Monday

A modest, reasoned
defense of Martha

We are watching is an egregious abuse of power

By Gene Ely

   We don’t seem to like her much anymore. We couldn’t possibly.
   Just how she looks, those high Polish cheekbones shiny and unpowdered, her face puffed and in shock, caught unawares by the flash of cameras at her arraignment.
   Imagine her a hausfrau out on errands from a two-family in one of those New Jersey towns, like Bayonne or Secaucus, that the swells know only from the map but dare never visit.
   Hardly the glamour-puss of two years ago, Martha looks jacklighted in the glare of the cameras, a frightened deer in a hunter’s scope.
    We should all be frightened for Martha.
   On the face of things, it would seem the government has snared a big victory, bringing to heel a grand celebrity who for so many has come to symbolize corporate America’s abounding greed.
But looking deeper we find a startling example of prosecutorial abuse at its worst.
   We find a government desperate to confuse the public, aided by the tabloid press, into believing Stewart is one and the same with the great corporate thieves of Enron, Tyco and WorldCom.
   We find a government no less anxious to distract the public from its own massive failure to prevent those billion-dollar bust-outs.
    Martha Stewart might deserve to be tried for insider trading, but first we should prosecute Arthur Leavitt, former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission under Clinton, on whose watch these abuses such as Enron were allowed to fester unchallenged. He should be tried for malfeasance in office.
    These accounting scandals, like the savings and loan scandals before them, were failures of government, which, having done its bad work, simply invited greed to partake. Greed replied, count me in.
    We should then build a huge bonfire and over it we should roast on weenie forks all the toes of every member of Congress who has not yelled himself or herself hoarse demanding reform of a tax code whose only apparent intent is to befuddle and blind the honest while enriching the scalawags who swing like chimps from branch to branch through the jungle of its loopholes.
    Ours is not a tax code; it is a crime inviting all entrants. The chief crime is the maze of accounting rules it has engendered. It’s these accounting rules that have bred the likes of Enron. They are beyond understanding except by thieves.
   The tax code’s second chief crime is the creation of a subaltern class of numbers-jugglers who float through government, consultancies and corporations, tweaking figures, messaging mistruths and in other ways draining off substance.
   This group is part of the permanent government of Washington whose livelihoods would be at risk if the tax code were reformed, which is why we will see no reforms or token reforms. They are the ones whose craft with numbers replenishes the reelection war chests of the politicians whose toes we will carry off to the weenie roast.
    Martha did not create Enron, nor our tax code. She was building honest salads.
    When our founding fathers imagined this America, they were not worried that someday a Martha Stewart might rise to reign over the aisles of Kmart.
    Being sage men, and understanding tyranny through history, they were rightly frightened by the prospect of a Jim Comey, the U.S. Attorney for New York, who is prosecuting Stewart. They understood how otherwise well-meaning ordinary folk were inclined to be impressed by uniforms, priestly wear and officious manners of the kind Comey displays. While not necessarily imagining Comey directly, they certainly could anticipate how such a creature, by abusing his authority, could destroy the country they were imagining.
    Comey has abused his authority egregiously.
    There is no real case against Martha Stewart for insider trading, it now appears.
   Yet for a year and one-half, Comey, with the consent of his superiors in Washington, was permitted to prosecute Stewart without ever having to bring a case, simply through innuendo, via press leaks, and an oppressive investigative process. Over that time, Comey all but destroyed Martha Stewart Omnimedia, without apology.
   If you read the tabs, with which Comey appears to enjoy daily congress, Martha is guilty of several venal sins and is paying the appropriate price.
    One, Martha refused to cooperate with investigators, which appears to be a main reason for their wanting to send her to prison.
   Good for Martha. She had and has no obligation under the Constitution to cooperate with investigators or to confess her various sins or permit them to destroy her business. In this America, prosecutors are not held above ordinary citizens. Prosecutors must try their case in public, before an open court, and win it, or shut up and back off.
   Martha’s second venal sin is her utter unwillingness to repent. Good for Martha for the reasons stated above.
    Comey is a zealot and a lout in a grand but regrettable American tradition, a person building a career as a punisher of evildoers in the spirit of Father Coughlin, a fraud in a collar, and Joe McCarthy, a drunk in the Senate.
   In earlier decades, honoring their peculiar gods, these two men turned neighbors against one another, hunting down homosexuals, communists, communistic homosexuals, homosexualistic communists and the occasional wayward Baptist before self-immolating in the flames of their own depravity. Horrid creatures both, they persuaded a frightened public that basic liberties, along with reason itself, had to be suspended in order to cut out the evil growing within.
   They were that evil.
   Comey is described as a crime-fighter. He presumes a crime, then roots around till he finds it, and failing to find it he attacks the imagined criminals for the lesser crimes of daring not to turn over the appropriate evidence of the crimes they did not commit and of refusing to be repentant before him for the crimes they did not commit.
   For reasons that defy sense, we have come to accord great respect to such crime-fighters. We seldom examine their motives.
   We should. Through history prosecutors have proved themselves over and over again to be ordinary sorts of ordinary moral fiber, and not fools. Wanting either reappointment or reelection, they will always first bring cases that win them headlines. They will avoid cases against obscure figures that are hard to win while promising to get them in hot water with their political bosses.
    That’s not going to change.
    What needs to change is how we as citizens respond to such abuses of power as we are seeing in the case of Martha Stewart. Martha is all of us. As Martha goes, so go we.

-Gene Ely is editor and publisher of Media Life.

Send to a Friend| Printer-Friendly Version
Cover Page | Contact Us

Click here to add the Media Life home page to your favorites!