I'm no defender of corporate wrongdoing, although I still can't quite figure out what Stewart did that warrants time in jail. Lying to investigators about a non-crime apparently is all it takes to get one locked up these days. Investigators frequently lie to those they are interrogating, and they are not punished for that.

Which brings me to the point of this column: the double-standard often applied to government and business. Business leaders who abuse their power are treated with no mercy, while government leaders who do even worse things - the brewing California prison scandal, which I describe below, is a stellar example - are given a shrug.

For some reason, Americans - at least those who get energized by multimillionaire Kerry's quasi-socialist rhetoric - get hot and bothered about corporate "Benedict Arnolds" who have the audacity to outsource jobs to willing workers overseas. They get angry about highly paid corporate executives, even if those executives are at least partially responsible for the average American's decently performing stock portfolio.

When a CEO gets caught doing something dastardly, these same Kerry Americans scream for blood even as the CEOs are hauled out of their mansions in shackles and chains.

No one is forced to buy anything from a private company in this country (except for those who do business with the government!), which is why most companies are always improving the quality of their offerings and lowering their prices. By contrast, government takes its money by force, spends it as it sees fit, usually by lavishing benefits on politically powerful groups who escape real accountability because of their power.

Have any of you been following the scandal that is finally enveloping the prison guards' union and the corrupt, abusive, destructive way the state's prison system has been run? How many of the Kerry Americans are as mad at the guards' union as they are at poor Martha?

Just wondering.

The California prison system is so corrupt that it is hard to sort through all the issues. First there is the immense lobbying by the prison guards, who thanks largely to their donations to Gov.-reject Gray Davis received 34 percent pay hikes over four years in the midst of the state budget crisis.

If those outrageous pay hikes weren't enough, the guards secured from Davis and the Legislature a "3 percent at 50" retirement plan that allows a guard who has worked for 30 years to retire at age 50 with 90 percent of his final pay. Furthermore, the former governor fulfilled the guards' main goal - closing down many of the private prisons that compete with the union-operated prison monopoly.

Then there is the prison system's chronic overspending of its budget to the tune of $500 million a year.

Special privileges couldn't have been lavished on a more unworthy bunch. "After questioning newly appointed prison officials, U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson gave an initial go-ahead to using the state's inspector general to oversee investigations of excessive force and other alleged misconduct," reported Wednesday's Los Angeles Times.

"The judge said he hoped that the state Department of Corrections would address the so-called 'code of silence' among guards and that public confidence could be restored," the article continued.

The judge, by the way, dropped tough measures against the prison system in favor of additional oversight after officials vowed to fix things.

When private officials raid private funds, or commit fraud, or abuse the public, they are led out of their fancy offices in handcuffs and subjected to intense prosecutions. In the public sector, the judge orders some additional oversight and takes the word of the officials. The excessive pay and benefits are unlikely to be reversed.

A court-appointed special master's report, by the way, documents serious allegations of criminality and abuse. We're talking about public-sector guards who refuse to cooperate with investigations of abusive policies that have led to a prisoner's death. Finally, thanks to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the prison system is getting a close look. Finally, we have a governor not beholden to the guards' union. There will be an investigation and, no doubt, some changes will be made.

The governor is even getting support from a Legislature that not so long ago was beholden to the guards' union.

But I can't help but shake my head at the way an agency with a $5 billion annual budget has behaved for so long with limited oversight. And even now as the belated oversight is coming, it's doubtful that public officials will be treated in a similar way to Martha Stewart.

Don't get me wrong. Martha Stewart shouldn't have lied. But she never caused anyone any harm. She certainly never ignored the cries of a sick man as he died, unattended, in his cell (as is alleged in one prison incident in California). She certainly never bilked the taxpayers out of any money. Clearly, the private sector is held to a different standard than the government sector, yet in the world of Kerry and the Democratic Party, it is the government sector that is always good and the private sector that is bad.

What causes this distorted thinking?