← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Faust
Thread ID: 7134 | Posts: 12 | Started: 2003-06-05
2003-06-05 04:15 | User Profile
Why Single Out Martha Stewart?
** Why Single Out Martha Stewart? From Steve Selengut steve@sancoservices.com 6-4-3
Sure she's a big shot, and a lot of people are convinced that she's not a very nice person, but she really hasn't done anything new or different. She just managed to get herself caught! What if ImClone shares had risen? Would they indict her for being stupid? When the rich and famous get caught with their hands in the cookie jar, there's always a media feeding frenzy. If the scandal involves a politician, we get congress involved as well. I've always laughed at the way sharks feed on their fallen comrades. Clinton and Nixon were crucified; JFK and others escaped unscathed? Singling Martha out will not change the day-to-day insider activity that takes place in the Shock Market.
Financial papers report the trading activity of corporate insiders daily. Is it used as an insider-trading tip? The standard question from investor mouths is: "What's Hot, or Good?" Standard sales pitch from your stockbroker: "We think or hear." "It's under accumulation." "The stock is rising on takeover rumors." The fact is that most investors would jump at the chance to trade on information that they can't obtain legally. How many times have you acted on a tip, because you thought it was inside information? Securities salesmen construct their sentences in a manner that makes you think that they "know" something. This is Wall Street. This is life. Large sums of money can create aberrant behavior.even in the already rich!
Wall Street and Corporate attorneys have access to all the inside information, as do Treasurers, Accountants, and many levels of officers. Do they trade on this information? Well, maybe not directly. In some case, the bigger pigs don't lose after all, so long as their friends and relatives keep their mouths shut. Take a look at the "Most Advanced" and "Most Declined" Lists on any given day. Then check the price movements and volume a few days beforehand. What you see should not surprise you and it's what you'll always get! It isn't new and it just "ain't gonna" change, ever. You' ll just have to deal with it.
"The Brainwashing of the American Investor" describes a strategy that won't let you be victimized by this behavior. In fact, it will help you benefit from it. And without any inside information.
Steve Selengut steve@sancoservices.com 800-245-0494
Comment
From Allison L Ragner 6-4-3
If you ask me, Martha Stewart is being singled out because she's one of the few Democrats involved in this typically Republican crime. A contribution to the RNC would have bought her protection from criminal charges.
Best regards, Allison Ragner
Comment
Alton Raines 6-4-03
As far as I'm concerned, if Martha does time, she'll be serving Hillary Clinton's time for her! Now THERE'S a case of insider trading that deserves some jail time. Free Martha! We've got turn-over's to make, g'dmnit!!!!
url: [url=http://www.rense.com/general38/whysingle.htm]http://www.rense.com/general38/whysingle.htm[/url] **
Free Martha!
2003-06-05 04:58 | User Profile
My mom suscribes to her magazine and watches her show in the morning. Illl; maybe I should burn them and use the lock method on the cable from 7:00-8:00 in the morning.
FREE MARTHA!!
:punk: :punk: :punk:
2003-06-05 10:57 | User Profile
I heard Rush Limbaugh yesterday make the comparison between Martha and Hillary. He stated that Martha is facing jail time for saved $60,000 in profit (By selling $30,000 in stocks) from inside trading but Hillary made$99,000 on a $1,000 investment and walks around in the clear. Justice? What's that?
2003-06-05 13:56 | User Profile
The US government is bring charges against high profile people to restore European confidence in America's stock market.
One of the biggest reasons for the recent plummet was all the Europeans dumping US stocks after Eron and Worldcom.
2003-06-06 13:30 | User Profile
Her main problem is she gave to Party that lost the last election. If she had given money to GOP or Al Gore had won, I do not think this would be happening.
Bush Sucks!! :taz:
2003-06-06 15:29 | User Profile
These high profile highly selective prosecutions always fail the smell test.
It is pitiful to witness the machinations the gumint goes through to nail these folks who have about as much chance of walking as a Bolshevik in one of Comrade Stalin's show trials.
They won't be beaten in Lubyanka to extort a confession but the results will be the same, with the important exception that none are gonna get a bullet in the neck.
Still, the way they break you nowadays is just as effective.
If you notice, in all the pettifoggery emanating from the courthouse, they are now saying she will not be convicted on the original charges of insider trading etc but will instead be hung on that ole gumint standby obstruction of justice, perjury etc.
