOR ANY REASON whether it is about a crime

or noncrime!! What is wrong with that? That jury found her GUILTY!!, not

INNOCENT!! They had all the evidence laid before them. How dare he be so

presumptious that he knows better than they. Poor Martha had benefit of the

best attorneys she chose to have. Most of us don't. Why should I or anyone

for that matter, feel sorry for her? What better system would the author

suggest?

 

Now if that trial was unfair, Martha has RIGHTS to appeal the same as the

rest of us. Again, in her case, she has the money to pay for the best

attorneys to file those appeals. Most of us don't. She isn't going to jail

anytime soon because of that, unlike what happens to most of the rest of us

common folk. If the laws are unfair, she also has the same RIGHTS to

appeal, and the same privilege to have the best attorneys.

 

He says the judges and jurors are guilty?!! How can judges or jurors be

responsible for vague laws? More BS. Again, they do not write the laws

either. Everything that is written is subject to intrepretation, some things

are written clearer than others - that's life. That's why we hire lawyers -

if it all was so clear and simply defined, we wouldn't need them. So within

our court system, there is intrepretation and what is known as " precedence "

gets set. Martha was not oblivious to insider trading laws AT ALL - she had

set on the board of the NY stock exchange. PLEASE DON'T INSULT ME BY

ASSUMING WE ALL ARE IDIOTS!! SHE KNEW SHE WAS CROSSING LINES!! SHE KNEW

WHAT SHE WAS DOING WAS NOT ETHICALLY RIGHT AND EITHER THOUGHT IT WAS ILLEGAL

OR POTENTIALLY SO WHICH IS WHY SHE LIED!! AND THERE PROBABLY IS A LOT

MORE SHE DIDN'T CAUGHT FOR ANYWAY!!!

 

Poor Bobby Fischer knew what he was doing prior to doing it. In his case,

it was a UN sanction, not simply a US sanction that he violated. He had

options - he did not have to go to Yugoslavia. He could have waited until

the sanctions were lifted. He chose to go anyway and thus, chose to suffer

the consequences. How can he be called innocent?!! I can't feel sorry for

him either. Just because he is a great chess player, he is not entitled to

be excused from the laws when the rest of us are not. Again too in his case

as in Martha's, it is the judicial branch at play, not the executive.

Again, it is not the executive branch's right to pick and chose who to

prosecute. Rather as in Fischer's case, they are suppose to be committed to

the oath of office and support laws being upheld. Thus in this situation,

they are doing the RIGHT thing by requesting extradiction. It would be WRONG

if they were arbitrarily deciding to ignore Fischer or anyone else accused

of crime in such circumstances.

 

Now in our society, lieing by definition, is not stating what you believe to

be the truth. Stating what you believe to be the truth when in fact it is

not, is being wrong (or stupid), but not a liar. The arthor of this article

needs to learn this simple basic concept because he has made a major leap of

logic and presented an irrational argument which is sufficient right there,

to throw the whole writing into the garbage.

 

Plus it is just intellectually absurb to even try and draw analogies of

Martha Stewart or Bobby Fischer to the Iraq war whether you support it or

don't, or support Bush or not.

 

 

-

" Nora Gottlieb " <nwgott

 

Friday, July 23, 2004 11:51 PM

Fw: Martha Stewart: Punishing the

Innocent, Excusing the Guilty

 

 

good points....NG

-

Jim

N

Friday, July 23, 2004 11:49 PM

Martha Stewart: Punishing the Innocent, Excusing the Guilty

 

 

Martha Stewart: Punishing the Innocent, Excusing the Guilty

by Paul Craig Roberts

by Paul Craig Roberts

 

 

 

Martha Stewart has been sentenced to 5 months in prison and two years of

supervised release for not telling the truth about a legal stock tip. The

only thing she has been found guilty of is lying about a noncrime.

 

Mrs. Stewart was neither charged with, nor found guilty of, insider trading.

Neither she nor her broker had inside information that ImClone's anti-cancer

drug was turned down by federal regulators. They only knew that ImClone's

founder was selling stock.

 

Savvy investors often sell when executives sell, because they see stock

sales by a company's management as signs of management's lack of confidence

in the company's future. If the company's founder didn't want ImClone's

stock, Martha Stewart didn't want it herself. She sold.

 

Neither Mrs. Stewart nor her broker knew ImClone's founder was selling on

the basis of inside information. When news of an investigation came to

light, Mrs. Stewart and her broker were unsure of how her sale would be

interpreted by prosecutors. The Securities and Exchange Commission has

refused to define " insider trading " on the grounds that a vague offense

surrounded by uncertainty makes it easier to convict defendants who are

accused.

 

Faced with the possibility of being accused of a vague and undefined crime,

Mrs. Stewart and her broker stated that they had an agreement to sell when

an agreed price was reached. The statement was not made under oath and if

false does not constitute perjury.

 

Prosecutors claim the statement was a stratagem to cover up a stock tip, the

legality of which was unclear to Stewart and her broker, and constituted a

false statement that " obstructed " the investigation. Thus, even though

prosecutors uncovered no evidence that Mrs. Stewart had committed a crime,

they indicted her for " obstructing justice " by not telling them what they

say is the truth about the stock sale - even though what the prosecutors say

is the truth about the sale does not constitute a crime.

 

No one knows whether Martha Stewart and her broker told the truth or not,

but jurors naïvely believed the prosecutors. No one - not jury, judge, nor

prosecutor - had enough sense or decency to know that it made no difference

one way or the other. No one can be guilty of covering up a noncrime.

 

Meanwhile the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has released its

report, which states that the information used by President Bush, Vice

President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Powell

to justify the invasion of Iraq was incorrect. Everything Powell told the UN

and Bush told the American people was wrong. A war with tens of thousands of

casualties was started, if not on the basis of massive outright lies, on the

basis of massive orchestrated misinformation.

 

The deception was so successful that 45% of Americans purport to still

believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and links to

Osama bin Laden.

 

The senators say the invasion was unjustified, but no person is to blame -

only " the process. " The intelligence information was not correctly

collected, analyzed, processed, or reported. Thus, everything got fuddled up

and our incompetent government confused myth with reality.

 

The buck stops nowhere. No one is to be held accountable for a disastrous

blunder that has destroyed tens of thousands of people and a half century of

US foreign policy, wasted $200 billion dollars, and made Americans unsafe

for decades to come.

 

If we apply the " process is guilty " standard to Mrs. Stewart that is applied

to our government leaders, even if she told a lie the fault lies in the

vagueness of the insider trading offense. Not knowing what the offense is,

people try to defend against being accused of it. Mrs. Stewart is not

guilty. The process of the law is guilty for not defining the offense known

as insider trading. Judges and jurors are guilty for allowing prosecutors to

use vague laws and regulations to indict people.

 

Meanwhile, the Bush administration refuses to allow contracts that it handed

out to cronies to be audited, while imprisoning corporate executives for far

less accounting sins.

 

Meanwhile, the Bush administration has ordered Japan to detain and extradite

former world chess champion Bobby Fischer for playing in a 1992 chess match

in Yugoslavia. By playing a chess match, the US government claims that Mr.

Fischer violated UN sanctions against Yugoslavia, a country charged with

provoking warfare because it tried to prevent secession just as Abe Lincoln

did.

 

Are the American people going to reelect a government that prosecutes

citizens for noncrimes while excusing itself of war crimes?

 

July 17, 2004

 

Dr. Roberts [send him mail] is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for

Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a

former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and a former assistant

secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good

Intentions.

 

2004 Creators Syndicate