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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rascal who wrote (5139)	8/25/2002 10:25:59 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

It's not a good thing By Caryl Rivers Editorial The Boston Globe 8/25/2002 IS MARTHA STEWART just like Eve, taking the rap for male bad behavior? It was Adam who ate the apple, after all, but it's Eve who still gets blamed for getting us thrown out of paradise. Or is she the new Leona Helmsley - the woman in business who falls from grace and gets all the brickbats while the male miscreants slither away? The female face of bad behavior is getting more press than the male one these days. Martha, the style guru who makes it all seem so easy, may have dumped some stock on an insider tip. She was a good buddy of Sam Waksal, the CEO of ImClone. When he learned that the FDA was not going to approve his company's cancer drug, he ditched his own stocks and maybe clued in Martha. If true, it's an illegal act, but one that seems, in the light of recent scandals, relatively harmless to others. (Except, of course, those who hold stock in Martha's company, which has plunged since she's become the media's favorite whipping girl.) Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling sold their stocks in Enron for millions while their employees were forbidden to sell their stock in the doomed company. But Lay and Skilling have faded from the media spotlight. WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers still has his yacht and his mansion in Florida, while his company - whose stock graced many a 401(k) - has tanked. Analyst Jack Grubman of Salomon Smith Barney was pushing WorldCom even as it sank. There are allegations that he was way too close to the companies whose stocks he was pushing and that his firm made millions from business deals with them. He is getting to retire with $20 million. But it's Martha who gets most of the ink, most of the time. Blaming women for social ills goes back a long way in myth and prehistory. Pandora opened the box that let all the evils of the world out, according to myth. The sirens tried to lure noble Odysseus to his death, and Medusa had a head full of snakes that could turn a man to stone. Remember the last great American business scandal, the insider trading of the '80s? Some big players went to jail in those days, but the most hated icon of the business world was another minor female player, Leona Helmsley. The hotel magnate wrote off the swimming pool and some of the furniture at her estate as business rather than personal expenses. Not exactly up there with Teapot Dome, but Leona got the full media treatment. She was dubbed the Queen of Mean on magazine covers. Leona, it seems, not only played around with the figures on her tax forms but was really rotten to the help. She served 18 months in prison and paid $6.3 million in fines. In contrast, junk bond king Michael Milken, who pled guilty to six counts of fraud, served two years in prison - barely more than Leona. He has, since his release, been rehabilitated, devoting his time to good works in education and health. Part of Martha Stewart's problem, of course, is that she sells perfection, and everybody loves to see a Miss Perfect get her comeuppance. I have no great affection for Martha because she peddles the idea that everywoman can achieve the sort of household and cuisine that Victorian ladies were able to manage only with a household of servants. But still, there is real danger in making Martha the big story. The more the TV spots and the news stories and the magazine covers focus on her, the more the public's attention is drawn away from practices that have become standard operating procedure in too many executive suites. While we (figuratively) stone Martha, the real bad actors fade into obscurity, getting to keep their mansions and their ill-gotten gains from stock options. Some of them will probably pop up running companies again. So if you are chortling over Martha's distress because your souffles fall, your flowers wilt, and you can barely sew a button on, enjoy the moment. But don't be so distracted that you let the big fish keep on swimming away and let the same-old-same-old be the order of the day in corporate America. _______________________________ Caryl Rivers is a professor of journalism at Boston University. This story ran on page D7 of the Boston Globe on 8/25/2002. © Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company. boston.com