They would have never nailed Millikan either and they knew it so they pulled that most rotten of prosecutorial tricks and threatened to indict his totally innocent and uninvolved brother as a co conspirator. To save his brother Milliken copped a plea.
Tim MacVeigh was uncooperative with prosecutors until they pulled the same stunt and threatened to indict his sister who had zippo knowledge of his activities. But to save her the expense of fighting endless prosecutions and bankrupting herself, Tim started talking.
And once they decide to go after you, the charges come out of the woodwork to the point of absurdity.
The hapless captain of the Exxon Valdez was actually charged with killing migratory birds w/o a hunting license.
Marta's lawyer should definitely put her on the stand. She will be a sympathetic witness especially now that she has chunked up a little. If the lawyer is really smart he will put her on a high carbohydrate diet and choose all fat broads for jurors.
2003-06-07 02:23 | User Profile
Why am I hearing about Martha Stewart every day when I never hear about Andy Fastow or Bernie Ebbers?
2003-06-07 02:30 | User Profile
Originally posted by il ragno@Jun 6 2003, 22:23 ** Why am I hearing about Martha Stewart every day when I never hear about Andy Fastow or Bernie Ebbers? **
To ask the question is to answer it.
Martha is talented at her craft, I'll give her that. And I should have guessed this, but I didn't know she was a Dem, so I like her more now that I know she's an enemy of Bush.
And she makes for good comedy. I like that lady that impersonates her on TV.
She didn't do anything that all the rest of 'em haven't done. There are way worse crooks out there than her.
2003-06-07 13:54 | User Profile
Cracker of the Whip,
The exact point in [url=http://pages.zdnet.com/sartre65/wrack/id30.html]Which Diva Gets The Last Dance?[/url]
When her trouble first broke, this essay was offered: [url=http://quicksitebuilder.cnet.com/sartrejp/VIEW/id52.html]Steward of the Public Trust[/url]
SARTRE :ph34r:
2003-06-09 10:46 | User Profile
I think her main problem is she gave to Party that lost the last election. If she had given money to GOP or Al Gore had won, I do not think this would be happening!
** Martha Stewart has been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of securities fraud, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy, but notââ¬âsurprise, supriseââ¬âinsider trading. A civil lawsuit was also filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The charges could lead to Ms. Stewart's imprisonment (up to 30 years) and will further damage her successful media enterprise. She and the U.S. Department of Justice had been negotiating a settlement, but those talks broke off, according to Wall Street Journal sources, when Ms. Stewart rejected the prosecutors' demand that the settlement include a count carrying a potential prison term.
This is a frightening example of government out of control.
Martha Stewart is certainly an attractive target for an ambitious U.S. attorney or SEC enforcer. She's the "domestic diva" people love to hate. But according to Journal sources, the case against her was "based on novel theories of both insider trading and securities fraud for statements Ms. Stewart made proclaiming her innocence."
What is Ms. Stewart supposed to have done? She sold almost 4,000 shares of ImClone Systems stock for $220,000 just before it was announced that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had turned thumbs down on the company's cancer drug, Erbitux. She is a close friend of former ImClone CEO Sam Waksal, who last October pleaded guilty to insider-trading charges.
But the government is not saying Ms. Stewart knew the FDA was about to release bad news about the company. Rather, the five-count indictment says she sold her shares when her then-broker, Peter Bacanovic of Merrill Lynch, who knew that Waksal and his family were selling, advised her that ImClone's price was probably going to fall. The prosecution's chief witness, Douglas Faneuil, at the time a Merrill Lynch trading assistant, says that at Bacanovic's direction he informed Ms. Stewart that Waksal and his daughter were looking to sell their shares.
The obstruction charge stems from her disputed statement that she had a standing order to sell the stock if the price went to $60. Bacanovic backs up that claim, but Faneuil, who first corroborated it, has since recanted. Bacanovic was also indicted.
Without the insider-trading investigation there would be no obstruction charge. Had the government not had the intrusive power to ask why she sold her ImClone sharesââ¬âan investigation that could cost her libertyââ¬âshe would not have been put in a position where her answer could bring an indictment for obstruction of justiceââ¬âa vague and elastic charge that U.S. attorneys often use to snare innocent citizens when no other charges can stick. That is precisely what has happened in this case. Ms. Stewart is not charged with insider trading. The securities-fraud charge does not refer to her sale of ImClone shares, but rather to her public denials of wrongdoing, which, the government alleges, were issued to keep the price of her own company's stock from falling further due to bad publicity.
