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Non-Tech : Martha Stewart -- Scourge or Scapegoat -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: yard_man who wrote (138)	3/9/2004 10:44:59 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 165

Punish Martha, but not Bush? boston.com Editorial The Boston Globe 3/9/2004 SO, MARTHA STEWART has been found guilty and most likely will go to jail (Page A1, March 6). She sold $228,000 worth of ImClone stock before the price plummeted based on insider information and was convicted on obstruction charges. But what I would like to know is, why are the rules not the same for everyone? In 1990 George W. Bush dumped $848,000 worth of Harken Energy Corp. stock before the price plummeted. Bush, as a Harken board member and a member of the well-informed Harken Audit Committee, surely had insider information about the oil company's financial woes. If Bush didn't think his sale would be considered suspicious, why did he wait eight months to notify the SEC about the trade and then uncharacteristically leave the notification undated? He said the timing of his sale of stock before the price plummeted was purely "coincidental." Lucky for Bush, his father was president at the time, the head of the SEC was his father's appointee and former vice presidential counsel, and the SEC's general counsel was Bush's personal lawyer in his sale of the Texas Rangers. Why is it that Bush seemed to get away with something much worse than Martha Stewart's crime? KIM HARRINGTON Abington © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.