Heidi Fleiss is a moron and Martha Stewart is still a criminal

Heidi Fleiss was recently quoted as saying:

"It's so wrong what they did to her, just because she [Martha Stewart] is a powerful woman. "

Sorry Fleiss. Stewart happened to engage in what's called "Insider Trading." Ever since Stewart was accused, I've heard all kinds of rationales about why she shouldn't be punished for it, and why it shouldn't even be illegal.

On the surface, what she did was little more than the antics of almost every "Wall Street" Movie villain since the genre was born, but insider trading is illegal for a lot of reasons. I won't go into the details, but after six years of reading Securities Continuing Education courses, I think I'm justified in saying anyone who thinks insider trading is "OK" is speaking from a place of deep and profound ignorance about Finance.

As a quick example, insider trading is what allowed many Enron executives to dump their stock before the accounting scandal became public.

You see, Stewart has what's called a "Series 6 License" It happens to be one of the tougher licenses to get, and it's tightly regulated. It also means that you;re supposed to know better about how to behave. The actions that would get the random joe six months would literally get a Series 6 license holder Six Years, again because they're supposed to know better. As one friend of mine who HAS a series six license put it, "If I'd done exactly what Stewart had done, I'd be in Federal 'pound me in the ass' prison for six to ten years."

What Ms. Fleiss and the others who blithely and ignorantly worship Martha Stewart are ignoring, is that she got an absurdly mild slap on the wrist because she's a wealthy and powerful woman.

What people don't realize is that even though they don't understand it, what Martha did was illegal and carries stiff penalties for good reason. What they don't realize is that she got a sentence that was an insignificant fraction of what anyone else would have gotten. What the judge did in sentencing her was the legal equivalent of falling on his knees and kissing her toes.

So, Ms Fleiss, I'll keep reading your amusing comments, not out of any actual concern for what you have to say, but because I find painfully stupid people amusing whenever they're not in office. Besides, it reminds me why the best line of work you could come up with was as a whore.