Roger Donway

We at the Atlas Society and its Business Rights Center mourn the passing of Professor Larry Ribstein, who died of a stroke on December 24, at the age of 65. A pro-business blogger without peer, he stood out as a rare champion of justice amid the Great American Rich Hunt that has taken place in the ten years following the collapse of Enron

10/21/2011 -- On October 13, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals refused to throw out the fraud conviction of Greg Reyes that had emerged from the media-generated backdated-options frenzy of 2005–2007.

June 2, 2011 --  Oral arguments in the back-dated options case of Greg Reyes (pictured below) were conducted on May 10 and can now be heard on-line—here.

May 20, 2011 -- As the director of the Business Rights Center at the fiercely pro-capitalist Atlas Society, I shall not be accused, I think, of harboring excessive sympathy for a Socialist IMF bureaucrat who stands accused of sexually assaulting a hotel chambermaid. And therefore, I want to take this opportunity to protest the treatment to which Dominique Strauss-Kahn has been subjected since his arrest on May 14, 2011.

May 16, 2011 -- On May 11, after the trial of Galleon hedge-fund founder Raj Rajaratnam (pictured below) had ended in a conviction on all counts, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, came forth to give his understanding of it all. His statement is worth parsing, one element at a time.

May 11, 2011 -- Yesterday, May 10, the backdated options witch-hunt began drawing to its close. A three-judge panel from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in the case of Greg Reyes, the former CEO of Brocade, who was convicted of committing securities fraud by backdating options at his company. Coincidentally, Reyes was the first person to be indicted in connection with backdated options, back in 2006. Now his case bodes to be the last resolved, even as he languishes in prison.

Fall 2006 -- Frank Quattrone has just become the greatest businessman in three generations to escape the anti-business persecutions of twentieth-century liberalism. On August 22, government lawyers offered investment banker Quattrone a laughable “deferred prosecution agreement” that will result in their dropping all charges against him after a year, in return for his agreeing to such onerous conditions as not associating with known felons for the next twelve months.

April 2007 -- Last year, on November 16 (the anniversary of the Federal Reserve System, ironically), Milton Friedman died at the age of ninety-four. The editorial in the next day’s Wall Street Journal carried the headline “Capitalism and Friedman,” playing off the title of his 1962 work Capitalism and Freedom. The article’s subtitle read: “The man who made free markets popular again.”

What has prompted people, over the course of three millennia, to look upon work and commerce as degrading and deceitful? Why have they instead tended to look upon the leisured and lordly as models of the good life? One answer holds that people have been the dupes of false prophets, working in collaboration with evil princes, to subdue those who are the natural aristocrats of mankind.

December 14, 2010 -- We’ve all seen the headlines: “Insider Trading ‘Rampant’ On Wall St.: US Attorney.” But how many of us stop to ask about the person who lurks behind that title, “US Attorney”?