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Jewish World Review June 4, 2003 / 4 Sivan, 5763
Joe Scarborough
The Real Deal on the Martha Stewart witch hunt: Making a big deal while others get away
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | Big news from Wall Street! The Feds are cracking down on Martha Stewart. That’s kind of like letting Hitler keep control of his army and arresting the Fuehrer’s secretary for typing out his orders.
There’s always been something about Martha Stewart that has provoked anger in certain people. I don’t know why, nor do I care.
But what does bother me is the fact that Feds are making a big deal about going after Ms. Stewart’s scalp while letting some of the biggest whores in the history of Wall Street off the hook, without even the slightest penalty.
The Feds have been pursuing Martha Stewart for a year now, and doing it with the intensity of a religious crusade, and yet, they can’t even begin to prove she took part in insider trading. And on the day Stewart sold her 4,000 measly shares of ImClone, over 7 million shares of that same stock were traded.
Meanwhile, the Feds gave Jack Grubman a free pass after he and CitiCorp CEO Sandy Weill defrauded American retirees out of billions of dollars. What a joke. And where were the handcuffs for Merrill Lynch bigwigs who sold stock to unsuspecting Americans, while secretly calling their recommended picks pieces of cr-p.
What about Kenny Boy Lay at Enron? Shouldn’t he be in jail? What about Bernie Ebbers? That guy screwed Americans out of billions of dollars. Mean old Martha may have pocketed $200,000. Most of that she would have gotten back anyway if she had held on to the stock.
But this isn’t about Martha Stewart. This is about how Wall Street tycoons worth hundreds of millions of dollars screw middle and upper middle class Americans out of their retirements, and then get a free pass.
I guess it’s the latest example of the golden rule, He who has the gold, makes the rules. Martha Stewart’s biggest crime seems to be, in this current involvement, that she just didn’t have enough gold to scare the prosecutors away.
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