MARTHA STEWART CASE PROVES WOMEN ARE WORTH LESS THAN MEN

Everyone knows that women’s time is considered less valuable than that of men who do the same jobs. Employers have always felt that men should get paid more than women.

But what isn’t as well known is that the Judiciary feels the same way. When it comes to crimes of money, judges are really prejudiced against the value of women. Even when a powerful woman like Martha Stewart is involved.

Just look at a few cases.

• Bernie Ebbers was convicted of a giant $11 billion fraud. He hurt hundreds of thousands of small investors and employees. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

If we look at Ebbers on an hourly basis, the man was penalized a mere hour for every $50,405 he stole. Stealing over $50,000 an hour even beats Kobe Bryant’s rate for playing with an inflated ball.

On an hourly basis, Rigas was sentenced to one hour of jail time for each $15,207 he stole, which is a very decent hourly rate.

But Fastow got off easy, getting only 10 years for his guilty plea. That means his frauds netted almost $800,000 per hour of prison time. To date, an all-time record.

Now let us look at Martha Stewart - a mere woman. She was convicted to lying to federal investigators and sentenced to five months in prison and five months of home confinement. She was charged with lying because it was too difficult for the feds to get her on the only alleged crime she committed, insider trading. So they skipped the tough case and charged her with lying about selling her stock based on inside information.

Martha sold 4,000 shares of Imclone stock for $230,000 before the bad news about the FDA withholding approval of the company’s key drug was made public. During the course of the investigation, Martha allegedly lied about the timing of her trade or something. The Feds felt she should have waited until after the news was out and lost $50,000 or $100,000 on her shares as the stock plummeted all the way down from about $60 to a low of $5.24. That’s what the brouhaha was all about.

Well, let’s say Martha did commit the heinous act of insider trading and in the process saved herself $100,000. That means she stole that much from less wary investors. Her sentence was 10 months, which means that the judge gave Martha one month for each $10,000 stolen. This implies that one month's worth of stealing is worth only $10,000 for a woman, but – as the judges in the Ebbers and Rigas cases showed – a big-stealing man is worth between $11 million and $36 million per month.

If Martha had been incarcerated at the rate of $15,000 an hour – the rate a judge gave John Rigas – she would have had to serve less than a day, or six hours and forty minutes, for her alleged insider trading. She wouldn’t have even had to take an overnight bag to West Virginia.

If Martha had been judged the equal of a real, big-stealing man like Bernie Ebbers, her sentence had been meted out at a rate of $50,000 an hour. Which mean she would have had to serve only two hours in prison for $100,000 of unprovable insider stock trading. A sentence she could have done standing on her head while baking brownies.

If she has been sentenced at Andrew Fastow’s rate of $800,000 per hour of prison time, Martha would have spent only seven and a half minutes in the jug. Hardly enough time to deliver fresh-baked cookies to the warden.

The lessons from all this are clear:

1. If you are going to steal, steal big. The bigger the better.

2. Be wary if you are a woman. Because your time is perceived as less valuable, you will get more of it for each dollar you steal.

None of the above is a good thing.