**Unfit for a Free Society
Laws against insider-trading are inconsistent with the principles of a free society. No one's rights are intrinsically violated when someone buys or sells stock on the basis of nonpublic information. Where such trading violates a contractual trust, wronged parties may sue the offender on those grounds. But the offense is not insider trading; it is breach of contract.**
As John Allen Paulos, author of A Mathematician Plays The Stock Market, wrote, "The fact is that there are insurmountable logical problems with the very notion of insider trading. It's illegal for an insider to buy on learning of his company's secret scientific breakthrough. But if this same person changes his plans to sell the stock after finding out about the breakthrough, he has violated no rule."
It gets more absurd than even that. Some commentators believe that if Ms. Stewart knew why the Waksals were selling, her own selling would constitute insider trading; but if she didn't know the reason, it would not. (For the definitive case against insider-trading laws, see Henry G. Manne, Insider Trading and the Stock Market, 1966.)
Even if insider trading were properly outlawed, there are no grounds for charging Ms. Stewart. She was not an insider. To be guilty of insider trading one must be "in breach of a duty of trust or confidence that is owed directly, indirectly, or derivatively, to the issuer of that security or the shareholders of that issuer, or to any other person who is the source of the material nonpublic information." How does Ms. Stewart satisfy that criterion? She was a stockholderââ¬âperiod.
Moreover, her action had no victims. The anonymous buyers of her shares were already in the market looking for ImClone stockââ¬âand presumably they knew that a critical FDA decision was imminent. If she had not sold her shares, the buyers would have found others. No matter who sold them, the price would have fallen the next day. But that was the FDA's doing, not Ms. Stewart's.
To the extent that Ms. Stewartââ¬â¢s sale lowered the ImClone share price, she helped make it consistent with the new circumstances dictated by the FDAââ¬â¢s negative ruling. Thatââ¬â¢s good because prices are useful only if they contain up-to-date information.
Erbitux Effective After All
There's an irony in all this. The day before word of the pending indictment circulated, a study was released showing that Erbitux, the drug at the center of the controversy, "produced statistically measurable benefits when used in treating colon-cancer patients whose disease was so advanced no other therapy had workedââ¬Â¦. Erbitux , in combination with chemotherapy, reduced the size of deadly tumors by about half in about one-fifth of patients tested" (Michael Waldholz, "Cancer Isn't Cured, but Recent Studies Validate New Methods," Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2002).
As the Journal editorialized the other day, "Results from the latest Erbitux study are virtually identical to the positive numbers ImClone originally gave the FDA, a study the agency said was so flawed that it wouldn't even review the application."
The Journal added: "Erbitux was actually a good drug, yet barely a [news organization] noticed, despite the heartbreaking tales that could have been told about dying patients needlessly denied it. An estimated 75,000 Americans have died of colon cancer since the FDA turned ImClone away. Erbitux wouldn't have cured most of them, but it could have improved the length and quality of many lives."
In other words, if America were not saddled with the bureaucratic nightmare that is the FDA, not only would Martha Stewart not be facing prison, but cancer patients would also have a better chance of coping with their disease.
url: [url=http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=news_business&Number=669966#Post669966]http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?C...9966#Post669966[/url] **
2003-06-11 16:57 | User Profile
What's interesting about the Martha Stewart fiasco is that she isn't actually charged with insider trading of her ImClone stock: she is being prosecuted (essentially) for declaring her innocence. All these charges relate to the fact that Stewart declared herself innocent of allegations of insider trading. Basically, the charges that exist now, allege that Martha Stewart manipulated her own company's value with her public allegations and obstructed justice etc. by making aforementioned statements.
The fact that one can be put on trial for declaring one's innocence of a crime is scary, to say the least. If she is jailed the implications are far more frightening.
FREE MARTHA!!
2003-06-12 23:14 | User Profile
Alka is Right!
The fact that one can be put on trial for declaring one's innocence of a crime is scary, to say the least. If she is jailed the implications are far more frightening.
I bought a Martha Stewart product at Kmart today! :lol: :lol: