Or to never talk to a fed without your own tape recorder......

In the bizarro world of the media and Dems Clinton et al get a pass (under whose watch a lot of the Enron like stuff) while Bush et al get pounded while they clean up the mess.

Better get home before my wife runs over to Best Buy and grabs 42" (diagonally)of sweet payback in protest of The Man's justice.

How long before some budding entrepreneur uploads a "Free Mumia"-style "FREE MARTHA" logo to Cafe Press and creates "Free Martha" T-shirts, bumperstickers, and the like?

Whooops--there's a bunch of them already. Malcolm Muggeridge was right: there is no way that any satirist can compete with real life for its pure absurdity.

Orrin - Assuming that the public is indifferent to the fact that the case didn't involve either the integrity of the market or corporate governance, you may be correct that it will restore faith in those institutions. The appropriate analogy being the execution of Admiral Byng "pour encourager les autres." On the other hand, Martha's celebrity trial has attracted all the attention, to the detriment of public awareness of the Tyco case or the WorldCom case that are going on now as well, so the public may not be getting the right message.

No one has ever heard of Dennis Kozlowski, that's why you have to prosecute the Marthas. And Ken Lay has to go to jail.

Orrin - I would assume that it doesn't particularly matter whether or not Ken Lay is guilty of any particular crime. Are you down with Bill Lockyer's hope as to his cellmate as well?

George:

Don't tell me you think Enron is getting a bum rap too?

Drew, Whitney, Boesky.

The market gets cleaned up every three or four years, the public's confidence is restored and the sharpies skin the public again.

Proves you can get fleece from a donkey.

Orrin - On Ken Lay, bum rap issue, I have no idea, since none of the evidence against him has come forward. We do know most, if not all, the phony partnership stuff was created after Skilling took over as CEO, so what, if anything, Lay did criminally is unknown to me, at least, at the present time. I just try to keep an open mind on these things, particularly when the media already has you convicted before the charges are even filed.
By the way, when are we going to read your essay on the FDA and its lack of policy against staffers leaking news of pending actions, as happened with ImClone in Dec. of 2001. I know that you felt it was an entirely separate issue from Martha Stewart lying to the FBI, but now you are talking about restoring confidence in the market. As one who holds some drug company stocks, I have a lot more concern about staffers at the FDA being able to leak market moving information and there not even being a policy against it at the FDA

The vibes aren't good for Fastow or Skilling down in Texas right now, in terms of their chances of getting off on their Enron indictments. Hard to see how if they go down, one or both doesn't work a deal to testify against Lay.

(BTW -- What's the latest with Terry McAuliffe's buddies over at Global Crossing? Unlike Martha, Enron or even Bernie Ebbers over at WorldCom, Global's meglomaniac boss Gary Winnick seems to have fallen through the press' memory hole, though an indictment just about the time they were lifting the balloons up to the rafters at the Fleet Center this summer would be interesting...)

George:

If they aren't bound to keep such information secret at the FDA they should be and they obviously shouldn't be allowed to trade on it. That's just a matter of writing a rule, I imagine. But it seems improbable that no such rules are in place.

They aren't and they don't and since no body is checking up on how the wives and friends of FDA staffers invest, being busy with Martha these past 2 and 1/2 years, no one knows whether there is a real problem or not. We do know that a FDA staffer told a Washington lawyer about the pending turn-down of ImClone's application on December 24th, we don't know who else he told that bit of information to, but we know that ImClone stock was showing some volatility prior to Waksal starting to sell suggesting that other people had the news. Finally we know, because the FDA said so that they have no evidence of any wrong-doing by any employee of the FDA. So no policy, no evidence, no problem.

How do we know they have no policy?

On the Enron case. The only person who seems to have made money on the partnerships, (that I have read about) is Fastow. Until someone shows more evidence of Ken Lay, profiting from those deals, why would you think he was guilty of anything?

Skilling, Fastow working with Arthur Anderson would seem to be capable of stealing, without Ken Lay knowing anything.

Regarding the secretness of FDA approval/disapproval, the opposite view is that we the investor would better served with complete openness, (publication of test results, etc on a daily basis). So that all concerned would constantly know the basis on which approval or disapproval is being made. Why give so much power to bureaucrats to extort Drug companies?

Because I didn't just fall of the turnip truck?

Orrin - On the FDA, we know that they don't have a policy because they said that they don't have a policy. See Devlin Barnett of the AP in the Detriot Free Press on January 22, 2004, the only story that I am aware of that touches on the interesting question of how did advance word of the pending FDA action get out. Apparently the FDA so values the free exchange of ideas that its staffers are free to disclose, unofficially of course, such information even to complete strangers to the application in question. What the FDA won't comment on, except to say that there is no evidence of wrongdoing, is its internal investigation into the disclosure.
By the way, it appears, based on the comments of juror Chappell Hartridge, that you got the perfect jury for the Stalinist show trials you consider desireable to restore faith in the market and corporate governance.
"Maybe this is a victory for the little guys who lose money thanks to these kinds of transations. Maybe it's a message to the big wigs." Since I must have fallen off the turnip truck onto my head, I have to admit that since the only transaction properly before the jury were the interviews between the defendants and the government agents, I'm not sure why this was a victory for the little guy. Martha's a big celebrity and all, but compared to the FBI and the SEC and the rest of the United States, she is a little guy. We also know that a little guy has even less of a chance than Stewart did of contradicting what the government's agents say you said when they don't record the interview. Of course, they may have decided to convict her for the charges the government didn't bring or the ones that the Judge dismissed.
"It bothered me that they only put one witness on the stand. It's like they were saying `I don't need to defend myself. I don't need to persuade the jury." Those of us non-turnip truck riders, assume that by "they" he means "she" since the Bacanovic defense called all sorts of witnesses whose testimony, if believed, tended to exonerate not only Bacanovic but also Stewart. While I suspect that the defense erred by not calling the defendants and in Stewart's case by not calling a showline of character witnesses, it is also clear that this juror, at least, decided to disregard that part of the Court's instruction about the fact that the defendant never have any burden of proof and don't have to persuade the jury of anything.
We gave up riding on the back of turnip trucks a long time ago, but it does sound like you are comfortable there in the back nestled in the tubers.

Here on the truck we know that if you don't testify you're guilty.

That's "know" not in the sense of arriving at a conclusion based on a a process of logical deduction and adherence to the rule of law (for the protection of the individual against the state), but "know" in the sense of "presume", I presume.

By the way, how did the refrain go to that song by Vickie Lawrence "The Night the Lights Went Out for Martha" go, wasn't its something like

"...don't trust your life to no Southern District juror/ Cause the foreman's got his mind on his 401k plan..."

I think you're groping towards the theme from Beretta:

"Don't do the crime if you can't do the time."

It was interesting to watch the Cable News shows last night, where lawyers of every stripe--especially guys like Dan Abrams--said that the evidence was so strong that the case was certainly not an abuse of justice, even if it need not have been brought, but to a man/woman they said that the overwhelming lesson here is that you can't lie to the feds or they'll come after you like Rome after Carthage.

Meanwhile, human reason does not require that we adhgere to a judicial standard of proof. OJ Simpson, for example, was guilty.

I guess I didn't realize that we were merely talking about opinion, I thought we were talking about how a juror was supposed to assess the case. As to the rent-a-lawyers on TV, did they mention what this means for investigations? Next time I, and any attorney following this case, have a client who may or may not be the target of an investigation and the FBI or other law enforcement wants to interview them, the advise is unless there are ground rules about how the interview is conducted that don't leave it to the government to decide what gets recorded and use of the statement, it's sorry, subpoena me to a grand jury where there will be a transcript. After all you can't leave it up to Rome to decide if you are Carthage.

By the way, the other lesson of the case may be that taping interviews might not be a help either, since the tape recording of Bacanovic's interview with the SEC contradicted one of the specifications on the indictment for one his alleged lies. The jury heard the tape, should have seen how, as to that specification at least, it contradicted the indictment and SEC attorney's testimony, but they convicted him on it anyway it appears. So the Clinton stonewall seems to be the way to go, which may or may not be good for the country. And I'm definitely not thinking about Barretta, the man is confused about the difference between a divorce lawyer and a 38.

We aren't jurors, but simply reasonable men. Martha Stewart's guilt isn't even really an open question, by definition she engaged in insider trading and obstruction, the question was only her legal guilt, now proved.

You're right OJ, Martha is guilty of covering up crimes the government couldn't prove she committed.

Can I get back on the truck now?

Sure, as long as you're over the delusion that such an act isn't illegal.

If I were selling watered stock, Orrin would be my first call.

You can trust me, Orrin, this stock is going to go way up, and all the guys behind it are upstanding citizens whose only interest is seeing a rapid rise in your net worth.

"Where are the customers' yachts?"

The problem with the statement that she was guilty "by definition" of insider trading is that what constitutes insider trading is not defined by statute. Now as a matter of case law, what she was accused of (by the media), but never charged with, doing does not meet the definition of insider trading since (a) she was not an ImClone insider; and (b) there is no evidence that she traded on non-public material information relating to ImClone. Mr. Waksal is not ImClone and Merrill Lynch only held 2% of his holdings in ImClone. So assuming, as he testified he did, Fanueil told Stewart Waksal was selling his shares held by Merrill that means that she was told that an insider was selling 2% of his stock. That information might be non-public it hardly seems material since corporate insider sell stock all the time perfectly legally. On the other hand, if Stewart somehow learned that Waksal had sell orders at a bunch of different brokers then that information, while material, could hardly be considered non-public. There is, however, no evidence that Stewart knew anything about Waksal's other sales. The final completely public and completely material information was that ImClone was down about 10% by the time that Stewart talked to Fanueil and volume was 5 times the normal trading volume, apparently on the basis of rumor that the FDA was going to reject the application. We now know that those rumors had a good basis in fact since they emanated from a source inside the FDA. Now I know that you are remarkably resistant to the concept, but the evidence is that she didn't talk to Waksal or even attempt to prior to telling Fanueil to sell her stock. So the only way, she could be guilty by definition is because you've got your own definition.

One discovers, seemingly effortlessly, that FDA employees are even covered:

http://www.sec.gov/answers/insider.htm

Harry:

While it's true that most customers don't have yachts, bankers and brokers aren't that different from anybody else who offers a good or service to a mass market.

Most Wal-Mart customers don't have yachts, but plenty of Wal-Mart shareholders have aquired the means through their stock's growth.

Ditto for Ray Kroc, Dave Thomas, also the founders of Subway and Domino's Pizza, and, dare I mention, S. Truett Cathy.

George:

I said, in another thread, that you were taking the Martha Stewart verdict well.

I take that back.

Okay Orrin, Lord knows that you are smarter than me, so why don't you quote the exact language you are referring to. What I read there is that the SEC is saying that they won't attempt to define who is an insider. I couldn't find whatever you are referring to and of course I was unaware that the SEC had rules governing the FDA, but as I say you're much smarter than I am so cite me the SEC rule relating to release of pending actions of the FDA.

By the way, I did read the section that says that insider actions have been brougt against goverenment officials who used information learned in the course of their employment.

The SEC's cite demonstrates the error of claiming that Stewart was guilty of insider trading as a matter of definition. They forthrightly decline to give any definition, except along the lines of "you too could be an insider" since these types of persons have been charged with insider trading. It's still a hell of the a way to run a railroad. Of course, the FBI and the CIA have charged employees with being spies for the Soviet Union, but at least they were looking (sort of) for moles, if a leak comes out of the FDA and the FDA person is dumb enough to be trading himself he or she would be facing possible insider trading charges, but someone has to be looking for that pattern. As it stands now, it a leak comes out of the FDA, the FDA isn't going to investigate it since they have no policy against the disclosure of such information and the SEC isn't going to investigate unless they have reason to believe that the government person was trading on the information. Finally, this is good-bye Orrin, there doesn't seem to be much point in corresponding with you.

Farewell, George, better luck with the Enron guys.