“It has to be said that in USA where Mr Corzine who ran a big company to bankrupty and violated many laws has not even been charged because he is an insider, where any number of big financial institutions have grossly violated laws bringing billions of dollars of losses to American taxpayer and untold misery to the world at large without a single serious conviction – they are going for a case against a man of honor where no motives have been established.

I think this is a very important trial and the world is watching.Is America a country where rule of law works or is it a country driven by its current political expediency”

—  From the website, FriendsofRajat, which suggests that Rajat Gupta, former McKinsey and Goldman Director, now undergoing a criminal trial on insider trading charges, is being scapegoated. (I’ll grant that that an endorsement from billionaire Mukesh Ambani, one of the richest men in the world,  may actually hurt Gupta in this context)

Mind you, I don’t agree with the lib shibboleth that insider-trading is a non-crime. There are all kinds of insider trading, and some types do fit that description.

However, corporate directors who disclose confidential and privileged information to enrich themselves (assuming the Gupta charges stick) are being unethical and abusing their fiduciary duties at the least; quite likely, they’re acting illegally.

But that indictment of Gupta simply isn’t available to anarcho-caps who routinely defend insider-trading as a voluntary capitalist exchange, unfairly and ignorantly targeted by law-makers.

If it’s fine and dandy at other times, it should be fine and dandy for Gupta too.

So, what I’d like to know is where are all those “radical” libertarians who are always defending guys like Marc Rich and Ivan Boesky and even Bernie Madoff?

Where are they now?

After all, Gupta didn’t run a shameless ponzi scheme , like Madoff, and he didn’t bilk clients and charities.

He didn’t bankrupt his company, like Sandy Weill or Jon Corzine .

Or steal from customers (like Citi).

Or treat his clients like marks (Goldman).

Or bribe (Goldman).

Or collude to naked-short struggling companies (Goldman and its hedge fund mafia).

He didn’t launder money for organized crime as Boesky and Milken are alleged to have done.

He didn’t blackmail or threaten public officials (certain hedge-funds that shall remain nameless).

He didn’t undermine national security or trade with the enemy (Marc Rich).

He didn’t set up anyone to be killed or embroil himself with the CIA or with conspiracies to murder (also, Rich, per Sherman Skolnik).

On the contrary, he has a long history of educational and charitable work and the confidence of the entire gamut of global corporate leadership.

And the victim of his alleged crime is none other than Goldman Sachs,  one of the sleaziest firms in corporate history, co-star with Alan Greenspan in the Financial Follies of the last twenty years.

Face it. Everyone seems to have been behaving unethically at Goldman Sachs for decades. Next to full-blown villains like Hank Paulson and Jon Corzine, Gupta’s alleged sins are small potatoes.

Rajat Gupta doesn’t even appear on the establishment’s own lists of the villains of the financial crisis.

Time magazine’s list of the 25 people responsible for the financial crisis doesn’t have Rajat Gupta on it.

Nor does he appear on Vanity Fair’s list of the 100 people and things we should blame for the financial crisis.

But…but… one of the people testifying as a government witness against him, Lloyd Blankfein, does.

Blankfein,  witness for the prosecution on insider jobs,  was in up to his neck in that

gigantic 2008 insider trade called the bail-out,

I  had been watching Goldman for a while by then. And Rajat Gupta wasn’t involved in that.

Hank Paulson and Blankfein and Tim Geithner and Hank Greenberg were.

Where do you suppose Gretchen the-most-important-journalist-of-her-generation-Morgenson, a known plagiarist who never wrote a syllable about Goldman before I wrote this article, “Putting Lipstick on an AIG,” got her own sudden interest in the matter?

And where do you suppose Matt “Hunter  S. Vampire Squid” Taibbi got his take on Goldman?

And why d’you suppose he spun that story to erase Hank (AIG) Greenberg out of it – the same Hank I indict in my piece and the same Hank who shows up on those establishment lists along with another better-known Hank (Goldman Sachs) Paulson, whom I also fingered in 2006-07 in multiple pieces?

If insider trading is a victimless crime, as Murray Rothbard, demigod of American Austrians says it is , seems like the Lew Rockwell libertarians  would be running to the defense of Mr. Gupta, right?

I mean, if they can defend a corporate villain like BP that inflicted serious injuries on the public, not just paper-cuts, as Mr. Gupta is alleged to have, shouldn’t they be falling over themselves to defend this case?

But they aren’t, are they?

And should that be put down to opportunism…or to racist feeling…or maybe even to envy?